Broadening Participation in Computing

A term of art, promoted heavily by the U.S. National Science Foundation and professional societies such as ACM, referring to concerted efforts to increase the participation of groups that are historically underrepresented in computing — including women, people of color, people with disabilities, deaf and hard-of-hearing people, and first-generation college students. Broadening-participation work spans recruitment, retention, curriculum design, mentorship, and workplace-culture change, and is typically evaluated against demographic data on who studies and enters the field. For the accessibility community, broadening participation specifically means building pipelines (internships, REUs, tiered mentoring, accessible conferences) that bring disabled researchers and practitioners into computing as creators, not only as the users that accessibility research serves.