skip to main content
10.1145/3478431.3499399acmconferencesArticle/Chapter ViewAbstractPublication PagessigcseConference Proceedingsconference-collections
research-article

Exploration on Integrating Accessibility into an AI Course

Published: 22 February 2022 Publication History

Abstract

Understanding accessibility and how it relates to artificial intelligence (AI)-based technology is an imperative skill for computing students from both an ethical and employment standpoint. Unfortunately, AI courses do not typically cover accessibility. When teaching ethics in AI, discussions on bias and fairness cover user diversity in terms of gender and race, but not disability. To address the lack of teaching accessibility in AI courses, we conducted a pilot study to explore what and how accessibility topics can be integrated into an AI course, titled Natural Language Processing (NLP). We added to the NLP course some general and quick accessibility topics through means such as a short guest lecture, a programming assignment and a final project that connect accessibility and AI. We gathered student feedback through a pre-survey, a post-survey and interviews with five students. The course we looked at took place synchronously in an online setting using Zoom. In this context, we observed how implementing accessibility topics remotely into the course affected students in their knowledge of accessibility and disability.

Supplementary Material

MP4 File (sigcse submission 1.mp4)
Presentation Video

References

[1]
Mary Ainley and John Ainley. 2011. Student engagement with science in early adolescence: The contribution of enjoyment to students' continuing interest in learning about science. Contemporary Educational Psychology 36, 1 (2011), 4--12.
[2]
Oliver Alonzo, Matthew Seita, Abraham Glasser, and Matt Huenerfauth. 2020. Automatic Text Simplification Tools for Deaf and Hard of Hearing Adults: Benefits of Lexical Simplification and Providing Users with Autonomy. In Proceedings of the 2020 CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems. 1--13.
[3]
Oliver Alonzo, Jessica Trussell, Becca Dingman, and Matt Huenerfauth. 2021. Comparison of Methods for Evaluating Complexity of Simplified Texts among Deaf and Hard-of-Hearing Adults at Different Literacy Levels. Association for Computing Machinery, New York, NY, USA. https://doi.org/10.1145/3411764. 3445038
[4]
Catherine M Baker, Yasmine N Elglaly, and Kristen Shinohara. 2020. A systematic analysis of accessibility in computing education research. In Proceedings of the 51st ACM Technical Symposium on Computer Science Education. 107--113.
[5]
Steven Bird, Ewan Klein, and Edward Loper. 2009. Natural language processing with Python: analyzing text with the natural language toolkit. " O'Reilly Media, Inc.".
[6]
Emanuelle Burton, Judy Goldsmith, Sven Koenig, Benjamin Kuipers, Nicholas Mattei, and Toby Walsh. 2017. Ethical considerations in artificial intelligence courses. AI magazine 38, 2 (2017), 22--34.
[7]
Paula Conn. 2019. A Systematic Analysis of Accessibility Education Within Computing Disciplines. Rochester Institute of Technology.
[8]
Paula Conn, Taylor Gotfrid, Qiwen Zhao, Rachel Celestine, Vaishnavi Mande, Kristen Shinohara, Stephanie Ludi, and Matt Huenerfauth. 2020. Understanding the motivations of final-year computing undergraduates for considering accessibility. ACM Transactions on Computing Education (TOCE) 20, 2 (2020), 1--22.
[9]
Eric Eaton, Sven Koenig, Claudia Schulz, Francesco Maurelli, John Lee, Joshua Eckroth, Mark Crowley, Richard G Freedman, Rogelio E Cardona-Rivera, Tiago Machado, et al. 2018. Blue sky ideas in artificial intelligence education from the EAAI 2017 new and future AI educator program. AI Matters 3, 4 (2018), 23--31.
[10]
Yasmine N Elglaly. 2020. Teaching Accessibility to Software Engineering Students. In Proceedings of the 51st ACM Technical Symposium on Computer Science Education. 121--127.
[11]
Yasmine N Elglaly, Weishi Shi, Samuel Malachowsky, Qi Yu, and Daniel E Krutz. 2020. Presenting and evaluating the impact of experiential learning in computing accessibility education. In 2020 IEEE/ACM 42nd International Conference on Software Engineering: Software Engineering Education and Training (ICSE-SEET). IEEE, 49--60.
[12]
Richard Foulds and Cynthia Camacho. 2003. Text summarization contributions to universal access. Technology and Disability 15, 4 (2003), 223--229.
[13]
Núria Gala and Johannes Ziegler. 2016. Reducing lexical complexity as a tool to increase text accessibility for children with dyslexia. In Proceedings of the Workshop on Computational Linguistics for Linguistic Complexity (CL4LC). 59--66.
[14]
Natalie Garrett, Nathan Beard, and Casey Fiesler. 2020. More Than" If Time Allows" The Role of Ethics in AI Education. In Proceedings of the AAAI/ACM Conference on AI, Ethics, and Society. 272--278.
[15]
Abraham Glasser, Kesavan Kushalnagar, and Raja Kushalnagar. 2017. Deaf, hard of hearing, and hearing perspectives on using automatic speech recognition in conversation. In Proceedings of the 19th International ACM SIGACCESS Conference on Computers and Accessibility. 427--432.
[16]
Judy Goldsmith and Emanuelle Burton. 2017. Why teaching ethics to AI practitioners is important. In Workshops at the Thirty-First AAAI Conference on Artificial Intelligence.
[17]
Thilo Hagendorff. 2020. The ethics of AI ethics: An evaluation of guidelines. Minds and Machines 30, 1 (2020), 99--120.
[18]
Matthew Honnibal, Ines Montani, Sofie Van Landeghem, and Adriane Boyd. 2020. spaCy: Industrial-strength Natural Language Processing in Python. https: //doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.1212303
[19]
Lin Jia, Yasmine N Elglaly, Catherine M Baker, and Kristen Shinohara. 2021. Infusing Accessibility into Programming Courses. In Extended Abstracts of the 2021 CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems. 1--6.
[20]
Saba Kawas, Laura Vonessen, and Andrew J Ko. 2019. Teaching accessibility: A design exploration of faculty professional development at scale. In Proceedings of the 50th ACM Technical Symposium on Computer Science Education. 983--989.
[21]
Claire Kearney-Volpe, Devorah Kletenik, Kate Sonka, Deborah Sturm, and Amy Hurst. 2019. Evaluating instructor strategy and student learning through digital accessibility course enhancements. In The 21st International ACM SIGACCESS Conference on Computers and Accessibility. 377--388.
[22]
Megan Lawrence and Mary Bellard. 2017. Teach Access: Preparing Computing Students for Industry. In Proceedings of the 2017 ACM SIGCSE Technical Symposium on Computer Science Education. 700--700.
[23]
John SY Lee and Chak Yan Yeung. 2018. Personalizing lexical simplification. In Proceedings of the 27th International Conference on Computational Linguistics. 224--232.
[24]
Stephanie Ludi, Matt Huenerfauth, Vicki Hanson, Nidhi Rajendra Palan, and Paula Garcia. 2018. Teaching inclusive thinking to undergraduate students in computing programs. In Proceedings of the 49th ACM Technical Symposium on Computer Science Education. 717--722.
[25]
Ninareh Mehrabi, Fred Morstatter, Nripsuta Saxena, Kristina Lerman, and Aram Galstyan. 2021. A survey on bias and fairness in machine learning. ACM Computing Surveys (CSUR) 54, 6 (2021), 1--35.
[26]
Gustavo H Paetzold and Lucia Specia. 2017. A survey on lexical simplification. Journal of Artificial Intelligence Research 60 (2017), 549--593.
[27]
Rohan Patel, Pedro Breton, Catherine M Baker, Yasmine N Elglaly, and Kristen Shinohara. 2020. Why Software is Not Accessible: Technology Professionals' Perspectives and Challenges. In Extended Abstracts of the 2020 CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems. 1--9.
[28]
Cynthia Putnam, Maria Dahman, Emma Rose, Jinghui Cheng, and Glenn Bradford. 2016. Best practices for teaching accessibility in university classrooms: cultivating awareness, understanding, and appreciation for diverse users. ACM Transactions on Accessible Computing (TACCESS) 8, 4 (2016), 1--26.
[29]
Luz Rello, Ricardo Baeza-Yates, Stefan Bott, and Horacio Saggion. 2013. Simplify or help? Text simplification strategies for people with dyslexia. In Proceedings of the 10th International Cross-Disciplinary Conference on Web Accessibility. 1--10.
[30]
Jeffrey Saltz, Michael Skirpan, Casey Fiesler, Micha Gorelick, Tom Yeh, Robert Heckman, Neil Dewar, and Nathan Beard. 2019. Integrating ethics within machine learning courses. ACM Transactions on Computing Education (TOCE) 19, 4 (2019), 1--26.
[31]
K Mona Teja, S Mohan Sai, PV Sai Kushagra, et al. 2018. Smart Summarizer for Blind People. In 2018 3rd International Conference on Inventive Computation Technologies (ICICT). IEEE, 15--18.
[32]
Meredith Whittaker, Meryl Alper, Cynthia L Bennett, Sara Hendren, Liz Kaziunas, Mara Mills, Meredith Ringel Morris, Joy Rankin, Emily Rogers, Marcel Salas, et al. 2019. Disability, bias, and AI. AI Now Institute (2019).
[33]
Qiwen Zhao, Vaishnavi Mande, Paula Conn, Sedeeq Al-khazraji, Kristen Shinohara, Stephanie Ludi, and Matt Huenerfauth. 2020. Comparison of methods for teaching accessibility in university computing courses. In The 22nd International ACM SIGACCESS Conference on Computers and Accessibility. 1--12.

Cited By

View all
  • (2025)Enhancing Accessibility in Software Engineering Projects with Large Language Models (LLMs)Proceedings of the 56th ACM Technical Symposium on Computer Science Education V. 110.1145/3641554.3701841(25-31)Online publication date: 12-Feb-2025
  • (2025)Accessibility Insights from Student's Software Engineering ProjectsProceedings of the 56th ACM Technical Symposium on Computer Science Education V. 110.1145/3641554.3701839(39-45)Online publication date: 12-Feb-2025
  • (2025)Sprint to Inclusion: Embedding Accessibility Sprint in a Software Engineering CourseProceedings of the 56th ACM Technical Symposium on Computer Science Education V. 110.1145/3641554.3701838(32-38)Online publication date: 12-Feb-2025
  • Show More Cited By

Index Terms

  1. Exploration on Integrating Accessibility into an AI Course

      Recommendations

      Comments

      Information & Contributors

      Information

      Published In

      cover image ACM Conferences
      SIGCSE 2022: Proceedings of the 53rd ACM Technical Symposium on Computer Science Education - Volume 1
      February 2022
      1049 pages
      ISBN:9781450390705
      DOI:10.1145/3478431
      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]

      Sponsors

      Publisher

      Association for Computing Machinery

      New York, NY, United States

      Publication History

      Published: 22 February 2022

      Permissions

      Request permissions for this article.

      Check for updates

      Author Tags

      1. accessibility
      2. artificial intelligence
      3. computing education

      Qualifiers

      • Research-article

      Conference

      SIGCSE 2022
      Sponsor:

      Acceptance Rates

      Overall Acceptance Rate 1,787 of 5,146 submissions, 35%

      Upcoming Conference

      SIGCSE TS 2025
      The 56th ACM Technical Symposium on Computer Science Education
      February 26 - March 1, 2025
      Pittsburgh , PA , USA

      Contributors

      Other Metrics

      Bibliometrics & Citations

      Bibliometrics

      Article Metrics

      • Downloads (Last 12 months)140
      • Downloads (Last 6 weeks)18
      Reflects downloads up to 17 Feb 2025

      Other Metrics

      Citations

      Cited By

      View all
      • (2025)Enhancing Accessibility in Software Engineering Projects with Large Language Models (LLMs)Proceedings of the 56th ACM Technical Symposium on Computer Science Education V. 110.1145/3641554.3701841(25-31)Online publication date: 12-Feb-2025
      • (2025)Accessibility Insights from Student's Software Engineering ProjectsProceedings of the 56th ACM Technical Symposium on Computer Science Education V. 110.1145/3641554.3701839(39-45)Online publication date: 12-Feb-2025
      • (2025)Sprint to Inclusion: Embedding Accessibility Sprint in a Software Engineering CourseProceedings of the 56th ACM Technical Symposium on Computer Science Education V. 110.1145/3641554.3701838(32-38)Online publication date: 12-Feb-2025
      • (2024)Reflections on Incorporating Digital Accessibility in an Operating Systems CourseProceedings of the 2024 on ACM Virtual Global Computing Education Conference V. 110.1145/3649165.3690127(179-185)Online publication date: 5-Dec-2024
      • (2024)Toward Building Design Empathy for People with Disabilities Using Social Media Data: A New Approach for Novice DesignersProceedings of the 2024 ACM Designing Interactive Systems Conference10.1145/3643834.3660687(3145-3160)Online publication date: 1-Jul-2024
      • (2024)A Realist Review of Undergraduate Student Attitudes towards Ethical Interventions in Technical Computing CoursesACM Transactions on Computing Education10.1145/363957224:2(1-19)Online publication date: 4-Jan-2024
      • (2024)Teaching Ethics in Computing: A Systematic Literature Review of ACM Computer Science Education PublicationsACM Transactions on Computing Education10.1145/363468524:1(1-36)Online publication date: 14-Jan-2024
      • (2024)Teaching Digital Accessibility in Computing Education: Views of Educators in IndiaProceedings of the 2024 ACM Conference on International Computing Education Research - Volume 110.1145/3632620.3671122(222-232)Online publication date: 12-Aug-2024
      • (2024)Crafting Disability Fairness Learning in Data Science: A Student-Centric Pedagogical ApproachProceedings of the 55th ACM Technical Symposium on Computer Science Education V. 110.1145/3626252.3630815(944-950)Online publication date: 7-Mar-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
      • Show More Cited By

      View Options

      Login options

      View options

      PDF

      View or Download as a PDF file.

      PDF

      eReader

      View online with eReader.

      eReader

      Figures

      Tables

      Media

      Share

      Share

      Share this Publication link

      Share on social media