A Gamification-Based Tool to Promote Accessible Design

The human population with disability is rapidly expanding, more than 15% of people worldwide suffer from a disability and, despite the availability of accessibility guidelines, the websites are still inaccessible. Moreover, professionals with knowledge of accessibility and design abilities are hard to come by. Therefore, the current paper addresses the introduction of accessibility to the Software Engineering students through AccessCademy, a gamification-based tool, in a fun way. The activity is delivered via a Web-based learning environment, that presents bad accessibility scenarios or failures based on the Web Content Accessibility Guidelines (WCAG), and then encourages the students to solve them. Furthermore, a case study will be presented that evaluated the learning effectiveness of the tool in the context of a university course. The results demonstrated the potential of AccessCademy which offers students a fun and engaging way to learn about accessibility, to understand the importance of accessible design with WCAG and gain accessible design skills as well.