A Case for Improving the Accessibility of Electrical and Computer Engineering Education -- Starting with a Blind Student's Autoethnography
Trisha Kulkarni, Gene S-H Kim, Aya Mouallem · 2023 · ASSETS 2023: The 25th International ACM SIGACCESS Conference on Computers and Accessibility · doi:10.1145/3597638.3614551
Summary
This short paper presents an autoethnographic account of Trisha Kulkarni, the first blind student to complete the introductory electrical and computer engineering (ECE) and making course (E40M) at Stanford University. The course is a required eight-to-ten-week course for undergraduate engineering majors covering circuits, signals, and systems through a maker approach where students design, build, and debug real devices ranging from solar-powered chargers to electrocardiogram wave generators. Kulkarni, who lost her vision completely in her early teens and primarily uses JAWS and NVDA screen readers, documented her experience retrospectively over six months through journal entries and reflection sessions totaling 7,239 words across seven entries and ten reflection sessions. The data was analyzed using grounded theory with open, axial, and selective coding. The research team included Kulkarni as co-researcher, Kim (a JAWS screen reader user who lost his vision progressively and became fully blind in early high school), and Mouallem (a sighted PhD candidate in electrical engineering designing accessible ECE tools). Prior to the course, Kulkarni met with instructors, the disability services officer, and a visual descriptionist to establish accommodations. During the quarter, she had biweekly meetings with instructors, regular sessions with the descriptionist during and outside labs, and worked with a sighted lab partner.
Key findings
Three main areas of inequitable challenges were identified. First, in conceptual learning and tooling, Kulkarni found circuit schematics extremely difficult to retain as mental models from verbal descriptions alone, especially for circuits with tens or hundreds of components. While small tactile card sets representing electronic symbols helped with simple circuits, they were insufficient for larger ones. She could not use the CAD-based circuit simulator that sighted students used for verification, and had limited exposure to soldering because the visual calibration required for safety excluded her. Second, in translating theory to practice, the gap between schematic symbols and physical components was a major barrier — a tactile schematic of a switch felt completely different from the physical switch, and transistor terminals were not physically labeled. Kulkarni felt the lab inaccessibility "redefined my entire course experience into just another theoretical course." Third, regarding learning methods, Kulkarni found talking through concepts with others to be her most effective approach, followed by finger-tracing of schematics on her hand or a surface. The flipped classroom format was beneficial as she could review recorded lectures and explore tactile diagrams at her own pace. The paper proposes ten design criteria for accessible ECE tools: multimodal representations, learner agency, fail-safe error recovery, support for complex circuits through sub-circuit abstraction, mental model retention, transferable learnings from adjacent fields, accessible labels (e.g., Braille on components), time efficiency, modularity for modification, and grounding in BLV lived experiences.
Relevance
This paper makes an important contribution by documenting the first-person experience of a blind student in introductory ECE, a field with almost no accessibility research despite its foundational role in STEM education and making. The ten design criteria provide actionable guidance for tool designers, educators, and disability services offices working to make engineering education more inclusive. The finding that the lab component's inaccessibility effectively reduced an entire engineering course to a theoretical exercise for a blind student illustrates how physical making activities can become gatekeepers to STEM participation. For accessibility practitioners, the paper highlights that existing accessible approaches like netlisting (textual circuit descriptions) are insufficient for introductory students and that tactile schematics, while valuable, cannot scale to the hundreds of circuits covered in a single course. The autoethnographic method itself is valuable as a model for centering disabled students' voices in educational accessibility research. The work is the first phase of a larger project that will include broader BLV community surveys and development of new accessible ECE tools.
Tags: STEM accessibility · electrical engineering · blind and low vision · autoethnography · higher education · maker education · circuit design · inclusive education · design criteria
Standards referenced: WCAG