Recent AccessComputing and AccessCSforAll Webinar Recordings

Over the past few months, AccessComputing and AccessCSforAll have held several webinars relevant to computing education and employment for individuals with disabilities. Recordings on these webinars are available in an accessible video-player with open captions on our Webinar page. Here are three of our most recent webinars:

Blocks4All

Lead by Lauren Milne (Macalester College) on Feb 11, 2020

Lauren Milne is an assistant professor at Macalester College. Her research is on making programming more accessible for children with visual impairments. She will be doing a demo of Blocks4All, an iPad application she developed, which can be used to program the Dash and Dot robots from Wonder Workshop, which is accessible with VoiceOver and Switch Control.

Inclusive Hiring

Lead by Neil Barnett (Microsoft) and Lorne Needle (Google) on Feb 07, 2020

You may have heard that many companies are stepping up their efforts to hire people with disabilities. In this webinar, we’ll hear from representatives at Microsoft and Google about what their companies are doing. Neil Barnett started Microsoft’s Autism hiring program in 2015 and is leading the efforts to improve the experiences for Microsoft employees and their customers with disabilities. Lorne Needle is Google’s global lead for disability inclusion in staffing and has led multiple talent initiatives.

Quorum Studio: Into Accessible Graphics

Lead by Andreas Stefik (University of Nevada Las Vegas) on Jan 14, 2020

The Quorum Programming Language is the first evidenced-oriented programming language that was “born accessible” more than ten years ago. New is Quorum Studio, an accessible integrated development environment (IDE) to support programmers in Quorum. Quorum Studio is built on the same design principles as the language itself, making it accessible to all users. In the first version, we have created a full development environment for editing, navigating, compiling, debugging, and executing applications, in addition to typical help features (e.g., highlighting, code completion, projects, updates) and accessibility features (e.g., smart zoom, smart navigation, a highly customized screen reading experience). Quorum Studio is also a platform for future accessible growth, with 3-D visual level editing, still fully accessible even if the user is blind, coming in the summer of 2020 in Quorum Studio 2.

We’re looking to hold more webinars over the coming months. If there is a topic you’d like to see DO-IT address in a webinar, please email us at doit@uw.edu.