How Do Computer Engineering Students Construe Usability and Accessibility? A Comparative Study between Turkey and Kyrgyzstan

This survey study evaluated the level of education, awareness and knowledge of prospective software developers in the areas of usability and accessibility by comparing the results obtained from computer engineering students from Kyrgyzstan and Turkey. There were a total of 311 student participants who were attending a computer engineering program in eight universities, four in Kyrgyzstan and four in Turkey. According to the results, these two countries with different education systems had significant differences in terms of the level of the education of the computer engineering students, their knowledge, awareness and attitude concerning usability and accessibility. Although the overall level of knowledge and awareness of the Turkish students was found to be higher than those of the Kyrgyz students, the computer engineering students in the selected Kyrgyz universities either had taken or were planning to take more courses on accessibility and had a higher level of awareness in terms of undertaking thesis and project work in this area. However, the results obtained from the participants from both countries demonstrated the need for the revision of course content to assist future software developers gain not only technical but also acquire soft skills in the topics of usability and accessibility