CUDE

Unfortunately, the designs of some informal learning conversations and other activities do not allow individuals who are deaf or hard of hearing to fully participate. There are several strategies your program can follow to avoid this situation. Begin by making sure your promotional materials and correspondence with potential participants explain how individuals can request accommodations, including a sign language interpreter and real-time captioning.

The Riverside Art Museum (RAM) created KickstART kits during the Covid-19 pandemic to provide natural science education through at-home art making. Each kit is designed to inspire young learners to explore the natural world, and each kit has five art lessons with specific themes students can choose from: Animals, Art Around the World, Oceans of Fun, Desert, and Winter.

Open Exhibits, originally funded by the National Science Foundation, seeks to transform the way in which museums and other informal learning institutions produce and share digital exhibits. Open Exhibits hosts accessible downloadable exhibits that utilize universal design principles in their development. Examples of downloadable exhibits include the following:

The SciAccess Initiative in conjunction with Ohio State University (OSU) and the Ohio State School for the Blind, launched the fully virtual Zenith Mentorship Program to engage blind and visually impaired 8th to 12th grade students in space and astronomy sciences.

The Center for Advancement of Informal Science Education (CAISE) works with the National Science Foundation’s Advancing Informal STEM Learning (AISL) program to “build and advance the informal STEM education field by providing infrastructure, resources, and connectivity for educators, researchers, evaluators, and other interested stakeholders.”

In a community of practice (CoP), a group often focused on a specific application area, collaborators share perspectives and expertise; identify promoters and inhibitors of change; suggest initiatives and activities; and share problems, solutions, and practices. CoPs within organizations can help prevent information across departments from being siloed. A CoP can also be used to disseminate new information, practices, or projects that might otherwise get overlooked.

Very few data sets that offer data about students in computer science (CS) education include information about students with disabilities. Indeed, very few organizations collect this data.

Recognizing the value of learning computer science (CS) for all students, many nationwide efforts are underway to ensure that all students in K-12 schools are introduced to computer science. Unfortunately, many of these efforts do not promote practices that are fully accessible and inclusive of students with disabilities. Three examples of inclusive efforts are listed below.

Throughout 2020, as conferences moved online in response to the global pandemic, many struggled with accessibility while others took proactive steps to make their conference more accessible. The 2020 Association of Computing Machinery International Computing Education Research Conference (ICER) is an example of one conference that chose to take proactive steps by captioning the sessions and providing clear guidelines to presenters about accessible presentations.

Alternative text, or “alt-text” is written descriptions of images that are embedded into website code and digital documents that can be read with screen readers by people with visual and other disabilities. An example of alt-text is “a small gray dog sitting on the grass in a park” that accompanies a photo of a dog.