AccessComputing News - January 2016: All Articles

My name is Zane Hintzman, and I graduated from Carnegie Mellon University in 2015 with my B.S. in Computer Science. This summer, I participated in an internship with Disney Research in Pittsburgh. For my project, I worked on an interface for streaming data from a motion capture system and a radio frequency identification reader simultaneously. The goal of the project was to create a tool that could track people moving in a specified two dimensional region. The internship’s main focus was to create a unified software environment that allowed multiple technologies to work together simultaneously. 

I found out about the internship through an email that was sent to Computer Science majors at Carnegie Mellon University. I spoke to the contact for this opportunity, and he gave me a related project to work on over the summer. 

I really enjoyed the overall experience. My project was interesting, and my mentor was really proud of my progress. I had a lot more interaction with my mentor than I have in previous internships. The Disney Research group also held many social events that allowed people at the offices to network.

I learned about many new technologies during my internship. For example, I learned how a motion capture system works, as well as how RFID readers work. I learned about the benefits and downsides to each kind of technology I used. Working on my project, I became more familiar with Visual Studio and the C# language.

I had a great experience working for Disney. This internship inspired me to be open to career options that use technologies I haven’t had much experience with—I encourage other students to be open to working with new technology and learning new skills.

AccessComputing is excited to announce the publication of Universal Design in Higher Education: From Principles to Practice, edited by AccessComputing co-PI Sheryl Burgstahler. After thorough revision and the addition of new articles, this second edition addresses recent changes in law, technology, university policy, and practices, making it a comprehensive guide for creating inclusive college and university programs. It showcases practices for creating a campus environment that is welcoming, accessible, and usable. As more students with disabilities attend postsecondary educational institutions, universal design becomes a practical approach for educators to fully include these students.

As Stephan Smith, executive director of the Association on Higher Education And Disability, said: “Fresh, comprehensive, and engaging, Universal Design in Higher Education is expertly written, thoughtfully crafted, and a ‘must-add’ to your resource collection.” To learn more about the book or order it online, visit the Harvard Publishing website.

AccessComputing partner Professor Jonathan Lazar from Towson University also has a new book. Ensuring Digital Accessibility Through Process and Policy was published in July 2015. It looks at why digital accessibility is an important issue and offers best practices for implementing accessibility in a variety of settings including universities, companies, and government.

Richard Ladner, AccessComputing PI has said, “Ensuring Digital Accessibility is a wonderful explanation of why accessibility to all kinds of technology including computers, smartphones, e-books, and web sites, is so beneficial to society. Certainly the recipients of access benefit, but so do the providers of the information by reaching a wider and more diverse audience.  Providing access to users with disabilities is not only the right thing to do, it is the smart thing to do.”

The Teaching Accessibility Initiative was created in 2015 to address the needs of the computing industry for developers, testers, program managers more familiar with accessibility. Their statement of principles and objectives includes the following. 

“We believe that technology is integral to our culture, our society and our workplace and should be usable by everyone, regardless of their abilities or disabilities. While there has been progress in a variety of applications, standards and regulations, accessibility is still not systemic in the development of new and emerging technologies. 

Today, knowledge of accessible development is limited to a handful of domain experts. To reach the goal of making technology accessible to everyone, we must broaden expertise across industry. Accessibility must become mainstream.”

One of the first actions by the Initiative was to encourage industry to include knowledge of accessibility as part of job descriptions. To this end Adobe, Facebook, Google, LinkedIn, Twitter, Yahoo!, and several other companies have added language about knowledge of accessibility to their job descriptions. This pressure from industry will help influence computing departments to include accessibility in their courses.

AccessComputing is an active participant in the Initiative along with 27 other companies, organizations, and institutions. The goals of the Initiative coincide with our objective to increase the teaching of accessibility and universal design in computing courses. Visit the website to learn more.

I’m a junior majoring in computer science at Stanford University specializing in human computer interaction and artificial intelligence. This summer, I worked on the accessibility team within the operating systems group at Microsoft, developing a Windows service that would provide more feedback to the team, thereby helping improve the accessibility of their applications. 

The application process started with a meeting with Microsoft’s on-campus recruiter for Stanford. I expressed my interest in accessibility and talked about my prior experience. I flew to Microsoft’s headquarters in Redmond, WA for a day of technical interviews. AccessComputing also connected me to a few contacts at the company, and their guidance proved very helpful in preparing for the interviews. While the interviews primarily tested my coding and design abilities, they were also an opportunity for me to learn about the team and the potential project that I would be working on. I particularly liked how the interviewers tried to keep the entire process interactive.

Even before the internship, I was invited to attend the company’s Ability Summit, a two-day event where employees come together to develop solutions that can empower people with disabilities. This event left me highly impressed with Microsoft’s commitment to diversity. I participated in the ability hackathon where I, along with two other developers, worked on a Yammer client that makes it much easier for screen reader users to interact with the application. Our project was recognized by the CEO, and he gave us some constructive feedback to further improve it. I also made it a point to network with current employees with disabilities at the company, and these connections later helped me a lot during the internship.

After getting the internship, I started ramping up on the technology that I would use for the project. The internship was designed in such a way that I was responsible for implementation, design, and testing. Design is something that I had never done before, so it was a challenge for me. The implementation phase took longer than expected, but it was a good learning experience to work through unexpected bugs and other issues in the development cycle. I also got an opportunity to review and play with existing Microsoft’s internal code, which helped me better understand coding practices and standards in the industry. I learned more about UI automation (which is the cornerstone of accessibility at Microsoft) and applied several concepts I learned at school, such as concurrency control. Besides technical knowledge, I also gained a better appreciation for working in a corporate culture, and how that is different from a school environment. For instance, I would often spend a significant amount of time trying to resolve problems I encountered on my own by reading online documentation, but I soon realized how inefficient that was. With people around me who had first-hand experience with different types of technologies, it made more sense to schedule a short conversation with the concerned person and resolve issues quickly.

I actively participated in other events around the company. In particular, I was a part of the “deep vision” team in Oneweek, Microsoft’s annual hackathon. My team developed an application that helps a blind person with indoor navigation, while also helping to instantly read and scan documents such as restaurant menus. Our project was selected as the best project in the Tech for Social Good category. It will be further improved and possibly shipped. Similarly, I also interacted with other teams and helped them brainstorm ideas that could help people with disabilities. Interaction with other teams has inspired me to learn about natural language processing and helped me to secure a return offer for next summer.

My internship ended with a presentation of my work. The company plans on using my tool as a validation tool for accessibility, and I’m excited to see it’s positive impact.

To secure an internship like this, I recommend applying early. The internship positions at big companies fill up quickly, and chances of getting in later decrease accordingly.

Since 2006, AccessComputing has contributed funds to support computing- and information technology-related activities, training, and experiential learning opportunities nationwide. Funds have been used to expand existing computing events to involve students with disabilities, create new stand-alone events designed to attract students with disabilities into computing fields, and support professional development opportunities. We’d like to share some of the creative and exciting ways people from all over the country are working to increase the number of people with disabilities successfully pursuing computing careers.

Congratulations to all of these recipients for conducting successful projects!

• Ather Sharif ran the evoHaX Special Edition hackathon. The hackathon had over 75 participants and focused on building wearable technologies that are accessible. The teams targeted a broader range of disabilities through collaboration between professional developers, students, therapists, and people with disabilities.
• The Empowering Blind Students in Science and Engineering workshop engaged 18 students and 16 mentors who are blind learn a variety of resources and mindfulness strategies to balance demanding course loads.
• Sherry Hahn, in collaboration with Andreas Stefik, and Derrick Smith hosted a workshop titled Computer Programming Camp: Expanding Computer Science to Blind and Visually Impaired Students. The camp was a hands-on workshop for middle and high school teachers designed to prepare educators to teach computer programming to students who are blind or visually impaired.
• Dr. Cydale C. Smith hosted the second annual Science, Art, and Health Symposium in Huntsville, Alabama. The event highlighted the connection between science and the arts. With  participation from NASA, U.S. Army, local colleges and local companies, an estimated 500 on-site participants and 1,000 online participants (with over one third being students with disabilities) participated in activities such as the Kids-Hackathon.

I encourage you to consider applying for minigrant funds.