AccessSTEM

Companies benefit from having interns and employees with disabilities. These individuals enrich companies in ways that include the following.

There are a variety of strategies that companies can use to support employees with disabilities. Taking such actions may help to ensure that employees with disabilities have the same opportunities for advancement and professional development as all employees.  Some of these strategies may be similar to strategies used to support other underrepresented groups, such as women and racial/ethnic minorities. To support employees with disabilities companies can:

Many programs, institutions and departments have strategies that they use to recruit individuals from underrepresented groups such as women and racial/ethnic minorities.  Many of these strategies can be adapted for recruiting individuals with disabilities. For example:

Refer to a person's disability only if it is relevant to the conversation. Avoid negative descriptions of a person's disability. For example, "a person who uses a wheelchair" is more appropriate than "a person confined to a wheelchair," which is both inaccurate and negative in tone; people who use wheelchairs are not “confined” to them, they are empowered by them with the gift of mobility.

Many people with disabilities prefer language that mentions the person first and then the disability. They consider, for example "A man who is blind" preferable to "a blind man.”

Many challenges to increasing the participation of students with disabilities in computing have been reported by faculty, staff, students and other stakeholders.

Shiri Azenkot at Cornell Tech teaches a class on interaction techniques (e.g., text entry and scroll bars). When designing the course, she considered her constraints (time, curriculum requirements, and expectations) and how her course might compare to similar courses across institutions. Rather than including accessibility in the course with an “accessibility lecture,” where she covered everything about accessibility in one short lecture, Shiri chose to integrate disability throughout the course.

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.

Background

Professor Cowen teaches a capstone course in computing. Students are required to give oral presentations discussing their final designs. Professor Cowen is concerned that a student in her class, Amy, will have difficulty with delivering her presentation. Although Amy has not expressed concern about the presentation assignment, Professor Cowen is concerned because Amy is autistic and rarely joins classroom discussions.

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.