Teaching Digital Accessibility through Serious Games

Background

The World Health Organization estimates that more than a billion people live with some form of disability. The United Nations Convention on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities (CRPD) mandates countries to “… promote the design, development, production, and distribution of accessible information and communications technologies and systems…”. To accomplish this, concepts and skills needed to develop accessible products and services must be included in computing education. Software companies like Google, Facebook, Apple, and Microsoft emphasize making their products accessible, and accessibility often features as a preferred skill in their job postings. For instance, a current Google job posting for a Software Engineer position specifies “Experience developing accessible technologies” as a preferred qualification.

The Problem

Despite such 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 comupting education for this gap in implementing accessibility.

According to the computing (CS) faculty, the main barriers to teaching accessibility include the lack of clear learning objectives about accessibility and their lack of knowledge about accessibility. Also, most instructors who teach accessibility have a background in human-computer interaction (HCI) and related fields and teach these topics in specialized courses. This indicates that other instructors may find it challenging to build their expertise and to incorporate accessibility topics in “mainstream” CS courses.

Our Contribution

We have developed fun, self-paced learning interventions, in the form of three sets of games:

1. Accessibility Awareness: (a) a special version of Wordle that asks you to guess a five-letter word, and tells you how it relates to accessibility, and (b) a game that asks you to burst the bubbles that carry a myth about accessibility, while saving the ones that carry a fact.
2. Access Quest: A role playing game that helps you learn WCAG guidelines about accessibility by solving puzzles and challenges a software developer may face in a day-to-day life.
3. Bug Hunter: A race against time game with a goal to find as many accessibility bugs in a web page as possible. The game is designed to assess your knowledge of WCAG guidelines.

We welcome your feedback and suggestion.