Disability & Innovation (intro)

In one of my most recent talks, I was asked during the Q&A session about recommendations on which approach to use to promote-advocate for accessibility within an organization. I swiftly went through the human/moral case, the legal case, and the business case, citing Apple practices, European legislation, and general humanistic ideas, and concluded that none of them helped me win the case in the early stages of any project. However, one argument that consistently draws the attention of decision makers is innovation. Accessibility-driven innovation is a term I frequently use to encourage discovery, shift the focus from how to why, and improve the adoption of the accessibility mindset beyond just the techniques. After the talk, Daniel Steinberg mentioned how persuasive this argument was, which was a big deal to me, but rapidly I started having mixed feelings about the backing evidence and origin of the concept. In general, claims can last for so long, and we continuously take for granted the "standing on the shoulders of giants," but still, I couldn't remember where I got this concept from. So I went to the archive and dug through the graph, re-discovering some excellent references that connected all the way up to the disability rights circles: "Nothing about us without us".

Now, the reason I'm writing this post is because Haben Girma resurfaced, and specifically her (now-unlisted) WWDC16 talk, which makes this post just a prologue that intends to say, "Go and watch this video, 26 minutes that are going to be so valuable in understanding that...", and I quote:

Disability never holds anyone back. Disability is not something that people need to overcome. The barriers that exist are created by society, and it's up to every single one of us to work together to remove those barriers.

Teaching Accessible Computing

For computing to work for everyone, it must be accessible to everyone. Alas, it is not: people with disabilities in mobility, vision, hearing, learning, attention, and more regularly face software that is hard or impossible for them to use. One reason for this is that when we educate future software engineers, we rarely teach them anything about accessibility. This limits their ability to find and fix accessibility defects and advocate to their organization to prioritize those fixes. More importantly, it limits the capacity of software organizations to design software that is accessible from day one. This book addresses this problem by offering concrete pedagogical ideas for educators about how to integrate accessibility into their computer science classes. It teaches basic foundations of accessibility that are relevant to major areas of computer science teaching, and then presents teaching methods for integrating those topics into course designs. Our hope is that computer science teachers will be able to read the first few introductory chapters, and the chapters relevant to their teaching, and use their learning to teach accessible computing in their classes. This book is a living document! If you’d like to be notified of future updates, or if you’re interested in contributing a chapter in your area of expertise, please let us know through the [Teaching Accessible Computing book Interest Form|https://forms.gle/a7KDmxnoyvi5ueUu9]. If you have suggestions for improvement, send them to our lead editor, [Alannah Oleson|https://alannaholeson.com/]. Many people contributed time, effort, and expertise to this book beyond just the authors and editors, including those listed in the [Acknowledgements|Acks] chapter.

edited by Alannah Oleson, Amy J. Ko, Richard Ladner

https://themarkup.org/coronavirus/2020/04/21/blind-users-struggle-with-state-coronavirus-websites

Audio graphs | Apple Developer Documentation

Define an accessible representation of your chart for VoiceOver to generate an audio graph.

Apple Developer Documentation

Videos | AccessComputing

AccessComputing