No Average User: Covering Accessibility and Inclusion in an HCI Course

Human-computer interaction (HCI) courses can be taught in many different ways. The course at our institution is an advanced Computer Science option, and therefore is required to have a significant programming component. While the focus is on design and various modes of interaction, students are encouraged to try out various interaction devices and use them in their half-semester long final project. One of the main tenets of an HCI course is that the programmer is not the average user. However, most textbooks fail to discuss categories of users that are generally underrepresented in computing. In recent offerings of our course, we added a module that covers users with diverse abilities, genders, and races. Since we are not experts in this area, our goal was to raise students' awareness through guest lectures, to encourage them to explore further through directed readings and conversations, and to get them to practice by requiring an accessibility component in their final project. The students were very receptive and their knowledge of these topics improved significantly.