AccessComputing News - June 2019: All Articles

A big thank you to the AccessComputing group for enabling me to attend the CSforALL SCRIPT (Strategic CSforALL Resource & Implementation Planning Tool) Symposium at the Scripps Institute of Oceanography in San Diego, California from January 14 – 17. I got to learn about what schools and states are doing to improve K-12 computer science education.

The workshop was aimed at school districts, state departments of education, and partner organizations to help get computer science education into every K-12 school. I shared my work starting an after school computer club at the South Carolina School for the Blind. I hope that with the tools I learned at the symposium, I can expand our offerings, either during the school day or as part of after school activities.

During the symposium, I led a breakout session abut including students with disabilities in computer science education. The program stimulated some interesting questions and conversations from participants. Some reported that they had never previously thought about including students with disabilities as a target demographic for inclusion. I think it would be ideal if all the districts and states were required to participate in a diversity inclusion session.

I also met and collaborated with 150 education leaders from 14 states. I hope that my message of participation by students with disabilities in computer science will impact someone down the road. If it does, then I have served my purpose to make getting an accessible education easier.

For further reading, check out the CSforALL and the SCRIPT Symposium websites.

Able Player is a free, open source HTML media player created with accessibility in mind by me, University of Washington technology accessibility specialist Terrill Thompson, and supported in part by AccessComputing. Version 4.0 was released in April and includes three important new features.

First, Able Player now supports Vimeo. For years, Able Player has been capable of playing YouTube videos, but now it can play Vimeo videos as well, with some limitations. For example, a Plus, Pro or Business Vimeo account is required in order to hide Vimeo's default controller. If videos are hosted on a free account, the Vimeo controller and Able Player controller are both shown. Also, Vimeo's captions are built into its playback controls, so if the controls are hidden in favor of using the more accessible Able Player controls, captions are hidden as well. To overcome this limitation, captions must be hosted both on Vimeo (for individuals who access the video there) and on a local web server (for individuals who access the video on a local website with an embedded instance of Able Player).

Second, Able Player now has full support for audio and video playlists. HTML5 has standard markup for adding accessible media to web pages (using <audio> and <video>), including multiple media source files in various formats (using <source>) and creating multiple time-stamped text tracks in WebVTT format (using <track>). Tracks can potentially be provided in various languages, serving any of five purposes (captions, subtitles, chapters, description, and metadata). All of this is made possible with HTML5 for a single audio or video title, but there is no standard markup for connecting all of the necessary components into a full playlist. Able Player 4.0 includes a method for doing exactly that.

Third, Able Player now uses the Web Speech API to read text-based audio description. As noted, HTML5 provides standard markup for associating a time-stamped text file with a video element for the purposes of description. Previously Able Player supported this by exposing the description text at the appropriate times in an Accessible Rich Internet Applications (ARIA) Live Region, which screen readers could announce. However, this method has many drawbacks. For example, some videos don't have enough silent moments to inject audio description. In those cases, a solution is to pause the video while the audio description is read, then resume playback after the description ends. If a screen reader is reading the description text, there is no way for Able Player to know the user's reading speed, therefore no way to know when the screen reader is finished reading the description. In contrast, the Web Speech API has a callback function, which enables Able Player to resume playback when it's finished reading the description. Additional details about using the Web Speech API for this purpose are provided in one of my recent blog posts titled Audio Description using the Web Speech API.

Now that Able Player 4.0 is out, next steps, both actively underway, are to create an Able Player WordPress plugin and an Able Player module for Drupal 8. These tools will make it much easier for content authors to add accessible videos to their web pages, and will increase adoption and enable accessible video to proliferate throughout the web, including in higher education.

Thanks to a new grant from the National Science Foundation (NSF), AccessComputing's partner organization, the Disabilities, Opportunities, Internetworking, and Technology (DO-IT) center, has been able to explore deeper into accessibility and online learning. One of AccessCyberlearning 2.0's main tasks is to write a white paper on the topic. The first draft of this paper is being reviewed by collaboration this month.

The white paper stems out of a capacity building institute (CBI) hosted in January, which brought together researchers, graduate students, and leaders in NSF-funded cyberlearning projects to engage with each other and explore how to make digital learning research, products, activities, and resources welcoming to, accessible to, and usable by everyone, including those with disabilities.

The white paper will offer possible solutions to create a more accessible learning environments. Potential applications of the white paper cut across multiple domains of knowledge, learning contexts, and time spans.

The project will also develop guidelines for how researchers can address disability/accessibility-related issues with respect to designing and testing new technologies, analyzing and reporting outcomes, and designing project activities and resources.

Read the proceedings from the CBI here.

The day I travel to a conference is usually one of eager anticipation. I love the rising energy as we approach the first day of a conference and the sense of connection on the way to a destination. And when I arrive, the payoff: I get to reconnect with many old friends, meet the next generation of scholars who will shape our field, and develop the ideas I might work on in the coming years. Especially for a conference celebrating its 50th anniversary, Special Interest Group on Computer Science Education (SIGCSE) was likely to be quite the party of reminiscing on big ideas and important people and forging new foundation for the next 50 years.

The first event I attended was a half day workshop I co-organized with Richard Ladner on how to integrate accessibility topics into higher education computing courses. Nearly 50 people attended, with about half already teaching some aspect of accessibility in their courses. Some attendees were experts on accessibility but not at all experienced with teaching accessibility. Others were the opposite, struggling to teach accessibility without much expertise in it.

We organized a series of speakers with experience teaching accessibility, and they shared an incredible diversity of integration points, including introductory courses with topical sections, aspects of web development courses, and accessibility capstones. I had planned on speaking about how we’ve integrated accessibility through our informatics curriculum in our introductory, ethics, web development, and database courses, as well as in numerous electives, but we ran out of time for my presentation.

Interestingly, most people who were teaching accessibility had the autonomy to integrate it. It was very rarely mandated from the top down, nor did leadership prevent anyone from teaching about it. In fact, some people had entire courses dedicated to accessibility! And at the core of most of these stories, it was because the teacher was personally passionate around integrating accessibility topics in their course.

I think the biggest impact of the workshop was giving everyone a sense of not being alone in their efforts to teach accessibility. Many people shared in rich discussions about pedagogical changes teaching accessibility. Another big impact was giving people a sense of growth: if we’re not alone, then we can do bigger things together. And we shall!

You can see a summary of presentations and links to slides from proceedings from the event online.

On Thursday, I presented our work on teaching explicit programming strategies, which is the idea of providing step-by-step procedures for solving various programming problems like debugging, reuse, and testing. We tried teaching these in a summer CS class to adolescents. Our results showed that students found them useful, but that most just couldn’t force themselves to slow down and follow the steps. Those that did, however, were much more successful than those that didn’t at independently writing programs. I speculated that one challenge could be that most adolescents don’t have sufficiently developed executive functioning to regulate their process so strictly. One question that came up was particularly interesting: how much does confidence interact with students’ use of the strategies? I shared some anecdotes that would suggest that not using the strategies was related to overconfidence. Students who lacked confidence tended to rely more on the strategies, because they were less sure about how to succeed. I wonder if they were more successful as a result!

On Saturday, another paper of mine was presented. Saba Kawas, who was the lead author of the work, shared our effort exploring how to educate higher education faculty on how to teach about accessibility in their CS courses. We were exploring the idea of how to provide “micro” professional development by creating a mapping between CS learning objectives and accessibility learning objectives, then linking examples of learning materials for each of these mappings. We made a tool that let CS teachers find those objectives and quickly connecting them to relevant material. However, our goal was not to build the tool, but to build enough of a prototype to assess whether such a tool would actually help. Our results showed that some faculty felt they could use the content immediately; others still faced personal, organizational, or structural barriers to incorporating accessibility topics into their courses. Nevertheless, our evidence suggested that investing in creating such online materials could have a lot of impact if adequately marketed.

I'm excited to see everyone I missed next year in my home town of Portland, Oregon! Read my full blog post on SIGCSE 2019 online.
 

I represented our AccessComputing and other projects at the NSF INCLUDES National Network Convening: Advancing Equity in STEM May 29-30 in Alexandria, Virginia. This event was supported by the NSF to bring together principal investigators (PIs) and other leaders of projects funded by NSF’s initiative called INCLUDES (Inclusion across the Nation of Communities of Learners of Underrepresented Discoverers in Engineering and Science). The DO-IT partner in AccessComputing has secured two grants through this initiative that complement what we are doing in INCLUDES. At the meeting I hosted a poster session on our two projects and co-led two sessions with Chris Atchison of the University of Cincinnati on how to better address accessibility issues within all funded INCLUDES projects.

AccessINCLUDES (HRD-1834924) shares knowledge and results from disability-focused projects and organizations in order to make other INCLUDES projects better prepared to include people with disabilities in their activities and research. Our ERC-INCLUDES project ( EEC-1028725) fosters collaborations between NSF Engineering Research Centers and the INCLUDES national network.

This year, the CSforAll Summit will be held October 21-23 in Salt Lake City, UT. The event brings together organizations—school districts, researchers, government, non-profits, and more—committed to K-12 computer science education across the country. This year, the CSforALL Summit has posted a new Call for Commitments, which includes "new, specific, and measurable actions taken by community stakeholders in support of achieving the ultimate goal of computer science for all US students."

Last year, we encouraged many of our partners to make commitments related to increasing the accessibility of K-12 computer science (CS) education. Over 100 organizations have signed the accessibility pledge that was launched last summer (www.uw.edu/accesscomputing/resources/accesscomputing-news-february-2019/...). At the 2019 Summit, the CSforAll Consortium will share about progress and outcomes resulting from the accessibility pledge. We'd love to see more organizations sign the pledge and make commitments related to accessibility this year.

Find more information at the CSforALL website.
 

The second annual CRA Grad Cohort for Underrepresented Minorities and Persons with Disabilities (URMD) was held in Waikoloa, Village on the Island of Hawaii on March 22-23, 2019. The event, organized by the Computing Research Association (CRA), is for computing graduate students in their first three years to learn how to navigate and persist in their programs. About 150 students, including roughly 20 who reported a disability, and 25 mentors attended the workshop.

AccessComputing was a Silver Sponsor with the commitment to fund 10 students with disabilities to attend the workshop. Among the mentors were our AccessComputing partners, Raja Kushalnagar from Gallaudet University, Shiri Azenkot from Cornell Tech, Ayanna Howard from Georgia Tech, Dilma Da Silva from Texas A&M, and Shaun Kane from the University of Colorado. Many topics of interest to first to third year graduate students were included in presentations, active breakouts, and panels. Among them were networking, publishing, life balance, industry vs. academia, job search, communication skills, cultural barriers, finding an advisor, and building a professional persona. One particular breakout, titled “Empowerment of People with Disabilities” and lead by Shaun Kane and Richard Ladner, was about strategies to help students with disabilities successfully advocate for themselves and maximize their abilities. There were many opportunities for one-on-one mentoring during breaks and at scheduled mentoring sessions.

Learn more about URMD and access resources here!

Accessibility is hard, it is also critically important. Accessibility is a core value of CHI, the flagship conference of the human-computer interaction (HCI) field. HCI is driven by understanding and supporting people, leading to technological innovation. Despite this value, SIGCHI, CHI’s parent organization, struggles to make it's 24 conferences accessible.

AccessSIGCHI is a dedicated group of volunteers who are leading the charge toward more accessible computing conferences. However despite their efforts, many of these conferences are woefully inaccessible. Tensions have been rising as these volunteers are ignored and disempowered. Finally this year, the tensions broke as the CHI conference struggled to overcome the outdated, cramped, inaccessible infrastructure of the Glasgow Convention Center. Numerous attendees with disabilities were excluded from the conference because of the accessibility barriers that volunteers had been anticipating for months. Students and faculty, many with disabilities, organized a “Crip-In” where protestors sat at the entrance to the town hall meeting. Holding signs for the whole conference to see, protestors with disabilities told their SIGCHI stories.

The protest was successful, prompting SIGCHI leaders to work with these volunteers to take concrete actions towards conference accessibility. Together efforts have begun to increase representation of disabled people; provide accessibility budgets to all SIGCHI conferences; create clear, enforceable guidelines for accessibility; and increase publication accessibility. Ultimately these are only small steps towards complete accessibility, but they have the momentum necessary to create an accessible community. Through protest, SIGCHI is embracing the endeavor towards an accessible world.

For updates on SIGCHI accessibility please visit the AccessSIGCHI facebook page.