Spotted via an entry on Matt Bailey’s blog: Brian Rosmaita, assistant professor of computer science at Hamilton College in New York, presented a paper, Accessibility First! A New Approach to Web Design at the Association for Computing Machinery SIGCSE 2006 Technical Symposium on Computer Science Education in Houston on 3 March 2006.
His paper proposes an “accessibility first” pedagogy for web design, developed at Hamilton, in which the course is organized around therequirement of implementing web pages accessible to visually impaired computer users, as opposed to the traditional method of teaching accessibility only after students havealready learned web design.
News item on Rosmaita’s paper on Hamilton College’s site. This ought to be of interest to the WaSP Education Task Force.
So says Ian
Very interesting - I had a conversation with someone who is currently working on a site redeisng that is aimed very much at people with visual impairments, and he was telling me that they are not going to design anything at all. Basically, they’re getting the site to work right in screen readers with no design ethic at all, and only add the presentational layer at the very end. I’m intrigued to know how it’ll lokk - but if if *also* looks the business, that would be fantastic!
Added March 20, 2006 at 9:02 am