Teaching Accessibility in India: A Work in Progress

Abstract

There are about one billion persons with disabilities (PWDs) in the world [8]. Between 40 and 80 million of them are in India [5]. In 2015, the Government of India launched the Sugamya Bhārat Abhiyān (Accessible India Campaign), a “nation-wide Campaign for achieving universal accessibility for PWDs”. One of its three components, “Information and Communication Eco-System Accessibility”, focuses on accessible softwares and digital artifacts. The private industry is also increasingly emphasizing developing softwares that are accessible to everyone [See, e.g., 3, 4, 7, 1]. However, the CS curricula that ought to prepare the future professionals to develop such accessible softwares hardly cover topics related to accessibility. This project is aimed at understanding the status of accessibility education in India and developing appropriate course content. I present initial ideas, solicit feedback, and invite collaborators through the discussion on this poster. It is important to note that teaching accessibility (including accessibility topics in your courses) and teaching accessibly (making your course content accessible) are two different things; my focus is on the former. (1) Understanding the challenges to accessibility integration in CS education in India. We first need to understand the faculty’s preparedness for and attitude towards teaching accessibility topics. Shinohara et al. [6] report that very few CS faculty in the US teach accessibility (20% of the respondents but only 2.5% of all faculty surveyed). Moreover, most of them include accessibility topics in specialized human-computer interaction (HCI) courses rather than core CS courses such as Software Engineering. The numbers in India are likely to be much lower due to various factors; for instance, a cursory survey of CS faculty profiles in the twenty “Institutes of Eminence” in India revealed that only three have someone with HCI expertise. I am developing an instrument to investigate the following initial research questions: (2) Developing accessibility-themed courses and evaluating their effects. I will teach a software engineering course with a focus on Android app development in Fall 2021. I am currently developing materials for this course such that accessibility will be an underlying theme throughout the semester. I plan to include the following four topics, observed in the literature [2], in the course learning objectives: I will evaluate the effects of this course on how students learned certain software engineering concepts and their attitude towards accessibility.