Accessible Design (at SIGCSE TS 2025)

Teaching Accessibility in Data Programming and Data Structures

About

My name is Kevin Lin, and I’m looking forward to working with you. While my home page highlights the products of my work, it doesn’t explain how I work. I want to share with you how I work so that we can have the best collaborative relationship possible. Continue reading to learn more about me, and I hope you’ll do the same and share more about what I need to know to work effectively with you too.

I am a Berkeley-trained computer scientist, a self-taught and largely self-advised scholar of teaching and learning, and an academic trailblazer, so I value self-directed individual achievement without much mentorship from others. I see scholarly work as fundamentally creative work even when the requirements are clear, so I prefer setting ambitious goals even if mistakes occur along the way.

I expect each of us to find intrinsic value in our work. Your work is your art: it is the mark you leave behind on the world, and I do not have enough time to work with people who are not serious about their art. Critical conversations about our art are key to improving ourselves, so I think candid feedback that constructively challenges us to do better is the kindest way to show care.

While I think human existence is bleak, meaningless, and out of balance with the natural world, I find for precisely those reasons beauty in life and living. I am rarely ever angry or disappointed in individual people, but rather in the systems that produce them. Instead of focusing on what is good or bad about a situation, I tend to focus on actions we can take to change social conditions.

Writing this document is one way that I name the forces that shape how I move through the world. I believe reflexivity is a key practice for living in accordance with one’s values, and I respect people who think critically about how they think. I trust people who consistently take deliberate action to improve themselves, honor commitments to others, and go out of their way to provide help.