Technology, Accessibility, and Design

Catalog description

This course equips students with an interdisciplinary set of tools to design, build, and critique technologies that mediate access to physical and digital worlds. We will use disability as a lens to examine the ways in which technology (e.g., assistive, medical, consumer) can both enhance and diminish access to economic, social, and informational resources. Students will examine the history of such technologies and analyze modern trends. Building from this perspective, students will learn about design processes and implementation strategies for maximizing the accessibility of the technologies they build. During the course, student teams will work with a community partner to design a technology to enhance accessibility (along some dimension) for a user group with a disability. Students will learn and employ user-centered approaches throughout the course.