IBM has so far signed up five universities, including the University of Toronto, for its Accessibility Common Courseware Exchange for Software Studies (ACCESS). That program will help the institutions develop and share course materials to teach students how to design software that people with disabilities can use comfortably.The project had its roots in a programming contest that IBM organized for students, said Angel Franco, project manager of the company’s Human Ability and Accessibility Center. The students were asked to write computer programs to check whether Web sites are accessible for people with disabilities.
That contest made it apparent that many students were learning little or nothing about designing for people with disabilities, Franco said. “It appeared that this was the first time it had over occurred to them to ask the question: Well, how does a blind person use the Internet?”
IBM then conducted a survey that verified that “in many places, very little was being taught about anything to do with human/computer interaction,” least of all issues specific to disabled people, Franco said.
Universities around the world will be able to contribute lessons, tools and courseware related to accessible technologies to an open repository hosted and supported by the IBM Academic Initiative. Materials in this repository will be available to academics who join the Academic Initiative, which Franco said they can do in a few minutes at no cost. The repository will be available online, IBM said.
School’s in
Along with the University of Toronto, the other initial participants are the University of Illinois, California State University at Long Beach, Georgia Tech and Rochester Institute of Technology.
About 2,000 universities around the world are members of IBM’s Academic Initiative, which will be promoting the ACCESS program to all of them, said Franco.
The University of Toronto’s Adaptive Technology Resource Centre has been developing teaching materials related to accessible design since its inception in 1993, said Jutta Treviranus, director of the centre. The ACCESS program will help the centre share its work with others. “It will get our curriculum out there more. It will give us an additional pool of resources,” she said.
The University of Toronto plans to launch such a program in the fall of 2008, Treviranus added. Operating within the university’s Faculty of Information Studies, it will offer students a dual specialization in inclusive design and one of a number of other areas.
Alan Cantor, a Toronto consultant who specializes in accessible technology, welcomed IBM’s move.
According to Cantor, some 10 per cent of the population today has a disability of some sort, and that figure will rise to around 20 per cent by 2020.
As the population ages, there will be more older people with physical limitations such as deterioriating eyesight who want to continue using computers, Franco said.
But it’s not only people with disabilities who benefit from accessible design. Designing to accommodate disabilities leads to better overall design, Treviranus said.
A popular example is the curb cut – the section of a sidewalk curb that is cut away at many street corners to allow wheelchairs to cross the street more easily. This helps wheelchair users, but also helps a far greater number of people pushing baby carriages and shopping carts, as well as rollerbladers and others, Treviranus pointed out.
When manufacturers ask for advice on making their products easier for people with disabilities to use, Cantor said, his suggestions often make the products easier for everyone to use. For example, he has suggested changing colours in software screens to improve contrast, which makes the display easier for everyone to read. Easier-to-read markings on controls are another example.