Best Practices for Teaching Accessibility in University Classrooms

Development and Evaluation of a Tool for Assisting Content Creators in Making PDF Files More Accessible

Most PDF documents are inaccessible for people with disabilities, creating barriers in education, science, commerce, e-government, and recreation. Documents in PDF format are considered harder to make accessible than documents in other formats, primarily due to the insufficient tools available to assist content creators. In this article, we present the research and development of Ally, a new tool to assist content creators in remediating their PDF files to improve accessibility. Ally utilizes best practices from other areas of HCI research to create a more efficient and effective interaction for remediating regions, headers, reading order, and tables in a PDF document for improved accessibility. Twenty participants attempted to complete the same PDF accessibility remediation tasks using both Ally and a standard industry tool, Adobe Acrobat Pro. Ally was almost twice as fast and three times as accurate compared to Acrobat Pro, with participants reporting a strong preference for and a much higher level of satisfaction with Ally. The approaches taken in Ally improve the ability to create accessible PDFs efficiently and accurately for the four important aspects studied, but future work will need to incorporate additional functionality, related to remediating alt text, forms, and other aspects of PDF accessibility.

Evaluation of Self-Concept in the Project for People with Intellectual Disabilities: "We Are All Campus"

The inclusion of people with disabilities, intellectual in the case that concerns this research, has been one of the main concerns of society in recent years. The University of Murcia has launched the “We are all Campus” program in order to facilitate the inclusion of this group from a training perspective. Being aware of the influence of self-concept in such inclusion, this research aims to analyze the influence of the self-concept of people with intellectual disabilities in their expectations of inclusion. For this purpose, 18 subjects were asked to carry out a SWOT analysis, assessing the situation in which they find themselves through a qualitative perspective and a phenomenological design. The research reveals, among other conclusions, how important personal development is to them, especially by generating autonomy in their daily routines, and also the relevance of their relationships to feel socially included.

Managing digital accessibility at universities during the COVID-19 pandemic

Students, faculty and staff with disabilities at universities have faced many digital accessibility barriers during the COVID-19 pandemic. While the legal requirements for digital accessibility at universities are clear, the mechanisms for managing digital accessibility are not yet well established. This study reports on a longitudinal series of 18 interviews throughout 2020 involving directors of digital accessibility, starting before the COVID-19 pandemic was officially declared by the World Health Organization in March 2020. These interviews took place with directors of digital accessibility at a small-, medium-, and large-sized university in the USA, respectively, as well as the director of digital accessibility at a comparative US state government agency. Patterns throughout the year, common challenges, and emerging best practices are all discussed, as well as implications for managing digital accessibility during non-pandemic times.

How Content Authored by People with Dementia Affects Attitudes towards Dementia

Negative attitudes shape experiences with stigmatized conditions such as dementia, from affecting social relationships to influencing willingness to adopt technology. Consequently, attitudinal change has been identified as one lever to improve life for people with stigmatized conditions. Though recognized as a scaleable approach, social media has not been studied in terms of how it should best be designed or deployed to target attitudes and understanding of dementia. Through a mixed methods design with 123 undergraduate college students, we study the effect of being exposed to dementia-related media, including content produced by people with dementia. We selected undergraduate college students as the target of our intervention, as they represent the next generation that will work and interact with individuals with dementia. Our analysis describes changes over the period of two weeks in attitudes and understanding of the condition. The shifts in understanding of dementia that we found in our qualitative analysis were not captured by the instrument we selected to assess understanding of dementia. While small improvements in positive and overall attitudes were seen across all interventions and the control, we observe a different pattern with negative attitudes, where transcriptions of content produced by people with dementia significantly reduced negative attitudes. The discussion presents implications for supporting people with dementia as content producers, doing so in ways that best affect attitudes and understanding by drawing on research on cues and interactive media, and supporting students in changing their perspectives towards people with dementia.

Using Modules to Teach Accessibility in a User-Centered Design Course

Courses in user-centered design, where students learn about centering design on the needs of individuals, is one natural point in which accessibility content can be injected into the curriculum. We describe the approach we have taken with sections in the undergraduate User-Centered Design Course at the University of Maryland, College Park. We initially introduced disability and accessibility in four modules: 1) websites and design portfolios, 2) introduction to understanding user needs, 3) prototyping, and 4) UX evaluation. We present a description of this content that was taught as an extended version in one Fall 2018 section and as an abbreviated version in all sections in Spring 2019. Survey results indicate that students' understanding of accessibility and assistive technology increased with the introduction of these modules.

Tenets for Social Accessibility

Despite years of addressing disability in technology design and advocating user-centered design practices, popular mainstream technologies remain largely inaccessible for people with disabilities. We conducted a design course study investigating how student designers regard disability and explored how designing for multiple disabled and nondisabled users encouraged students to think about accessibility in the design process. Across two university course offerings one year apart, we examined how students focused on a design project while learning user-centered design concepts and techniques, working with people with and without disabilities throughout the project. In addition, we compared how students incorporated disability-focused design approaches within a classroom setting. We found that designing for multiple stakeholders with and without disabilities expanded student understanding of accessible design by demonstrating that people with the same disability could have diverse needs and by aligning such needs with those of nondisabled users. We also found that using approaches targeted toward designing for people with disabilities complemented interactions with users, particularly with regard to managing varying abilities across users, or incorporating social aspects. Our findings contribute to an understanding about how we might incur change in design practice by working with multiple stakeholders with and without disabilities whenever possible. We refined Design for Social Accessibility by incorporating these findings into three tenets emphasizing: (1) design for disability ought to incorporate users with and without disabilities, (2) design should address functional and social factors simultaneously, and (3) design should include tools to spur consideration of social factors in accessible design.