Comparison of Methods for Teaching Accessibility in University Computing Courses

Abstract

With an increasing demand for computing professionals with skills in accessibility, it is important for university faculty to select effective methods for educating computing students about barriers faced by users with disabilities and approaches to improving accessibility. While some prior work had evaluated accessibility educational interventions, many prior studies have consisted of firsthand reports from faculty or short-term evaluations. This paper reports on the results of a systematic evaluation of methods for teaching accessibility from a longitudinal study across 29 sections of a human-computer interaction course (required for students in a computing degree program), as taught by 10 distinct professors, throughout four years, with over 400 students. A control condition (course without accessibility content) was compared to four intervention conditions: week of lectures on accessibility, team design project requiring some accessibility consideration, interaction with someone with a disability, and collaboration with a team member with a disability. Comparing survey data immediately before and after the course, we found that the Lectures, Projects, and Interaction conditions were effective in increasing students' likelihood to consider people with disabilities on a design scenario, awareness of accessibility barriers, and knowledge of technical approaches for improving accessibility - with students in the Team Member condition having higher scores on the final measure…