Interesting article about a professor, Brian Rosmaita of Hamilton College in New York. Rosmita has presented a paper, “Accessibility First! A New Approach to Web Design” at the Association for Computing Machinery SIGCSE 2006 Technical Symposium on Computer Science Education, held in Houston. He is asking that accessibility be added earlier into Computer Science curriculum.
Rosmita is advocating teaching accessibility before teaching typical web design classes. Currently, students learn to build web pages and then add accessibility later. This change of philosophy places the emphasis on learning accessibility prior to learning thecoding and programming of a site.
I can’t agree enough about this approach. It has long been my criticism of high-school and university curriculum, that they teach WSYWIG programming, but not true coding. Even if they do approach actual code, standards and accessibility are mere mentions. As a result, they turn out thousands of students that can use FrontPage and DreamWeaver, but few who can hand-code a style sheet or adjust a site for IE/FireFox compatibility. Teaching Accessibility may actually turn a standard web page-building class into a creative workshop of ideas.
I couldn’t agree more with some of the points made; most books or courses relating to web design hardly ever touch upon the subject of accessibility or just mention it in passing.
Comment by Robert Wellock — March 20, 2006 @ 6:31 am
[…] As reported on Accessify and Matt Bailey’s accessibility blog, news reaches us of a novel way of teaching web design, that being with accessibility very much at the forefront, rather than the bolt-on affair that it often is in web design. […]
Pingback by Accessibility First - A Novel Teaching Method - The Web Standards Project — March 23, 2006 @ 7:37 am