Accessible Design

Teaching How All Technologies Are Accessible in Data Structures and Algorithms

Elglaly et al. argue for teaching accessible design not only in human–computer interaction courses but across the undergraduate computing curriculum. This poster provides a description and preliminary evaluation of a pedagogical approach to teaching accessible design in an undergraduate advanced Data Structures and Algorithms (DSA) course. Inspired by the idea that all technology is assistive, our approach aims to empower students to utilize their DSA content knowledge and skills to redesign software features to address design assumptions and improve technologies for all.

Our approach uses the CIDER technique to identify a design assumption; design and implement an abstract data type to address the assumption; evaluate the abstract data type and implementations; before repeating this process to further improve the design. In our pilot offering of the course during Spring 2024, we integrated accessible design skills into 4 discussion sections led by teaching assistants as well as 2 multi-week software design and analysis projects. By the end of the course, we hoped students would feel more comfortable to:

  1. Incorporate accessible design practices in the software design and development process;
  2. Evaluate the impacts of their software design work with a consideration for accessibility;
  3. Describe the social and historical context of disability and its present-day effects on people.

We chose to integrate this approach during discussion sections and projects rather than lecture because we viewed accessible design work in software engineering as integrating knowledge from across multiple lessons: section provided an opportunity for students to review all the concepts introduced in the preceding week while projects required students to practice applying it to real-world problems. The 4 discussion sections applied DSA content knowledge to implement accessibility features: a disability access service, augmentative and alternative communication, screen reader website navigation, and accessible shortest paths using data from Project Sidewalk. The 2 multi-week software design and analysis projects also incorporated accessibility as a context. The first project utilized a dataset of website accessibility reports: students wrote code to identify the most common Web Content Accessibility Guidelines (WCAG) to address and then created a randomized testing framework to stress-test their data structures when given a large number of WCAG. The second project extended the discussion section on accessible shortest paths with algorithm engineering by engaging students to explain how they could redesign the project to allow users to choose whether to use the Project Sidewalk access scores when generating shortest paths navigation directions.

This work-in-progress research aims to identify the elements of DSA content knowledge and accessible design skills that support critical student reflection on the impacts of their designs. We conducted pre- and post-surveys with 225 non-major students enrolled in the pilot offering of the course during Spring 2024. Data analysis is planned to begin after the conclusion of the course with preliminary insights expected by the time of poster presentation.