FodnessMemo19

I will break my field sites into three categories instead of three specific sites:

1) Educational institutions

RPI for sure, and most likey two out of the basket of MIT, RIT, Carnegie Mellon, and Virginia Tech. I will contact the computer science and IT departments at these institutions to determine which would be willing to work with me. If possible, I would like to pick one that does accessibility education well, and one that does accessibility education poorly. I would like to stick to schools that are particularly tech-centric, since they are the institutions that produce many of the movers and shakers in the IT world, and are thus more influential than liberal arts schools.

2) Software companies

I would like to set up interviews with employees at two or three software companies that make websites or software that will be used by individuals with disabilities to get a sense of what their educational background has been and what their corporate policies are regarding designing for accessibility. I would also like to set up interviews with companies that design software that designs software, such as Adobe. Dreamweaver writes HTML code, and I want to know what the feeling is amongst the management and Dreamweaver engineers about coding their software to enforce accessibility standards in the HTML code that it produces. I would also like to set up an interview with Google about automatic subtitling of YouTube videos based on voice recognition instead of leaving subtitling up to the user that uploads the video (since almost no one will do this).

3) Individuals with Disabilities

I would like to set up interviews with a number of individuals with disabilities to ask them about how they use IT, what works well, what doesn't work well, and how cyberspace is constructed for the disabled. I will interview individuals with different disabilities, to get a sense of what it is like to browse the web or interact with software when you are blind, or deaf, or colorblind, or don't have the use of your arms, etc. For example, what is it like to browse the web controlling the mouse using a stick in your mouth, or by using voice commands? I would like to examine forms of disability in an IT context that people haven't thought about before (most people, I think, only think of blindness).