Research demonstrates that we continue to be deficient in creating inclusive and equitable software, with a lack of empathy among software developers attributed to this issue, even if unintentional. Though increasing empathy has been shown to be part of the solution, unfortunately there is a lack of data that that can be analyzed that shows how empathybuilding and accessibility awareness interventions can be utilized in computing education, along with a shortage of free, public, and easily-adoptable educational material regarding empathy and the creation of accessible software.

Through large in-person studies that involve real-world participants, we are able to contribute to the knowledge regarding the potential benefits that can be used to improve computing education by implementing empathy-building strategies in the curriculum. Two forms of accessiblity awareness exercises are utilized to display the effectiveness of empathy-based learning and teach the importance of accessibility in computing, including an experiential- and expression-based interventions. In these interventions, we expect to find an increase in awareness and empathy in participants as well as an increase in participant interest in the topic of software inclusivity and accessibility by placing the participant in a situation they may encounter in the real world.

We additionally present a web-hosted, easily adoptable experiential and expression-based educational lab to support the inclusion of inclusive development and/or empathy-focused topics into a variety of curricula formats. Complete materials are available on the project website: https://all.rit.edu