Dr. Lazar comments on how university curricula need to be modified to include accessibility content.
A statue of the blindfolded lady justice in front of the United States Supreme Court building. GETTY
Jonathan Lazar, UMD INFO professor, and director of the Maryland Initiative for Digital Accessibility, was recently quoted in an article in Forbes Magazine. The article, titled, “Web Accessibility Laws Set to Enter New Era as DOJ Gears up for Spring Rulemaking” focuses on the upcoming regulatory rulemaking process, and Dr. Lazar is quoted describing how university curricula need to be modified to include accessibility content throughout an academic program, not just at the end. Waiting until the end of the academic program to teach accessibility sets up this idea that “you build technology and then you retrofit it for accessibility. We know from lots of research that that’s the wrong way to do it. That’s the more expensive way to do it. If you use a “born accessible” approach, accessibility costs are minimal.”
Read the full article by Gus Alexiou in Forbes, published March 24, 2023.