CRII: HCC: Cross-Team Collaboration to Create Accessible Software for People with Disabilities

软件现在几乎影响着日常生活的方方面面。因此，软件中的无障碍问题可能会对残疾人获得银行、教育、通信和旅行等基本服务造成障碍。该项目有助于提高软件的可访问性;通过推动科学进步，促进国家福利，支持教育和多样性来造福社会。社会正义和法律的要求使软件对残疾人无障碍。然而，大规模的分析、诉讼和倡导组织表明，可访问性故障经常发生。这些故障包括低对比度的颜色，网站上的按钮太小，以及辅助技术无法使用的软件。软件创建是多个角色之间的协作过程，例如可访问性专家、设计师、开发人员和测试人员。这一过程涉及社会和技术因素，有一系列机会使无障碍环境得以整合或丧失。通过研究软件创建团队，本研究将识别整个软件创建过程中当前的可访问性实践。由此产生的见解将突出最佳做法，并为改进协作工具和组织结构提供指导。这些见解将通过论文，演讲和其他教育媒体与研究和行业社区分享。该项目将有助于改进协作软件创建工具、教育和公司实践，以提高软件的可访问性，从而有助于确保每个人都能公平地获得越来越多地通过软件提供的服务。该项目将通过三个主要步骤实现这些目标。首先，研究团队将采访跨软件创建角色的人员，以从多个角度了解当前的协作和可访问性技术。接下来，研究人员将观察多角色团队在软件项目生命周期的各个阶段在工作场所进行协作。研究人员将对收集到的数据进行归纳专题分析;通过转录本、现场笔记和人工制品（例如，电子邮件、白色板、设计）来识别主题。在最后阶段，研究人员将与跨软件创建角色的人员一起运行焦点小组，以收集对已确定主题的反馈，并将这些主题扩展为改进协作工具和组织结构的可操作影响。研究结果将通过学术出版物、以行业为重点的文件和演示以及公开的教育材料传播给多个受众。该奖项反映了NSF的法定使命，并被认为值得通过使用基金会的知识价值和更广泛的影响审查标准进行评估来支持。

Software now impacts nearly every aspect of daily life. Accessibility failures in software can therefore create barriers to essential services such as banking, education, communication, and travel for people with disabilities. This project contributes to improving software accessibility; work that benefits society by progressing science, advancing national welfare, and supporting education and diversity. Social justice and legal imperatives mandate that software be accessible for people with disabilities. However, large-scale analyses, lawsuits, and advocacy organizations show that accessibility failures occur frequently. Such failures include low contrast colors, buttons on websites that are too small, and software being unusable with assistive technology. Software creation is a collaborative process between multiple roles such as accessibility specialists, designers, developers, and testers. The process involves social and technical factors with a range of opportunities for accessibility to be integrated or lost. By studying software creation teams, this research will identify current accessibility practices throughout the software creation process. The resulting insights will highlight best practices and offer guidance for improving collaborative tools and organizational structures. These insights will be shared with the research and industry community through papers, presentations, and other educational media. This project will help improve collaborative software creation tools, education, and company practices to improve software accessibility, thereby helping ensure everyone has equitable access to services that are increasingly mediated through software. This project will reach those goals through three main steps. First, the research team will interview people across software creation roles to understand current collaboration and accessibility techniques from multiple perspectives. Next, researchers will observe multi-role teams collaborating in the workplace during various points in a software project's lifecycle. Researchers will perform inductive thematic analysis on the collected data; iteratively working through transcripts, field notes, and artifacts (e.g., emails, white boarding, designs) to identify themes. In the final phase, researchers will run focus groups with people across software creation roles to gather feedback on identified themes and extend those themes into actionable implications for improving collaborative tools and organizational structures. Results will be disseminated to multiple audiences through academic publications, industry-focused documentations and presentations, and publicly available educational material.This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.