Teaching Accessibility

The session will look at challenges faced by educators teaching accessibility, explore solutions and discuss ways to ensure skills learnt are transferred into the workplace.

Previous notes: Creating websites that are accessible to the broadest number of users possible is one of the core values of web developers.

Goals

• Understand: To explore ways to address the issues of Accessibility in Web Education by understanding the difficulties and obstacles faced by teachers and learners alike.

• Educate: To consider the day-to-day challenges of teaching Accessibility, in a wide variety of environments, and to establish ways to mitigate these.

• Transfer: To ensure that Accessibility is an integral part of all Web Education Curricula, in order for its core principles to be seamlessly transferred to Industry.

Previous notes:

• Share accessibility communication experiences successes and failures  - developers, web dev educators, accessibility advocate
• what are the boundaries of teaching accessibility?
• identifying shared problems - what are the solutions?
• learner specific : a way for them to sift through the silo of info on the web and to know where to start. giving them a starting point?
• accessibility as mindful web developer: attitudes and values, human values.
• understanding your audience, through access technologies, variable access.
• What is the potential of using personas as a design tool?
• meet the audience - linking learners and educators with those who find current web design challenging to access (dyslexics, sight impaired, mobile users, second language, on dial-up).

What do you want to achieve?

Some ideas of better and different ways we can teach accessible web development skills and values.

Who should come? How many? For how long?

web designers and developers, web educators and learners

max 20 people

50 minutes.

What will they do when they get there?

Learn about current ways of teaching accessibility. Workshop better ways to help people learn this core web development principle.

What will you / they have at the end?

Better understanding of how accessible web development can be taught. Better understanding of why accessibility is such an important part of web craft.

additional background and context