Web Accessibility – an eye-opener for service design students at Laurea University

On the 27th of May, Laurea University in Helsinki organized a half-day seminar on the topic Web Accessibility in Higher Education. 45 participants; students, university representatives and professional accessibility experts gathered together to learn more about accessibility and its importance.

The day offered an interesting presentation of the current structure of the study programs at Laurea University and how they work with the implementation of web accessibility into their service design courses. The service design students presented how they learn about accessibility in practice by showing a video on how they include visually impaired persons in testing Laureas University’s website. The participants had also an opportunity to listen to Tero Personen from Annanpura, a social enterprise owned by the Association of Visually Impaired People, who gave important tips on how to include web accessibility in the curricula.

The seminar ended with a short workshop during which participants got to discuss in small groups how web accessibility could be included in different courses at Laurea University. It became very clear that the awareness around these questions need to increase and that accessibility courses are a real eye-opener.

IAAP Nordic together with its partners: Funka, Laurea University, Oslo Metropolitan University, Lund University and Technical University of Denmark are working together in this project which is financed by NordPlus. The project’s goal is to network and promote web accessibility education in the Nordic countries.

Some feedback from the participants:

“Thank you, it was great to see how accessibility is taken into account in studies and how students and companies co-operate in different projects!”

”Interesting to meet many people in Finland who are working in this field.Great discussions!”

”The programme was very good!”

The page was updated: December 13, 2023