Our interest in this project began in the classroom, specifically with an attempt by one of the authors, a naïve attempt at best, to explain to students in a professional writing course basic concepts regarding usability and accessibility, especially as these concepts apply to the development of screen-based texts. Why a naïve attempt? Instruction on design was largely influenced by either personal experience (in this case, experiences of a screen user/reader without physical disabilities) or by references in class to course texts, texts that are quite familiar to teachers and students in professional and/or technical writing classes around the United States, that frequently fail to address issues of design, usability, and accessibility for the visually impaired. (The inability or complete failure of these texts to address successfully issues of access and design for users with disabilities is discussed in the “Accommodating through Design” section found later in this web text.)
As teaching continues to be a learning process, this author quickly came to realize that he was quite ill-prepared to teach students about usability and accessibility when it came to users with special needs. Instruction on design was taking place, but it was taking place in metaphorical darkness. Missing from instruction, from classroom readings and discussions, were the 600 million people worldwide (54 million in the United States and 37 million in Europe), those who use the same Web as their neighbor but those for whom usability and access carry particular challenges. I was teaching design, but I was not teaching good design – i.e., design that accounts for the multiple and diverse needs of screen users, design that facilitates or promotes access, and design that transcends mere compliance with Section 508 standards or the 1998-amended Rehabilitation Act of 1973. Indeed, John Slatin and Sharron Rush have suggested in Maximum Accessibility that good design moves beyond compliance. Good design is about access. “Web sites are accessible,” they write, “when individuals with disabilities can access and use them as effectively as people who don’t have disabilities” (3).
Identifying this instructional shortfall brought these authors together, one who regularly teaches professional and technical writing and the other who specializes as a senior instructional developer with teaching experience and advanced degrees in occupational therapy. What we attempt in what follows, then, is not to provide groundbreaking scholarship on usability or design; rather our hope is to bring into conversations surrounding usability and design a better defined notion of access, one that crosses disciplinary lines and one that includes those millions of screen users who use assistive technologies such as screen readers, talking browsers, Braille display, and voice recognition technologies to increase access. In doing so, our focus will be on assistive technologies that enhance experience specifically for blind or low-vision users. As a part of this focus, we reinforce two primary concerns for all teachers and students of professional and/or technical writing: audience and purpose. That said, we shall work toward some general conclusions on matters of teaching and the importance of working toward more informed approaches to teaching design in the classroom.