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by uniclaude 3298 days ago
Wait what? CS students learn color about color blindness now? I really wasn't in the good classes!
4 comments

I didn't learn anything graphics-related in my CS degree. Seems like more of a UX or software development topic than a CS topic.
I learned it in both my computer graphics course and my user-interaction design course as part of my CS degree (German university). None of these courses are required, but they are popular enough that the most important lessons were pretty universal knowledge among students.
I taught a ton of a11y stuff in my intro to web classes. Even did screen reader demos. I wasn't the only one. There are lots of folks teaching this stuff. Not a critical mass, but I'm so thankful it's happening. :)
I think it's a joke.
I learned that in my 1st year HCI module at University nearly 20 years ago. It shouldn't be a joke. It should be normal.
I actually learned that as a CS student.
If it was actually part of the curriculum I sure hope that it was in some design centered elective class. IMO if your CS degree spent time teaching that as part of the core curriculum, they missed an opportunity to put more Math, PL theory, and interesting algorithms in there, because there's more than can be sanely covered in any one curriculum.

Since it's accessibility based, it's more laudable than teaching CS students how to center a div, but it's not like it really requires a mentor of some sort to express the nuances of, right? Or even if it does, it's still design.

It's some years now, and there were at least two courses in which it could have been. The one was elected, HCI. The other was not, it was an introduction into graphics and audio, and since you need to understand basics of human perception to understand compression in that area (jpg, mp3), they talked about stuff like that.

A good CS degree definitely has the space to teach some basics in that area. To mention Gestaltgesetze, to explain human perception a bit, and give an introduction into usability. You do not get a useful developer in the end otherwise

> You do not get a useful developer in the end otherwise

Not all developers do stuff with UI, and of those that do not all do anything with a UI that is actually graphical beyond a terminal.

> since you need to understand basics of human perception to understand compression in that area (jpg, mp3), they talked about stuff like that.

That is a good reason to teach it, and counters my overly assertive original comment.