2025 ASEE Annual Conference & Exposition

“Nothing About Us, Without Us”: Co-Designing an Accessible Engineering Education Tool with the Blind and Low Vision (BLV) Community

Presented at Design in Engineering Education Division (DEED) - Accessibility and Empathy in Engineering Education

This paper is submitted under the “Intersection of Design and “X” Research Papers” category.

Electronics-based education is essential to different fields of engineering education, including electrical, mechanical, and biomedical engineering, as it equips students with technical skill sets to design, build, and test functional hardware devices. However, electronics-based engineering education remains largely inaccessible to learners who are blind or have low-vision (BLV), given its reliance on primarily visual tasks – from spatially sketching electronic circuits to visually analyzing digital simulation results. There have been limited but promising community efforts exploring the design of pedagogical and technology-based learning resources to create inclusive pathways to electronics-based engineering education for BLV learners.

To further expand these efforts, our research team co-designed the first BLV-accessible educational electronic circuit simulator, in collaboration with our community partner [redacted], which supports the BLV community in the [redacted] region. Adopting the co-design method expanded the role of BLV participants to become active co-researchers with power to influence the research agenda and design directions. This work begins by reviewing the adopted co-design process, which spanned 2.5 years of iterative tool design, prototyping, and evaluation, where design principles from inclusive learning and design frameworks for an accessible tool design implementation, such as Universal Design for Learning (UDL) and ability-based design were adapted. We also discuss our data collection methods, in the form of surveys, observation notes, and reflection entries. We triangulate the perspectives and experiences of different stakeholders involved in this co-design process, including the BLV participants, the community partner, and the research team. After that, this work presents the findings resulting from the analysis of the collected data using the grounded theory building approach. The final stage of this work synthesizes the findings by proposing recommendations to support inclusive, community-based future efforts to co-design engineering education tools. Additionally, we present supplementary resources to support organizing and implementing these recommendations, and we discuss aligning the goals of co-design with liberatory design efforts.

Authors

Aya Mouallem http://orcid.org/0000-0001-9360-9971 Stanford University [biography]

Aya Mouallem (she/her) is a PhD candidate in Electrical Engineering at Stanford University. She received a BEng in Computer and Communications Engineering from the American University of Beirut. Aya is a graduate research assistant with the Designing Education Lab at Stanford, led by Professor Sheri Sheppard, and her research explores the accessibility of introductory electrical engineering education to learners with disabilities. She is supported by the Knight-Hennessy Scholarship, the RAISE Fellowship, and the DARE Doctoral Fellowship.
Trini Rogando Stanford University [biography]

Trini Rogando (she/her) is an undergraduate pursuing a B.S. Design in the Stanford University School of Engineering and Hasso Plattner Institute of Design. She is a research assistant in the Designing Education Lab at Stanford, with a focus on inclusive experiences.
Mr. Sean Patrick Dougherty M.S. LightHouse for the Blind and Visually Impaired [biography]

Sean Dougherty is currently leading the Social Enterprise team at LightHouse for the Blind and Visually Impaired, which includes mission-impact businesses such as Accessible User Experience (AUX), focused on usability testing of websites, apps & products along with supporting user research studies, and Media & Accessible Design (MAD) Lab, focused on printing & production of braille and tactile maps. Sean is a low vision user of assistive technology and is focused on developing partnerships with external organizations to support the BLV community through the LightHouse Social Enterprise businesses, including collaborations with large tech companies, startups, UX design agencies, and leading universities like Stanford, Berkeley, and Cornell to improve the accessibility/usability of current and future products/services. His previous work experience is in the Education Technology (EdTech) space, where he worked on the Google for Education team leading co-marketing partnerships with EdTech app developers who are building solutions for K-12 EDU & HigherEd classrooms, including accessibility-focused tools. He partnered with Google's Accessibility team to drive awareness for first-party tools and accessibility features and supported accessibility app/hardware partners. Sean received his undergraduate degree in History/Liberal Arts from the University of Michigan in 2012 and his master’s degree in Assistive Technology & Human Services (ATHS) from California State University - Northridge (CSUN) in 2023.
Mirelys Mendez Pons Stanford University [biography]

Mirelys Mendez Pons (she/her) is an undergraduate pursuing a B.S. in Product Design at the Stanford University School of Engineering and the Hasso Plattner Institute of Design, with a minor in Modern Languages and interdisciplinary honors in Education through the Graduate School of Education. She is a research assistant in the Designing Education Lab at Stanford, where her work focuses on accessibility in engineering education for blind and low-vision learners.
Dr. Sheri D. Sheppard http://orcid.org/0000-0003-3465-5542 Stanford University [biography]

Sheri D. Sheppard, Ph.D., P.E., is professor emerita of Mechanical Engineering at Stanford University. Besides teaching both undergraduate and graduate design and education related classes at Stanford University, she conducts research on engineering education.

Note

The full paper will be available to logged in and registered conference attendees once the conference starts on June 22, 2025, and to all visitors after the conference ends on June 25, 2025

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