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Evaluating Instructor Strategy and Student Learning Through Digital Accessibility Course Enhancements

Published: 24 October 2019 Publication History

Abstract

University students graduating and entering into technology design and development fields are underprepared to support digital accessibility due to a lack of awareness and training. Teach Access is a consortium of 10 industry partners, 5 advocacy groups, and 20 university partners working to address this issue. In an attempt to bridge the gap between what is taught to students and the increasing demand from industry, the initiative described here was aimed at awarding instructor grants to support the development of accessibility modules in tech-related courses. In our study we surveyed student attitudes toward accessibility pre- and post-instruction of these modules, as well as, instructor strategy. We found that across all courses, student confidence in accessibility-related concepts increased. The largest increases were found in student confidence in defining the Americans with Disabilities Act (ADA) and the Web Content Accessibility Guidelines (WCAG). Our work makes the following contributions: 1) A detailed description of how accessibility was integrated into 18 different university and college courses 2) Instructional delivery methods found to be effective by participating instructors 3) Insights for resource materials development.

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      cover image ACM Conferences
      ASSETS '19: Proceedings of the 21st International ACM SIGACCESS Conference on Computers and Accessibility
      October 2019
      730 pages
      ISBN:9781450366762
      DOI:10.1145/3308561
      Permission to make digital or hard copies of all or part of this work for personal or classroom use is granted without fee provided that copies are not made or distributed for profit or commercial advantage and that copies bear this notice and the full citation on the first page. Copyrights for components of this work owned by others than ACM must be honored. Abstracting with credit is permitted. To copy otherwise, or republish, to post on servers or to redistribute to lists, requires prior specific permission and/or a fee. Request permissions from [email protected]

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      Published: 24 October 2019

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      2. higher education

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      Cited By

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      • (2024)Success for All: Maximizing Digital Accessibility in Special Education Teacher Preparation Courses through Universal Design for LearningJournal of Special Education Preparation10.33043/4a6kfo46Online publication date: 18-Jan-2024
      • (2024)DREEM: Moving from Empathy to Enculturation in Disability Related Human-Centered DesignProceedings of the 26th International ACM SIGACCESS Conference on Computers and Accessibility10.1145/3663548.3675642(1-17)Online publication date: 27-Oct-2024
      • (2024)Digital Accessibility Education in Context: Expert Perspectives on Building Capacity in Academia and the WorkplaceACM Transactions on Accessible Computing10.1145/364950817:2(1-21)Online publication date: 22-Jul-2024
      • (2024)Motivated by Inclusion: Understanding Students' Empathy and Motivation to Design Accessibly Across a Spectrum of DisabilitiesProceedings of the 55th ACM Technical Symposium on Computer Science Education V. 110.1145/3626252.3630894(680-686)Online publication date: 7-Mar-2024
      • (2024)Mapping Accessibility Assignments into Core Computer Science Topics: An Empirical Study with Interviews and Surveys of Instructors and StudentsProceedings of the 2024 CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems10.1145/3613904.3642097(1-16)Online publication date: 11-May-2024
      • (2024)Evaluating a Multi-Component Classroom Intervention to Teach Accessibility in Higher Education: A Case Study With Persona CardsIEEE Access10.1109/ACCESS.2024.336013512(20299-20312)Online publication date: 2024
      • (2023)A model of an accessibility curriculum in higher educationFrontiers in Computer Science10.3389/fcomp.2023.11393505Online publication date: 15-May-2023
      • (2023)Blending Accessibility in UI Framework Documentation to Build AwarenessProceedings of the 25th International ACM SIGACCESS Conference on Computers and Accessibility10.1145/3597638.3608380(1-12)Online publication date: 22-Oct-2023
      • (2023)A Longitudinal Evaluation of the Impact of a Graduate Student Accessibility Training on Student Learning OutcomesProceedings of the 25th Western Canadian Conference on Computing Education10.1145/3593342.3593346(1-6)Online publication date: 4-May-2023
      • (2023)Tangible Progress: Tools, Techniques, and Impacts of Teaching Web Development to Screen Reader UsersACM Transactions on Accessible Computing10.1145/358531516:1(1-33)Online publication date: 28-Mar-2023
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