Supporting Industry in the Development of Design for All (DFA) Curriculum

1 Introduction

We will present in this paper recommendations regarding the creation of Design for All Curriculum. The results come mainly from workshops organized by Fraunhofer FIT under the scope of two EU-funded projects. Two workshops were part of the IDCnet project.^[1]IDCnet was a Thematic Network funded under the IST Thematic Priority of the 5^thFramework Programme from the European Commission. Another workshop was organized within the activities of the DfA@eInclusion project.^[2] DfA@eInclusion is a Coordination Action that aims to contribute towards the advancement of eInclusion in Europe through fostering design for all. It is funded under the IST Thematic Priority of the 6^th Framework Programme from the European Commission. The activities of IDCnet and DfA@eInclusion are aimed at supporting the objectives of eEurope and the European Design for All e-Accessibility Network (EDeAN ) in regard to the development of curriculum recommendations in the area of Design for All (DfA) in ICT.

The strategic goals of the workshops were to integrate information and identify core knowledge sets and skills in design for all for model curricula at universities and training modules for employees at industry. We situate our activities in the multidisciplinary area of design, especially design for, and supported by, information and communication technologies.

Why design for all in ICT?

There are many terms in this area used more or less as synonyms for the same topic: accessible design, barrier-free design, inclusive design, Universal Design, etc. We want to stress that we are using the term Design for All as a synonym for all of them.


Figure 1: Accessibility laws worldwide.

The drive to Design for All in ICT consists of many aspects:

• Legislation: worldwide laws regulating accessibility, see
  Figure 1.
• International Guidelines and recommendations, e.g.:
  - W3C/WAI – Web Content Accessibility Guideline 1. & 2.0 (WCAG)^[3]
  - W3C / WAI - Authoring Tool Accessibility Guidelines
  - (ATAG) ^{3
  -}  W3C / WAI - User Agent Accessibility Guidelines (UAAG)
  - Accessible Rich Internet Applications Suite (WAI-ARIA)
  - Evaluation and Report Language (EARL)
• Demographics & Market potential:
  - Ageing of the population and increasing portion of elderly worldwide.
  - Diversity of users and their needs, e.g., disabled persons; we refer to disabilities as a situative attribute and not as an attribute of a person.

• Technical requirements
  - New Interaction paradigms.
  - Rapid dynamic changes in technology.
  - Interconnected world.
  - Mobile devices became ubiquitous.
  - Different browsers.
  - Variety of Operating Systems.
  - Different display sizes.
  - Web 2.0/AJAX/XML/Semantic Web/…
  - Compliance issues: COPPA, SOX, etc. (see Figure 2)
  
  

Requirements on curriculum for Design for All in ICT

It is a known fact that a high percentage of European universities’ curricula do not reflect the needs of industry. Therefore, we tried to focus our work in a context that could identify first those needs, and then introduce recommendations dealing with Universal Access [5].

There are several technological landscapes in the area of ICT that can be affected by the incorporation of DFA:

• Accessibility guidelines and APIs
• Device independence
• User and device profiling
• Semantic Web and metadata
• Multi-modality
• Web 2.0 – AJAX
• Distributed Computing – Web Services
  technology
  
  

A number of big industry players are already working on DfA or accessibility, but they face a number of barriers. Software engineers are usually not taught about accessibility at the university, so they need to be retrained. For Web developers, the situation is even worse, because they have often no formal training.

The drive for DfA is usually top-down, not driven by the knowledge or training of the developer. Accessible products are developed by companies where senior management understands the value of accessibility. Similarly, large accessibility initiatives in the Open Source community are usually supported by big industry players (IBM, Sun).

Many companies have misconceptions about DfA, and think that it is only design for the elderly and disabled, or that it means ‘one size fits all’. Many also consider anything that costs more than the able-bodied version as an ‘undue burden’. Existing guidelines, for example the Web Content Accessibility Guidelines, are sometimes seen as too complex and too detailed. There have been surveys on what would be good incentives to incorporate accessibility: profits or increase in Web site traffic always come out on top, while legislation and policy are the least popular incentives.

Industry also wants closer ties with organisations that perform research on DfA, easier access to research results and exemplars of good design as sources of inspiration. They also would like more support from the outside. Companies who start out in this area want to know how to implement DfA in their organisation.

There are few sources on the ideal graduate profile for designers and engineers with regard to DfA, so it was necessary to extrapolate from recommendations from related fields (HCI and ergonomics). Some examples gathered from the HCI area state that:

• There is a greater need for HCI experts than for methods
  and tools.
• The industry prefers pragmatic knowledge and hands-on
  advice on guidelines to perfectionism.
• People should be trained to become sensitive to good and
  bad design.
• Learning on the job and using your skills and expertise
  in projects is one of the best ways of learning.
• Inviting guest lecturers from companies can increase
  credibility.
• There is a need for HCI education for people who end up
  in supervisory or decision making positions.
• There might be a greater need for soft skills than
  knowledge.
  
  

Taxonomy of Knowledge and Skills in DFA

In order to work towards curricula recommendations, it is also necessary to understand what constitutes the knowledge and skill sets that form the body of knowledge about DfA [3, 4]. Defining and understanding this body of knowledge or ‘discipline area’ forms a basic task of most curriculum studies [1]. It may be argued that DfA is more of a philosophy than a discipline in its own right. This argument is taken up and refuted in [2], and taxonomy of knowledge and skill sets that can be said to be distinct to DfA has been proposed:

• Design for All Awareness
• Why Design for All? Ethical, legal and commercial
  considerations
• Guidelines and Recommendations
• Interpersonal Skills for Teamwork
• Accessible interaction: input and output
• New paradigms of interaction
• User-centered design
  
  

Recommendations for Higher Education and Industry Training Courses

In the following we will show the main points, which resulted from discussions regarding the creation of training materials for employees in the industry. We have identified different roles of employees, e.g., software developer, designer, Human Resource Manager, etc. (see Table 1):

• Computer-based training packages for all identified
  role‘s should be created.
• Length for the awareness level should be about 30 minutes
  for every package.
• Approach of training packages could be like some popular
  online sites for training.
• Add functionalities that can be adapted to user needs;
  this approach will account for future technologies that will not have devices
  anymore but “interaction” with the user.
• Curriculum recommendations should consider future
  technology development.
• Action planning should be part of a training
  course/workshop, thus people go home with something concrete, i.e., what DfA
  means in their project.
• Training in interdisciplinary teams, not a single role
  (unless deep knowledge is conveyed, e.g., for programmers).
• To deliver information in text, graphic, video (accounts
  for hidden disabilities of the audience).
• Do panels in which you do not focus on disability but on
  activity/participation, i.e., have people talk in a panel and introduce
  themselves, like I am a programmer (activity) and doing such and such, this is
  my barrier ..., rather than saying I am hearing impaired.
• Stress user involvement of users in the development cycle
  during the training.
• I addition to the roles, we have identified many topics, e.g., User Interfaces (UI), Web Applications, etc., then we divided these different topics with related required knowledge levels.
  
  

This table is part of an ongoing work and it will evolve more in the next work rounds. Out of it we will be able to create / derive Checklists (Guidelines) from this table for the different roles or for one or more topics. The first column contains topics e.g. (G) UI , Web applications etc. For every topic there are three granulation levels of knowledge (see Table 1):

• Overview (O)(Fact)
• Middle (M)
• Detailed (D) (deep)
  
  

“X” in a cell means for the given topic and the according role the selected knowledge level is required, so training courses could be created appropriately.

Table 1: Overview – Training depth for employees in ICT topics

Conclusions

It is obvious that the impact of our recommendations still depends greatly on national and international policies, and to a greater extent, in the pressure received by the higher education institutions from industry to satisfy its demands for future designers and engineers.

When there is a sizeable body of recognizable DfA knowledge fuelled by lively research in the area, it will be easier for industry and policy makers to understand the importance of including DfA in their agenda. There are as well still many problems which need attention:

• Incompatible definitions and terms,
• Different and conflicting regulations,
• Inconsistent standards and contradictory guidelines,
  and
• Unnecessary certifications in the field of IT compliance
  especially of web resources and web applications.
  
  

References

1. ACM curricula work can be seen at: http://www.acm.org/education/curricula.html
2. Darzentas, J S, Darzentas, J (2003). Design for All Key
   Knowledge and Skill Sets for Information and Communication Products, Services
   and Systems. In: Stephanidis, C (ed), Universal Access in HCI, Inclusive Design
   in the Information Society (Volume 4, Proceedings of the 2nd International
   Conference on Universal Access in Human - Computer Interaction, 22--27 June,
   Crete, Greece), pp. 53—57. New Jersey: Lawrence Erlbaum
   Associates.
3. Darzentas, J S (ed) (2003). What constitutes DfA
   Knowledge? Identification of a range of work that contributes to DfA. IDCnet,
   IST-2001-38786, deliverable D3.1. Available at:http://www.idcnet.info/documents
4. Darzentas, J S (ed) (2003). Identifying Core Knowledge
   and Skill Sets for Model Curricula. IDCnet, IST-2001-38786, deliverable D3.2.
   Available at: http://www.idcnet.info/documents
5. Strobbe, C (ed) (2004). The Needs of Industry and Future
   Technologies Landscapes and the Resultant Requirements for the Graduate Profile.
   IDCnet, IST-2001-38786, deliverable D2.1. Available at:http://www.idcnet.info/documents