Abstract:

Background and objectives:
Accessibility is an essential competency for computer science students, particularly in Canada, where nearly 8 million people (27% of the population) live with a disability. While computing education research has examined accessibility integration, most work emphasizes curricula and instructors; comparatively fewer studies focus on computer science students’ attitudes and perceptions in core technical computer science courses. This study investigates how students in a second-year software design course perceive accessible software design and whether a targeted course intervention influences these perceptions.

Method:
We administered pre- and post-surveys to a cohort of 421 second-year software design students at a large public research institution in Canada. The intervention (“accessibility feature proposal”) embedded accessibility into a core software engineering context through:
(1) a guest lecture introducing Ability-Based Design (ABD) and accessible design principles and
(2) a course activity requiring students to produce a project outline that explicitly incorporated accessibility requirements and design decisions.
Surveys included Likert-scale items and open-ended questions assessing attitudes, interest, and self-efficacy. We analyzed Likert items using descriptive statistics, internal consistency (McDonald’s ω), and item-level Spearman correlations, and coded open-ended responses using thematic analysis with inter-rater reliability assessed via Cohen’s κ.

Results:
We analyzed 56 pre-survey responses and 60 post-survey responses (29 matched). Attitudes toward accessibility were high at baseline and remained stable (ceiling effect). Self-efficacy increased significantly post-intervention for designing accessible/assistive technology (M: 2.72 pre-survey to 3.28 post-survey, p=0.005) and using accessibility guidelines (e.g., WCAG) (M: 2.93 pre-survey to 3.45 post-survey, p=0.014). Correlation analysis showed a strong association between interest in learning how people with disabilities use technology and interest in accessibility-related careers (ρ≈0.76, p<.001). Qualitative responses emphasized professional responsibility for accessibility, though fewer students described integrating accessibility from the start of the design process.

Conclusions.
Embedding ABD and accessibility-oriented design work within a core software design course appears to strengthen students’ confidence without diminishing already-positive attitudes. These findings support the integration of accessibility as a first-class design constraint in core computing curricula and motivate future work using longitudinal and artifact-based evaluations.

Keywords:

Accessibility, computing education, software design, inclusive software design