CSAccess was formed in January 2022 to address issues of accessibility in computer science education and became a working group of CSTA in October 2022. Read more about the formation of CSAccess.

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Vision:

We believe that the vision of computer science for ALL learners means this basic literacy is a right that should be ensured for everyone, regardless of perceived ability. We believe that accessible instructional design should serve all learners to ensure a diversity of ideas and solutions.

Mission:

In order to make computing education more inclusive, we must hold our CS education community accountable to the intentional design of programs, tools, resources, and training to ensure safe and equitable access for people with diverse physical, visual, auditory, cognitive, and neurological abilities.

Action Steps:

  • Promote awareness that accessibility can affect anyone at any time and should be a priority in instructional design.
  • Work with companies to include accessibility as a priority in initial design and to increase accessibility of existing resources.
  • Promote safety and privacy of users with particular attention to students under 13.
  • Acknowledge companies and organizations who create universally accessible educational resources.
  • Foster collaboration with resource providers to share accessibility features and solutions to accessibility-related issues.
  • Celebrate and share best practices from educators who create modifications and adaptations to make materials accessible for all learners

Why?

There is widespread agreement about the importance of computer science education and the necessity of making computer science part of the K-12 curriculum. (Code.org  2022 State of CS Report) We believe that all students should have access to this increasingly important content discipline, including the more than 3 million children who have a disability. (U.S. Childhood Disability Rate Up in 2019 From 2008). 96.3% of the most popular websites (which includes commonly used computer science education web apps) had detectable WCAG 2 failures. These errors can prevent students who use assistive technology from accessing affected resources. (The WebAIM Million – The 2023 report on the accessibility of the top 1,000,000 home pages).

By taking the actions described above, our working group aims to ensure that all students can access high-quality computer science education.

Want to get involved? Please sign up here. Have questions? Contact us at csaccess@csta-hq.org.