Using Accessibility Awareness Interventions to Improve Computing Education

Research demonstrates that we continue to be de-ficient in creating inclusive and equitable software, with a lack of empathy among software developers attributed to this issue, even if unintentional. Although increasing empathy has been shown to be part of the solution, unfortunately there is a lack of data that can be analyzed that shows how empathy-building and accessibility awareness interventions can be utilized in computing education, along with a shortage of free, public, and easily adoptable educational material regarding empathy and the creation of accessible software. Through large in-person studies that involve real-world par-ticipants, we are able to contribute to the knowledge regarding the potential benefits that can be used to improve computing education by implementing empathy-building strategies in the curriculum. Two forms of accessibility awareness exercises are utilized to display the effectiveness of empathy-based learning and teach the importance of accessibility in computing, including experiential and expression-based interventions. In these inter-ventions, we expect to find an increase in awareness and empathy in participants, as well as an increase in participant interest in the topic of software inclusivity and accessibility by placing the participant in a situation they may encounter in the real world. We additionally present a web-hosted, easily adoptable ex-periential and expression-based educational lab to support the inclusion of inclusive development and/or empathy-focused topics into a variety of curricula formats. Complete materials are available on the project website: https://all.rit.edu