Beyond HCI: The Need for Accessibility Across the CS Curriculum

Few instructors include accessibility in computing education curriculum despite its importance in the computing field. Prior work on accessibility and CS education vary on what accessibility knowledge is appropriate for future computing professionals and is covered mainly in Human-Computer Interaction (HCI) and web design courses. In practice, there is no comprehensive list of learning objectives to characterize Accessibility as a competency even though it is an increasingly desired skillset across computing broadly. Moreover, in the soon-to-be-released CS2023, the Accessibility Knowledge Unit is nested within HCI. This placement fails to highlight the role accessibility plays throughout the CS curriculum, nor does it provide sufficient structure to guide CS educators. Thus, these efforts may not be enough to prepare future tech professionals with adequate accessibility skills to meet growing industry demand. We argue that Accessibility should be its own Knowledge Area within the CS curriculum. We present a set of knowledge units with topics and illustrative learning objectives for an Accessibility Knowledge Area in Computing Education. These objectives were produced through synthesizing computing education and accessible computing literature and discussions among the authors, who are subject matter experts in both computing education and accessibility. In this position paper, we make the case that Accessibility should be incorporated into computer science across the curriculum beyond just HCI, and we demonstrate how the knowledge units spans the different facets of computing. In addition to highlighting the cross-curriculum importance of Accessibility, the presented Knowledge Area outline provides structure for future work in creating teaching resources and guiding curricular integration.