Accessible Indian Bubbles: A Radio Show in New Zealand!
At the recent ACM CompEd'23 conference at IIIT-Hyderabad, we met Dr. Samuel Mann, one of the keynote speakers and a professor at Otago Polytechnic, New Zealand.
Otago Polytechnic is one of the southernmost universities in the world. They aim to have all their graduating students be able to “think and act as sustainability practitioners” irrespective of their areas of expertise. Sam has pioneered this program and has authored a book titled The Green Graduate on the same.
He also hosts a weekly radio show, Blowing Bubbles, on Otago Access Radio. After learning about our work on teaching accessibility, he invited us to record an episode for his show, which was broadcast on Dec 13.
We talked about teaching accessibility from various angles: what we are doing and why we are doing it, to whether accessibility should be taught in a separate course or be a part of all CS courses, to our superpowers, to what gets us going in the morning, to the challenges and opportunities we foresee in the coming few years.
It was great talking to Sam about these and many other things (outside the podcast). I hope you will enjoy listening to our conversation.
I found his characterisation that “People with disabilities is the largest minority anyone can become a part of in a heartbeat” very insightful.
After the recording, I asked Sam what his superpower is, and he said he can find anything exciting. Isn’t that fascinating!
