Integrating Accessibility Topics in Computing Education

Over 1 billion people in the world have some form of disability. As we rely more and more on software for our daily activities from banking to healthcare to entertainment to social life, it is essential that software products and services are accessible to everyone, including persons with disabilities.

Despite increasing awareness in the software industry about accessibility in the recent years, many mainstream software products fall short of meeting accessibility criteria. Software professionals point to a lack of relevant knowledge and skills in formal education for this gap in implementing accessibility. On the other hand, CS faculty experience several barriers to teaching these topics in their courses. We are working on bridging this gap and making it easy for computing educators to integrate accessibility topics in their teaching.

This talk presents our work on integrating accessibility in a mobile app development course at BITS Goa (published in SIGCSE’23) and discusses our other ongoing work in the area of computing education and accessibility.

IIT Bombay