Teaching Accessibility from the Ground Up

Awareness is the first step. Application and acceptance as the status quo is the ultimate goal. Some major companies in the technology industry are working towards making accessible design an expected part of everyday life.

Accessibility awareness is wonderful – more people should know what accessible design looks like and why it's important. Too often though, actual knowledge about how to design accessible content is missing and those who have the power to create accessible digital products simply don't know how -- or it's not a priority.

They may be motivated once they receive a direct complaint or comment, but otherwise might not have any knowledge of the subject and no reason to seek it out. Whether self-taught or learning in school, accessibility usually doesn't appear on the average student's curriculum.

Microsoft, Adobe, Facebook, Dropbox and others are aiming to change that. And I couldn't personally be more excited.

These large companies – all with variable records on accessibility themselves – are collaborating with accessibility groups and American post-secondary facilities to encourage students studying design, computer science, and human-computer interaction (among other fields) to learn accessible practices from the ground up. Influential groups such as the American Association of People with Disabilities and the Paciello group are involved, as well as schools like Carnegie Mellon and Stanford.

This project, called Teaching Accessibility, will also include a change to the employment postings for all the tech companies involved, stating that a preference will be given to those with knowledge of accessibility practices.

This is great news, if for no other reason than it gets the word out that accessible design and development is a skill everyone should have, not just someone with "accessibility" in their job title. It also means that these companies won't have to take additional time to train new hires in the field.

This marks a perceptible change in how technology companies view accessibility and hopefully there will be a trickle-down effect. Finally, and at very long last, accessibility is becoming mainstream. It's not an add-on or a separate basic HTML site which may or may not work properly and which lacks full features. It is finally being viewed as something to do right from the beginning and to do as a part of the same product everyone else is using.

Despite my excitement and my idealistic tendencies, I know change will take time.

Education and shifting of ideas are not instant processes. Approval to changes to curricula alone are slow. There are also many smaller players who are not on this list, who may lack the funding to rebuild or retrofit their offerings for accessibility. If the new knowledge and curricula are restricted to American university courses, self-taught developers may be excluded due to finances or geography.

While not a perfect solution to all accessibility challenges, education is crucial to a more unified and successful implementation of universal access. I'm eager to see where the Teaching Accessibility project will go.