Using Accessibility Awareness Interventions to Improve Computing Education
Authors: 
Yang Liu, Domenic Mangano, Krishna Prd. Neupane, 
Samuel Malachowsky, Daniel KrutzAuthors Info & Claims
Pages 66 - 71
Abstract
Research demonstrates that we continue to be deficient in creating inclusive and equitable software, with a lack of empathy among software developers attributed to this issue, even if unintentional. Although increasing empathy has been shown to be part of the solution, unfortunately there is a lack of data that can be analyzed that shows how empathy-building and accessibility awareness interventions can be utilized in computing education, along with a shortage of free, public, and easily adoptable educational material regarding empathy and the creation of accessible software.
Through large in-person studies that involve real-world participants, we are able to contribute to the knowledge regarding the potential benefits that can be used to improve computing education by implementing empathy-building strategies in the curriculum. Two forms of accessibility awareness exercises are utilized to display the effectiveness of empathy-based learning and teach the importance of accessibility in computing, including experiential and expression-based interventions. In these interventions, we expect to find an increase in awareness and empathy in participants, as well as an increase in participant interest in the topic of software inclusivity and accessibility by placing the participant in a situation they may encounter in the real world.
We additionally present a web-hosted, easily adoptable experiential and expression-based educational lab to support the inclusion of inclusive development and/or empathy-focused topics into a variety of curricula formats. Complete materials are available on the project website: https://all.rit.edu
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Information
Published In
April 2024
417 pages
ISBN:9798400704987
DOI:10.1145/3639474
- Co-chairs:
- Ana Paiva,
- Rui Abreu,
- Kiev Gama,
- Janet Siegmund,
- Program Co-chairs:
- Abhik Roychoudhury,
- Margaret Storey
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution International 4.0 License.
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- Faculty of Engineering of University of Porto
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Association for Computing Machinery
New York, NY, United States
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Published: 24 May 2024
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ICSE-SEET '24: 46th International Conference on Software Engineering: Software Engineering Education and Training
April 14 - 20, 2024
Lisbon, Portugal
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