Course Overview
Overview¶
This course celebrates ability, disability, and accessibility. It introduces students to the theory, history, policy, and practice of accessibility and inclusion in computing. Course readings will explore relevant concepts from disability studies, accessibility, human-computer interaction, and design methods. Students will develop critical perspectives on issues of representation, identity, visibility, and inclusion. Students will also learn about organizations focused on accessibility and inclusion and examine various approaches to creating accessible and inclusive computing systems. Students will leave the course with a sense of what it takes to both create and use accessible computing systems for people with visible and invisible disabilities. This is a practice-oriented course, and students will work in multidisciplinary teams to brainstorm, develop, and evaluate some kind of tool or system with people with disabilities.
Assignments (mostly done in groups) include:
- An introduction assignment to learn how to make an accessible presentation and accessible documents.
- A deep dive assignment to learn all about a particular disability.
- An evaluation assignment to identify accessibility barriers and solutions for web sites.
- A project in which each team collaborates with a disability-related organization to either
- Evaluate the accessibility of an existing web site or application and redesign it to fix the accessibility barriers.
- Design and develop an application, tool, or system to address an accessibility-related need requested by the collaborating organization.