Integrating Accessibility in a Mobile App Development Course

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Jaskaran Singh Bhatia

BITS Pilani, KK Birla Goa Campus

Goa, India

Parthasarathy P D

BITS Pilani, KK Birla Goa Campus

Goa, India

Snigdha Tiwari

BITS Pilani, KK Birla Goa Campus

Goa, India

Dhruv Nagpal

BITS Pilani, KK Birla Goa Campus

Goa, India

Swaroop Joshi

swaroopj@goa.bits-pilani.ac.in

BITS Pilani, KK Birla Goa Campus

Goa, India

ABSTRACT

The growing interest in accessible software reects in computing

educators’ and education researchers’ eorts to include accessibil-

ity in core computing education. We integrated accessibility in a

junior/senior-level Android app development course at a large pri-

vate university in India. The course introduced three accessibility-

related topics using various interventions: Accessibility Awareness

(a guest lecture by a legal expert), Technical Knowledge (lectures on

Android accessibility guidelines and testing practices and graded

components for implementing accessibility in programming assign-

ments), and Empathy (an activity that required students to blindfold

themselves and interact with their phones using a screen-reader).

We evaluated their impact on student learning using three instru-

ments: (A) A pre/post-course questionnaire, (B) Reective questions

on each of the four programming assignments, and (C) Midterm

and Final exam questions. Our ndings demonstrate that: (A) sig-

nicantly more (

𝑝<.05

) students considered disabilities when

designing an app after taking this course, (B) many students devel-

oped empathy towards the challenges persons with disabilities face

while using inaccessible apps, and (C) all students could correctly

identify at least one accessibility issue in the user interface of a

real-world app given its screenshot and 90% of them could provide

a correct solution to x it.

CCS CONCEPTS

•Social and professional topics →Computing education

;

•

Human-centered computing →Accessibility.

KEYWORDS

accessibility, mobile app development, computing education, global

computing education

ACM Reference Format:

Jaskaran Singh Bhatia, Parthasarathy P D, Snigdha Tiwari, Dhruv Nagpal,

and Swaroop Joshi. 2023. Integrating Accessibility in a Mobile App Develop-

ment Course. In SIGCSE ’23: ACM Technical Symposium on Computer Science

Permission to make digital or hard copies of all or part of this work for personal or

classroom use is granted without fee provided that copies are not made or distributed

for prot or commercial advantage and that copies bear this notice and the full citation

on the rst page. Copyrights for components of this work owned by others than ACM

must be honored. Abstracting with credit is permitted. To copy otherwise, or republish,

to post on servers or to redistribute to lists, requires prior specic permission and/or a

fee. Request permissions from permissions@acm.org.

SIGCSE ’23, March 15–18, 2023, Toronto, Canada

ACM ISBN 978-1-4503-XXXX-X/18/06. . . $15.00

https://doi.org/10.1145/TBA

Education, March 15–85, 2023, Toronto, Canada. ACM, New York, NY, USA,

7pages. https://doi.org/10.1145/TBA

1 INTRODUCTION

Despite an increasing awareness in the software industry about

accessibility over the past few years, many mainstream software

products fall short of meeting accessibility criteria [

Software professionals point to a lack of relevant knowledge and

skills in computing education for this gap in implementing acces-

sibility [

]. According to the computing (CS) faculty, the main

barriers to teaching accessibility include the lack of clear learning

objectives about accessibility and their lack of knowledge about

accessibility [

]. Also, most instructors who teach accessibility

have a background in human-computer interaction (HCI) and re-

lated elds and teach these topics in specialized electives [

]. This

indicates that other instructors may nd it challenging to build their

expertise and incorporate accessibility topics in the “mainstream”

CS courses. Our work contributes to the literature that aims to

bridge this gap by developing relevant course material, resources,

and assignments that other instructors can readily integrate into

their courses without much prior knowledge about accessibility

and without diluting the “core” learning objectives.

We report on our experience integrating accessibility topics in

a mobile app development elective for junior/senior undergrad-

uate CS students. All resources, including slides, video lectures,

assignments, starter codes, and exam questions, are available on-

line at https://swaroopjoshi.in/project/sugamyata/. We describe the

course (Sec. 3), the instruments we used to evaluate the eects of

integrating these topics and our ndings (Sec. 4), and discuss the

results (Sec. 5) and directions for future work (Sec. 6) in the rest of

this paper.

2 RELATED WORK

Educators have reported on teaching accessibility in special topics

courses such as assistive technology [

] and universal access [

]

and developing specialized modules for graduate programs [

Some others have integrated accessibility topics in existing courses

such as web development [

], articial intelligence [

software engineering [

], HCI [

], and introduction

to programming (CS1/CS2) [

]. Such courses mainly focus

on teaching: (i) Accessibility awareness, (ii) Technical knowledge

like tools for accessibility testing, (iii) Empathy, and (iv) Potential

endeavours using various instructional methods such as in-class

activities, projects, lectures, assignments, videos, simulated dis-

abilities, interaction with people with disabilities, guest lectures,

arXiv:2210.06132v1 [cs.CY] 12 Oct 2022

SIGCSE ’23, March 15–18, 2023, Toronto, Canada Jaskaran Singh Bhatia, Parthasarathy P D, Snigdha Tiwari, Dhruv Nagpal, and Swaroop Joshi

and research [

]. Other instructor resources include materials by

the AccessComputing initiative [

], Accessibility guidelines like

WCAG 2.0 [

], Accessibility Learning Labs [

], the Mobile inclusive

learning kit [8], and games for accessibility awareness [12].

Our work diers from the existing literature in that, to our knowl-

edge, this is the rst report on a mobile app development course

with accessibility as an underlying theme [

], with multiple as-

signments and evaluative components assessing the accessibility

knowledge of students throughout the semester. Another contribu-

tion is the Inclusive Thinking Questionnaire, which can be used in

other contexts to assess whether the respondents consider various

inclusivity criteria when designing software.

3 THE COURSE

We report on the Fall 2021 oering of a junior/senior-level Mo-

bile App Development elective at a private university in India. This

course focuses on Android app development using Java. Most of the

students were CS majors with prior coursework in Object-oriented

programming, UML, and software engineering fundamentals. One

of the stated learning objectives was “Understand the importance

of developing accessible software and demonstrate integrating ac-

cessibility components in Android apps.” The course was conducted

online due to the COVID-19 pandemic via the Google Meet platform.

The class was taught in a “ipped” mode: pre-recorded video lec-

tures were made available to the students before the class, and the

class meeting hours were used for several in-class active-learning

activities. It covered the basics of mobile app development and

various Android-specic topics such as activity lifecycle, fragments,

navigation components, services, background tasks, data persis-

tence, permissions, and sensors. It also introduced cross-platform

development using Flutter towards the end. The course had four

programming assignments worth 30% of the nal grades and two

exams worth 25% and 30%, respectively. The remaining 15% were for

in-class activities. One of the authors of this work was the instruc-

tor, and another author was an undergraduate teaching assistant of

the course.

3.1 Interventions

While the primary focus of the course was on software engineer-

ing concepts and Android features, we introduced the following

interventions to incorporate Accessibility Awareness, Accessibility

Knowledge, and Empathy towards persons with disabilities among

the students.

3.1.1 Guest Lectures. To raise awareness about the existing laws

about disabilities and expose students to the challenges persons

with disabilities may face in their day-to-day lives, a guest lecture

by a lawyer with expertise in the eld was organized. He talked

about the Rights of Persons with Disabilities (RPD), 2016 act of the

Indian Parliament [

], recounted his work on the relevant cases,

and shared his thoughts on how computing graduates can make

an impact in the eld of accessibility. He answered several student

questions at the end.

3.1.2 Classroom Lectures. Accessibility was introduced early on in

the course. In the third week of classes, after having introduced the

basics of Android app development and the fundamentals of testing,

the instructor talked about the statistics on disabilities and the need

for developing accessible software. Next, the instructor presented

the Android Accessibility Guidelines

and demonstrated Talk Back

and Accessibility Scanner, two softwares from the Android Acces-

sibility Suite to evaluate the accessibility features of an app under

development. The former is a screen reader developers can use to

check how their app feels to a visually impaired user, and the latter

is a tool that scans the UI of an app and produces reports on its

compliance with certain accessibility guidelines like the minimum

size of interactive widgets. Later, methods for running accessibility

checks via automated UI testing using the Espresso framework

were introduced.

3.1.3 Programming Assignments. Four programming assignments

spread across the semester assessed how well students implemented

various features of Android app development. In addition, we added

some accessibility-related tasks to assess students’ accessibility

knowledge (See Sec. 4.2).

3.2 Participants

The course instructor, who is also a co-author of this paper, ex-

plained the purpose of the research to the students and shared the

informed consent form approved by the institute’s Human Ethical

Committee (HEC) with them. 50 out of the 72 enrolled students

consented to participate in the study. Data from these students

were anonymized and handed over to the researchers over secure

cloud storage for analysis. All participants were junior or senior

year undergraduate students aged 18 to 22. Forty-seven of them

were males, and three were females.

4 METHODS AND FINDINGS

We used the following three instruments to measure the impact

on Accessibility Awareness, Technical Skills, and Empathy of the

students:

An Inclusive Thinking Questionnaire at the start and end of

the course,

Reective questions on accessibility as part of the program-

ming assignments, and

CQuestions on accessibility in both the exams.

We discuss each in detail below.

4.1 Inclusive Thinking Questionnaire (A)

This instrument, adapted from Ludi’s voting kiosk scenario [

was used to understand the change in Accessibility Awareness of

the students due to exposure to the interventions in the course.

The questionnaire asked the participants to design a hypothetical

“COVID-19 vaccination verication” and posed three open-ended

questions about the design and testing of the app prototype. The

text of the questionnaire is as follows:

Let us consider a hypothetical scenario: After the suc-

cessful COVID-19 vaccination of most adults, the gov-

ernment has decided to relax all restrictions – no

lockdowns anymore! But, for almost everything that

1https://developer.android.com/guide/topics/ui/accessibility

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IntegratingAccessibilityinaMobileAppDevelopmentCourseJaskaranSinghBhatiaBITSPilani,KKBirlaGoaCampusGoa,IndiaParthasarathyPDBITSPilani,KKBirlaGoaCampusGoa,IndiaSnigdhaTiwariBITSPilani,KKBirlaGoaCampusGoa,IndiaDhruvNagpalBITSPilani,KKBirlaGoaCampusGoa,IndiaSwaroopJoshiswaroopj@goa.bits-pilani.ac.inBIT...

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