There has already been a large amount of work done at PCC on understanding accessibility issues for our online content and for mathematical content. There are also ongoing plans to conduct additional subject area studies. When we began this study, we started by asking the following question: "What are the important differences between the CAS, CS, and CIS disciplines and other fields of study at PCC?" We wanted to address issues that would be useful for other disciplines at PCC, but we wanted to focus on the "most difficult issues" that were unique to our subject areas, rather than "re-inventing the wheel."
Many types of impairments and accommodations are well understood. For example, it is well understood that deaf students will require closed captioning for video media, and will require transcripts of audio media. This will be true regardless of the subject area. It is also well understood that students with some types of cognitive impairments will require more time on assignments and on exams. Once again, this will be true regardless of the subject area. While addressing these types of impairments and accommodations is crucial for delivering accessible educational opportunities, we did not feel that they should be the focus of this particular study.
At their root, CAS, CS and CIS are about interacting with the computer and with applications running on the computer. In particular, a large portion of CS and CIS involves learning to program, which requires interacting with complex applications such as IDEs as well as writing, running, testing, and debugging computer programs (which we will collectively refer to as "programming labs"). For some types of impairments, little additional work is required to make these programming labs accessible. For example, a student with motor control impairments may be unable to use the mouse or keyboard, but can use speech-to-text software such as Dragon Naturally Speaking or Windows Speech Recognition to complete the programming lab. However, this is not the case for blind students and for students with severe visual impairments. There are some fundamental differences between how a blind student interacts with the computer, and how a sighted student interacts with the computer.
We felt that by addressing how programming labs could be made accessible to blind students, we would be tackling one of the most difficult subject area specific issues. We also felt that the insights gained by studying this problem would be useful for understanding more about the requirements for other types of computer related activities, such as teaching a blind student to use Microsoft Word to author a document, or to use Dreamweaver to author a web site. Though we all felt that it was important to address how some of these issues affected students with other impairments, we felt the primary focus of this study should be on blind students and programming labs.
When we began exploring this specific area, we soon realized that there were a large number of factors that affected whether a blind student would be able to complete a programming lab substantially on their own. We carefully considered how this information could be most effectively organized and presented to support multiple uses. Ultimately, we devised the notion of a Programming Lab Accessibility Rubric that contained each factor we had identified as an accessibility standard, along with guidance on how to meet each standard. It is our hope that this rubric will serve multiple purposes:
We felt that a detailed Programming Lab Accessibility Rubric could help support all of those purposes.