A new feature of the ASSETS 2024 Conference were online workshops held the week before the hybrid conference physically held in St. John’s, Newfoundland and Labrador from October 28-30. I attended the one titled “Teaching Accessibility in Different Disciplines: Topics, Approaches, Resources, Challenges” that was organized by Kyrie Zhou, Rachel Adler, Caterina Almendral, SoyoungChoi, Devorah Kletenik, Bruno Oro and JooYoung Seo. Rachel and JooYoung represent the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign and Devorah represents Brooklyn College as AccessComputing Partners. I was honored to be the keynote speaker that led off the event. In my talk, I summarized my own experiences teaching accessibility and went on to describe the forthcoming foundations of disability and accessibility chapter that I am writing for the online book Teaching Accessible Computing. I highlighted the work of AccessComputing partner Teach Access and AccessComputing partner representatives Yasmine Elglaly, Catherine Baker, Anne Ross, and Kristen Shinohara who show how accessibility can become a Knowledge Area in the ACM/IEEE-CS/AAAI curriculum in the future. Their SIGCSE 2024 paper is open access in the ACM Digital Library.
After my talk, there were nine presentations about teaching accessibility around the world, from India, Germany, the United Kingdom, and the United States. I encourage you to read some of the papers that are found on the workshop website. All the papers are less than five pages long. One of the most exciting papers for me was the one from India titled “Bridging the Accessibility Gap in Indian Computing Education.” India has over 2 million computer science majors while the US has only about 600,000. The two authors P.D. Parthasarathy and Swaroop Joshi are on a mission to make sure Indian computer science students learn about accessibility.