One Year After The Accessibility Course In South East Asia

It was a year ago that I taught an accessibility course in South East Asia. Nine blind and visually impaired computer experts and teachers participated. We based the course on WCAG 2.0, which was not yet official at the time. Students who graduated the course has made a great progress towards promoting accessibility in the region. Here I will outline what happened in the last year after the course. If you are not familiar with the project, read the paper I have presented at the CSUN conference in March, 2009.

An amazing one hundred percent of the students have used their knowledge over the last year. New accessibility courses were implemented, and some of the new accessibility consultants had done great work with local government agencies and corporations.

Probably the most progress was made in Malaysia, which sent three participants, and the Malaysian Association for the Blind hosted the course. The course received lot's of media publicity. Over the last year, the accessibility consultant graduates were requested to help making government web sites accessible, and also assisted in a government competition to create the most accessible web site. In parallel, they taught several accessibility courses, or integrated accessibility into their curriculum.

Three more people participated from the Philippines, where they already had the advantage of existing accessibility standards. However, after the course they were able to introduce new ideas and techniques in their existing curriculums. In the other three countries, where we had participants from accessibility also received a great focus, and disability related organizations started engaging into promoting the accessibility of information technology.

However, probably the greatest achievement was that all participants were working hard to integrate accessibility into mainstream courses. Mostly, instead of teaching accessibility classes, they have integrated WCAG 2.0 into their regular web design courses, which were also attended by many people with disabilities.

As the next step, many of the materials are being localized, so that people who do not speak English would be able to participate equally.