Skip to main content

Competencies

This course is designed to meet the ABET requirements. Three of them are assessed outside of competencies:

Competency Individual Assignments Group Assignments
Accessible Implementation Peer Accessibility Audit Final Project Report
Inclusive Person Centered Design Project Prep Design Proposal; Design Spec
Accessible Communication Client Engagement Spec; Design Proposal; Design Spec; Final Project Report
Design/Disability Justice Client Engagement Summary; Design Proposal; Design Spec
Inclusive Experiments Client Engagement Spec; Lo Fi Spec

Competency Definitions

Accessible Implementation

This competency meets the ABET requirement that you demonstrate

An ability to identify, formulate, and solve complex engineering problems by applying principles of engineering, science, and mathematics

In our course, this means you can apply standards for accessible design (WCAG 2.1 AA) in your prototypes

Inclusive, person centered design

This competency meets the ABET requirement that you demonstrate

An ability to recognize ethical and professional responsibilities in engineering situations and make informed judgments, which must consider the impact of engineering solutions in global, economic, environmental, and societal contexts

In our course, this means you can demonstrate your ability to base design decisions on first person perspectives. This includes understanding the stakeholders; learning from them; and designing for them.

Assessment rubric:

  • Excellent: Account illustrates user needs in their own words and is highly detailed and informative. Includes perspectives that reflect a range of identities
  • Competent: Account illustrates user needs in their own words
  • Below competent: Account is not from a person with a disability or does not discuss needs

Accessible Communication

This competency meets the ABET requirement that you demonstrate

An ability to communicate effectively with a range of audiences

In our course, this means that you know how to ensure that documents, posters and presentations you create are accessible to everyone in your intended audience, including people with disabilities.

Best practices for documents include

  • Avoid visual clutter (e.g. use San serif fonts (for digital viewing), don’t have too many things on the page)
  • Use headers appropriately. Headers should be nested like they are in HTML (e.g., H2 after and H1). For example, in Microsoft Word these are built-in “styles” and in Google Docs you can see these under “Format -> Paragraph Styles.”
  • Use proper color contrast.
  • Write alt text for all non-decorative photos, diagrams and videos.
  • Use meaningful hyperlink text (e.g., “check out my web page” instead of “click here”)
  • Properly mark up tables
  • Screen reader order is correct (in documents where it applies, such as PowerPoint)
  • Slides have room for captions
  • Videos on slides are captioned
  • Document/slide is not overly cluttered
  • Font sizes are large enough (above 20 ideally for slides; above 11 for documents)

Best practices for presenting include:

  • Introduce and describe yourself
  • Speak slowly and clearly
  • Read entire quotes
  • Verbally describe images and videos so that someone who cannot see the screen can understand them
  • Repeat questions for clarity and member checking (even if on zoom)
  • Slides are available to audience at least 24 hrs ahead of presentation
  • Presentation finishes on time
  • Presentation does not use ableist language
  • Face the audience
  • Use understandable terms: Avoid slang, colloquialisms. Understand your audience

Assessment rubric:

  • Excellent: Follows almost all (relevant) guidelines / Violates no guidelines
  • Competent: Follows most (relevant) guidelines / Violates only a few guidelines
  • Below Competent: Follows only a few guidelines / Violates guidelines

Design/Disability Justice Principles

This competency meets the ABET requirement that you demonstrate

An ability to apply engineering design to produce solutions that meet specified needs with consideration of public health, safety, and welfare, as well as global, cultural, social, environmental, and economic factors

In our course, this means that you know how to enact positive disability principals in your design. These include learning and applying principals such as non-ableist language and ideas such as emphasizing agency and control and avoiding disability dongles. You should be able to summarize and critique accessibility projects, including your own, on the following concerns:

  • Is it being used to give control and improve agency to the intended clients?
  • How might this project perpetuate harm against those with marginalized racial or disability identities?
  • Is it prioritizing the design’s impact on the client community over the intentions of the designer?
  • Is it engaging with all aspects of participants’ identities, rather than oversimplifying by erasing part of who they are?
  • Is it addressing the whole community (intersectionality, multiple disabled people, multiply disabled people)
  • How might this project balance what you gain by learning from clients by giving knowledge, tools, or other results back to the client community?
  • Does this project honor and uplift existing client community knowledge and practices?

Assessment rubric:

  • Excellent: You describe and/or critiques all concepts accurately
  • Competent: You describe and/or critiques most concepts accurately.
  • Non Competent: You don’t accurately connect the research to disability-related concepts

Inclusive Experiments

This competency meets the ABET requirement that you demonstrate

An ability to develop and conduct appropriate experimentation, analyze and interpret data, and use engineering judgment to draw conclusions

In our course, this means you appropriately consider the following in your experimental design and analysis

  • Accessibility
  • Ethical and/or intersectional identity related issues relevant to your project
  • Concerns regarding power dynamics, safety, ableism, racism, or anything else that might affect inclusive participation or engagement with your project

Assessment rubric:

  • Excellent: The experiment is designed to consider issues of access across time, space, materials and communication; power dynamics. Further, the experiment directly addresses questions that relate to client identities
  • Competent: The experiment does not have obvious access or inclusion flaws and addresses some aspects of client identity
  • Below competent: The experiment is not inclusive or engage at all with client identity