Universal Design

Conference organizers can take a number of steps to ensure that their meetings are more accessible to participants with disabilities. Considerations may include:

The Promoting Equity in Engineering Relationships (PEERs) project at the University of Washington (UW) aimed to improve the experiences of underrepresented undergraduates in the College of Engineering. PEERs integrated NSF-funded efforts to engage a cadre of students, professors, and staff to create positive change toward a more inclusive environment in the College of Engineering, particularly for women, racial/ethnic minorities, and individuals with disabilities.

All major document publishing formats support alternate text for images, often abbreviated "alt text". The purpose of alt text is to provide a text equivalent of the image, so people who are unable to see the image have access to the message it’s intended to convey.

Many videos on campuses are captioned only as an accommodation for a person who is deaf or hard of hearing, even though they benefit many others, including English language learners, those with reading-related disabilities, and individuals who simply want to see the spelling of words spoken in the presentation. The University of Washington’s UW-IT Free Captioning Project was developed as an effort to promote proactive captioning of videos on campus.

How do student designers regard disability? How does designing for both users who are disabled and non-disabled encourage students to think about accessibility throughout the design process? These are the questions researchers at the University of Washington (UW) investigated via a design course study.

One way to integrate information about accessibility in the computing curriculum is to teach a capstone course focused on the topic, as is done at the University of Washington (UW). The UW Accessibility Capstone Course provides students with

Yes. For example, there is a community of individuals who are blind and use the Arduino platform to build hardware devices.  Arduino allows users to build digital devices that can sense and control objects in the physical world.

As part of a design project in a sophomore Industrial Design studio class at the Georgia Institute of Technology, students completed a project on assistive design. The objective of the project was to apply user-centered design strategies to design a product to meet a specific need for a user with a disability. Each student was required to identify potential barriers in a given scenario and then to design and fabricate a working product prototype to address the barrier.

The 2016 Engineering Experience for High School Students with Visual Impairments or Blindness at North Carolina State University (NCSU) aimed to prepare students with visual impairments or blindness for college by engaging them in engineering activities, identifying assistive technology that may help them navigate college life, and introducing them to mentors.