Abstract:

This article describes ways in which accessibility is brought to the attention of electrical and automation engineering students at Häme University of Applied Sciences and how they are taught to take accessibility into account. Accessibility is regulated by the European Union's Accessibility Directive, which requires public sector organizations to make their digital services accessible. However, from summer 2025 onwards, the requirements also extended to private sector organizations that provide digital services to consumers. Accessibility means that products, services, and information are available to all people, regardless of their characteristics or functional limitations. This means, for example, designing documents, websites, and applications in such a way that they can also be used by people with visual, hearing, or cognitive challenges. Accessible services and products reach a larger group of people, so in addition to the human perspective, considering accessibility also makes good business sense. Accessibility skills are also important for engineering students. Accessibility perspectives are introduced in teaching right at the beginning of the first year of study in technical communication, and skills are deepened by the time students reach the thesis stage. The key methods are teaching a document template that guides accessibility, accessibility in project work reporting, accessibility in preparatory work for the thesis, accessible documents online course completion and certification, and consideration of accessibility in thesis reports. With this method, accessibility skills have become an established part of electrical and automation engineering education, and graduates have a basic understanding of the accessibility of digitally published documents in accordance with the Accessibility Directive. In the future, this perspective should be broadened to cover online services more extensively. The development work is based on the university's strong commitment to accessibility, which lowers barriers to learning. This also requires teaching staff to undergo continuous and active training and to take accessibility into account when creating learning materials and in teaching in general.

Keywords:

Accessibility, barriers to learning, engineering education, pedagogy.