AccessComputing News - January 2015: All Articles

In Fall 2014, DO-IT and the UW College of Engineering were awarded a grant from NSF (#EEG-1444961) to fund AccessEngineering in order to help engineering faculty nationwide:

• Better serve a diverse student body that includes students with disabilities in engineering courses and programs, and
• Integrate relevant disability-related and universal design content into engineering courses.

The project aims to increase the participation of people with disabilities in engineering education and careers, where they can improve engineering fields with their perspectives and expertise.

The project is funded under NSF’s Broadening Participation in Engineering Strategy Track for $836,435 over the course of three years, beginning September 15, 2014. Sheryl Burgstahler is the Principle Investigator (PI) for the project. Two UW faculty members, Maya Cakmak, assistant professor in Computer Science and Engineering, and Katherine Steele, assistant professor in Mechanical Engineering, are Co-PIs. Fourteen representatives from universities nationwide, including AccessComputing PI Richard Ladner, will serve on the Faculty Leadership Team. Project leaders are looking forward to our first Capacity Building Institute with faculty members and other stakeholders, which will be held in April 2015.

For more information, visit the AccessEngineering website at www.uw.edu/doit/programs/accessengineering/overview or email doit@uw.edu for more information.

In Fall 2014, DO-IT and the UW College of Engineering were awarded a grant from NSF (#EEG-1444961) to fund AccessEngineering in order to help engineering faculty nationwide:

• Better serve a diverse student body that includes students with disabilities in engineering courses and programs, and
• Integrate relevant disability-related and universal design content into engineering courses.

The project aims to increase the participation of people with disabilities in engineering education and careers, where they can improve engineering fields with their perspectives and expertise.

The project is funded under NSF’s Broadening Participation in Engineering Strategy Track for $836,435 over the course of three years, beginning September 15, 2014. Sheryl Burgstahler is the Principle Investigator (PI) for the project. Two UW faculty members, Maya Cakmak, assistant professor in Computer Science and Engineering, and Katherine Steele, assistant professor in Mechanical Engineering, are Co-PIs. Fourteen representatives from universities nationwide, including AccessComputing PI Richard Ladner, will serve on the Faculty Leadership Team. Project leaders are looking forward to our first Capacity Building Institute with faculty members and other stakeholders, which will be held in April 2015.

For more information, visit the AccessEngineering website at www.uw.edu/doit/programs/accessengineering/overview or email doit@uw.edu for more information.

The Empowering Blind Students in Science and Engineering (EBSSE) workshop was held June 1-3, 2014 at a conference center near the UW. The workshop brought together three different groups of people to foster mentoring and networking among blind students studying science, technology, engineering, and mathematics (STEM). The first group consisted of eighteen blind students in STEM fields who came from seventeen universities and one high school in twelve different states. The second group consisted of sixteen blind mentors, some with PhDs, who are successful blind professionals working in STEM fields. The third group consisted of eight local leaders in industry, education, and government who attended for various lengths of time. The leaders participated in mentoring and listened to the successes and challenges of the blind students and mentors. A total of forty-four people, thirty-five of whom were blind, participated in the workshop.

The workshop consisted of structured plenary sessions, contemplative sessions directed by a professional in contemplative practices, and semi-structured breakout sessions based on academic and professional interests. One of the plenary sessions featured Dr. Nicholas Giudice, Associate Professor at the University of Maine, who presented his work on how blind people perceive various stimuli and his contributions to tactile graphics research. Sina Bahram, graduate student in computer science at North Carolina State, presented ways to grow one’s personal brand through the use of social media and the internet, important for networking and professional development. Dr. Daehee Lee gave a talk about his career as a Natural Language Processing Research Engineer for Nuance Communications, Inc. Shiri Azenkot, now an Assistant Professor at Cornell Tech in New York City, presented strategies for giving an effective presentation.

The breakout sessions in computer science were very popular among students learning about both accessible programming environments and about ways to generate accessible PDF files. An example of a contemplative activity was a “Just Like Me” session. This session allowed attendees to empathize with a partner silently to recognize everyone’s similarities in having positive and negative feelings, emotions, and experiences. This activity was particularly salient to educating the sighted leaders that blindness is not a defining characteristic.

The major funding for the workshop came from the Fetzer Institute in Kalamazoo, Michigan. The program manager for the workshop was Cynthia Bennett, AccessComputing Team member.

AccessComputing regularly hosts meetings with its partners, and traditionally these meetings have been conducted via voice-only teleconference. However, we acknowledge that there are shortcomings with this medium. For example, participants who are deaf or hard of hearing must participate through a relay operator, which introduces a lag time in the communication, can be confusing when multiple speakers are engaged in conversation, and is generally difficult for deaf and hard of hearing individuals to actively participate in the conversation.

Also, a great deal of communication occurs non-verbally, and voice-only meetings lack the non-verbal part of speakers’ messages. Many people find that having a face-to-face conversation is simply more engaging than meeting solely by voice.

Given the limitations of voice-only teleconferencing, we spent time in 2014 exploring available options for web conferencing systems. Our partners are diverse, and include people who are deaf or hard of hearing, people who are blind, and people who are physically unable to use a mouse, among others. Each of these groups of participants has unique interface needs that must be taken into consideration. The following is a summary of our requirements for a web conferencing system:

• Video quality and performance must be sufficient to support sign language. Our goal was to replace relay operators with a single sign language interpreter that could be shared in a window by multiple participants. The interpreter window must be resizable independently of the speaker window. This would allow users to have both the speaker and the interpreter in relatively large windows compared to other participants. Many web conferencing tools show all participants in small windows, and only one participant at a time can be promoted into a large window. The ideal product would at least allow two relatively large windows, and ideally users would have flexible control of those windows, and could resize and position them individually as needed.
• The product’s controls must be accessible by keyboard, without requiring a mouse. Most web conferencing systems have a variety of features that appear in different panes. Keyboard users must be able to easily navigate between those panes and use all the features.
• The product’s controls must be accessible to screen reader users. The panes and controls must be sufficiently labeled so blind users know where they are within the interface, and can easily navigate to particular features and use those features.
• The product’s interface must be customizable. Individuals using screen magnification software may find it difficult to navigate if their screens are cluttered with information. This can also be distracting for many other users. Flexibility is an important aspect of universal design.
• The product must be easy for everyone to install and use. As hosts, we at AccessComputing would expect to cover any costs, and our remote users could simply login and use the system without having to purchase software or install plugins, especially those that are dependent on other software being installed first. The more steps required of users for getting up and running, the more likely we are to lose potential participants if they encounter technical difficulties.

We solicited feedback from colleagues, many of whom had undergone similar quests. This helped us to narrow our focus, as there are a multitude of products out there. Christian Vogler, Paula Tucker, and Norman Williams of Gallaudet University had conducted a similar quest, focused specifically on the deaf and hard of hearing perspective, and presented their research at ASSETS ‘13, which can be found at http://dl.acm.org/citation.cfm?id=2517035.

However, we were ultimately unable to find a single web conferencing system that met all of our requirements. Some systems were relatively strong on customizability, including the ability to independently resize speaker windows; however these products were not accessible for keyboard or screen reader users. Other systems excelled at keyboard and screen reader accessibility, but failed to meet our needs for having both a speaker and interpreter in large windows. Other systems had excellent video quality but failed in other areas.

As of the date of this newsletter, we continue to host our meetings via voice-only teleconference. Rather than actively searching for a replacement, we are now actively working to ensure our meetings are as accessible as possible within this medium. Here are a few of the steps we are taking to ensure the accessibility of our meetings:

• We ask all participants to state their name and institution each time they speak. This helps all participants, but especially deaf and hard of hearing participants, since their relay operators aren’t likely to recognize speakers by their voices.
• We ask all participants to limit the background noise as much as possible so that everyone can clearly hear the person who is speaking. With each invitation, we include a list of the touchtone controls for muting and unmuting, and for increasing or decreasing volume of audio.
• We include a statement in each meeting invitation that invites participants to contact us if they require any disability-related accommodations, and include a specific email address to contact.

We will continue to monitor the web conferencing system landscape and will reach out to vendors in hopes of persuading them to more fully build accessibility into their products. There is clearly a need for such a system, and we look forward to doing business with the first vendor that satisfies that need.

Jonathan Lazar; professor of computer and information sciences, director of the Undergraduate Program in Information Systems and director of the Universal Usability Laboratory at Towson University, earned AccessComputing’s Capacity Building Award.

Jonathan engages in teaching and research in the area of human-computer interaction, specifically, web usability, web accessibility for people with disabilities, user-centered design methods, assistive technology, and public policy in the area of human-computer interaction. He is actively involved with SIGCHI, serving as the digital accessibility chair for the CHI conference in 2014. He engaged with AccessComputing leaders to ensure that SIGCHI and its activities are accessible and welcoming to people with disabilities. Jonathan has encouraged other AccessComputing partners to engage with the SIGCHI Accessibility Community.

Learn more about SIGCHI efforts to increase accessibility in their organization and at their annual meeting at www.washington.edu/doit/articles?540.

In the January 2014 issue of AccessComputing News, we reported on a variety of efforts to integrate universal design into curriculum, which was the theme of the 2013 Accessing Higher Ground conference (www.uw.edu/accesscomputing/get-informed/publications/accesscomputing-news-january-2014/universal-design-curriculum-key-focus-accessing-higher-ground).

One of our own contributions in this space has been WebD2, a web design and development course curriculum designed primarily for use in secondary schools. It is a full course curriculum in which students learn about the importance of web standards and accessible design. These concepts are taught as core design principles in the first unit, and then reinforced throughout the course as students learn new topics.

The curriculum is available for free at www.uw.edu/accesscomputing/webd2 and currently has over 5000 registered teachers worldwide.

In 2014, we conducted a survey of teachers who are using the curriculum, and 147 teachers responded. Among other questions, teachers were asked to rate the following two statements on a five-point scale:

• As a result of using the curriculum, I now have more knowledge about standards-based and accessible web design.
• As a result of using the curriculum, most of my students now have more knowledge about standards-based and accessible web design.

The mean rating for each of these statements was 4.3. We’re excited to know that by teaching universal design within the course curriculum, we are not only influencing students, but also on teachers, who will continue to share their new perspective with countless other students in the future.

Many of the teachers who participated shared stories of their students who had gone on to pursue web design and development or other computing-related career paths after taking the course. There were stories of students who are now working as graphic artists or web developers, and others who are pursuing academic degrees in computer science and engineering. It’s exciting to hear these stories knowing that these students, who will be the architects of our future world, will be approaching their work with a foundation of knowledge that includes universal design and accessibility.

We are interested in learning about other efforts to integrate accessibility into curriculum. If you have engaged with activities in this area, please contact us at accesscomp@uw.edu.

Did you know that the searchable AccessComputing Knowledge Base includes over 480 articles each as a questions and answer (FAQ), case study, or promising practice? These short articles are used to increase the capacity of postsecondary institutions, precollege educators, projects that broaden participation in computing, and industry to fully include individuals with disabilities in computing fields.

Hot topics in the Knowledge Base include:

• What are typical accommodations for students with ADHD?
• The Summer Academy for Advancing Deaf and Hard of Hearing in Computing: A Promising Practice for Encouraging Students To Study Computing in College
• What is the difference between open and closed captioning?
• What is the difference between the W3C guidelines and the Section 508 standards for web accessibility?
• Universally Designed Web Pages: A Case Study on Access Issues for a Student with a Learning Disability
• What are specific computer applications that can assist students with learning disabilities?
• How can I make my computing department more accessible to students with disabilities?
• What are the NIMAS Development and Technical Assistance Centers? DO-IT: A Promising Practice in Designing Accessible Videos
• Are there any web-based tutorials on web accessibility?

The Knowledge Base can be found at www.uw.edu/accesscomputing/search-accesscomputing-knowledge-base. The Knowledge Base is an ever evolving collection. Articles we expect to add in early 2015 include an FAQ on how to include individuals with disability into broadening participation activities for women or under-represented minorities, a case study about attending conferences via robots, and a promising practice on how to host a collaborative meeting.

If you have ideas or suggestions for new content to include in the Knowledge Base simply email us at accesscomp@uw.edu.