Accessibility First! A New Approach to Web Design
By Rosmaita, Brian J.; Proceedings of the 37th SIGCSE Technical Symposium on Computer Science Education -- 2006, Houston, Texas, USA, pp. 270-274Publication Date: March 1-5, 2006
Paper proposes a pedagogy for web design in which the course is organized around the requirement of implementing web pages accessible to visually impaired computer users. The outline of topics for this proposed entry-level course is: (1) Informal discussion of accessible web design; (2) Instruction on the authoring tools to be used, basic HTML, mounting a website on the server; (3) Readings from disability studies literature on blindness; (4) Instruction in XHTML and CSS; (5) Formal discussion of accessible web design and general usability principles; (6) Discussion of social aspects of computing via Section 508 of the Rehabilitation Act. The author concludes that placing the issue of creating web content accessible to visually-impaired computer users at the forefront of a course on web design stresses the importance of good web design as well as providing students with the motivation to implement it.
Published by: Association for Computing Machinery (Website:http://www.acm.org)
SIGCSE (ACM Special Interest Group on Computer Science Education) (Web Site: http://sigcse.org )
