Section 01
Spring 2006
2:30–3:20 p.m. M/W/F (Burke 005)
This course is a multidisciplinary exploration of the technology and social consequences of electronic computation and communication. Topics may include the history and technology of the Internet and the Worldwide Web, the techniques and design patterns used to make Web pages and possible future influences that the Internet will have in public policy, social structures, economics, law and ethics.
This section of the course will focus on web accessibility for visually impaired computer users. Students will learn web design with an emphasis on building and maintaining accessible websites, putting into practice what they've learned by implementing and maintaining their own website using open-source software. At the same time, we'll consider legal and moral obligations web designers and content providers have toward the visually disabled—to what extent these exist and the nature of their various justifications.
This class will contain a service learning component in which students will work in groups to apply what they've learned by conducting an accessibility audit of the website of a local nonprofit organization; part of this audit will consist of performing a partial redesign of the website to make it accessible.
No prior knowledge of web design or computer science is assumed.
My primary goal in this class is to turn you into competent designers and implementers of websites. I'm going to do this by taking an unorthodox approach to teaching web design: we're going to approach web design from the standpoint of visually impaired computer users—people who can't see what's on the monitor when they're surfing the web. This may seem very counterintuitive since browsing the web seems to be an inherently visually activity—after all, you have to see where the little buttons are so that you can click on them with your mouse! But we'll see (!) that the web is by no means an inherently visual medium—it just happens that most current web design stresses the visual mode of accessing content.
The World Wide Web Consortium's Web Accessibility Initiative has published a list of techniques for making web content accessible. In addition to studying these, we'll also be reading two texts that fall into the area of disability studies. From these, we'll try to get a sense of what it's like to interact with the world from the standpoint of a blind person. We'll also take a look at the federal and NY state laws that require government websites to be accessible, and discuss to what extent this should extend into the private sector.
Our work in this course will not be merely academic—you will apply what you're learning to real-world websites. We are partnering with some Utica-area nonprofit groups to do service learning. The services you'll supply will consist of conducting an accessiblity and general usability audit of these groups' websites; reconditioning these websites to make them accessible; and designing and implementing accessible websites for some groups that don't yet have websites. In addition to applying what you learn in class, you'll also have the opportunity to learn from interacting with professional web designers and working with production-quality websites.
Finally, we'll be using open-source software in this class. You'll get experience in using GNU/Linux and other free software for developing and deploying websites, making it easy for you to take what you learn in this class and apply it in the real world.
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Brian J. Rosmaita <contact me>