Reflections on Incorporating Digital Accessibility in an Operating Systems Course
This experience report adds to the growing literature on including accessibility topics in ‘core’ computing courses rather than in specialized electives like human-computer interaction(HCI). We incorporated digital accessibility topics into a 4-credit, graduate-level Operating Systems (OS) course for two cohorts: one in the Fall semester of 2022 and the other in the Spring semester of 2023 at a large private university in India. The course had the following interventions: (i) Accessibility awareness (discussion on relevant laws, accessibility principles, and documentaries on how persons with disabilities use software), (ii) knowledge of assistive technology and accessibility tools (lecture and demonstration of various built-in accessibility features of popular operating systems), (iii) accessibility implementation (discussion on system calls for assistive technology, vulnerabilities arising from assistive technology support). We evaluated student learning of accessibility topics using five instruments: (A) a pre-post questionnaire, (B) a graded quiz, (C) a question on accessibility in the open-book final examination, (D) an ungraded assignment requiring students to compare five modern operating systems based on parameters of their choice, and (E) their master’s dissertation submitted one year after completing the OS course. Our results show that the intervention is useful in the short term but less effective over time if accessibility is not emphasized subsequently. We discuss our experience of integrating accessibility into the OS course and highlight successes and areas for improvement.
Fri 6 DecDisplayed time zone: (UTC) Coordinated Universal Time change
06:00 - 06:40 | |||
06:00 20mPaper | FlashHack: Reflections on the Usage of a Micro Hackathon as an Assessment Tool in a Machine Learning Course Conference Indra R B.M.S. College of Engineering, Bengaluru, India, Parthasarathy PD BITS Pilani KK Birla Goa Campus, Ambasana Jatin Indian Institute of Technology, Bombay, Satavlekar Spruha Indian Institute of Technology, Bombay, India | ||
06:20 20mPaper | Reflections on Incorporating Digital Accessibility in an Operating Systems Course Conference |