A student project’s README explains how to run it. Its accessibility statement should explain who can use it—and where barriers remain.
GitHub’s November 5 announcement gives ACCESSIBILITY.md files a more visible place in repositories, helping maintainers document supported environments, known limitations, and ways to report problems. That suggests a useful addition to project-based programming assignments.
That suggests a useful addition to project-based programming assignments. Drawing on my teaching and application-development background, I would ask students to submit a short accessibility statement alongside their working application. For a simple data dashboard, that could mean checking whether someone can navigate the controls with a keyboard, understand a chart without relying only on color, and identify which input caused an error. Students would document what they tested, what remains unresolved, and how a user could report a barrier. The statement would give them a concrete reason to examine assumptions about how people interact with their software. It would also make those assumptions available to reviewers and future contributors. For the next programming project, I would make that document part of the handoff and assess whether its claims match the application’s behavior.
#SoftwareDevelopment #Accessibility #Teaching