Programming for everyone, that is my motto these days. And when I say all kids, I mean all kids. It is easy to think of all kids, but forget about kids with disabilities. One group of kids for whom it is really hard to program is kids that are blind and visually impaired. And I am really really happy to be able to share that we are one step closer to that, because we got funding from the Dutch government to research programming for blind and visually impaired kids for 2 years!
Wow, how do people program at all if they are blind?
There are lots of blind programmers! A few amazing ones are Bram Duvigneau the first blind programmer I ever met, and Ameer Armaly, who has inspired me to work on this topic. The way they usually program is by using a screen reader, a program that reads natural language aloud. If you are curious, you can install one in your browser or for any os easily. Sadly these things are made to read natural language are not source code. That means they read some symbols, for example they would read def __init__(): as
def underscore underscore init underscore underscore open bracket close bracket colon
Even worse, they do not read some symbols, so
person.name is read as
person <pause> name
Because in regular text a period and the end of a sentence is read as a pause!
If you want to learn more about this, I recorded an SE Radio episode on programming for when you are visually impaired with Andreas Stepik who is designing am accessible programming language called Quorum.
These tools can usually be customized but you can imagine that is pretty hard if you are learning to program and have no clue what settings would work. (One of the reasons to work on a code phonology of course it is to make this type of customization superfluous)
Why should visually impaired kids learn to program?
Well firstly, all kids should learn to program 🙂 Two reasons for that apply to blind children especially: employment and expression. As you can imagine, it is hard to find a well paid job when you are blind or severely visually impaired. Traveling to a job with public transportation can already be tiring and cumbersome and lots os professional communication is visual. Therefor it is important especially for blind kids to understand programming as a career option, especially since working from home is also a very viable option in our field!
Secondly, there are lots of form of expression and entertainment that blind kids lack. Drawing is very hard, of course, and so are many forms of arts and crafts. Teaching blind kids to program could help them express themselves in new and exciting ways.
What are you going to do for 2 years?
If you are interested in all details, you can read the full proposal. The basic idea is that we will investigate existing tools and programming languages to see if they support the needs of blind and vi kids. We are specifically aiming at languages that are inclusive of visually impaired kids, not designed for them. We want all kids to be able to program together, in tools that everyone can use. If would be very sad and counterproductive if we created tools for just the blind kids in a class room, such that they would be different from their peers once more. So year 1 will result in a matrix where we rank existing products and their inclusiveness. In year 2 we will transform this matrix into guidelines that teachers can use to decide whether programming materials are accessible, and we will experiment with adapting existing tools to make them more inclusive. This all will be done in close collaboration with Visio and Bartemeus, the Dutch organizations for schools for the blind, and for support to regular schools with blind students.
Are you going to do all that?
No, of course not 🙂 Where i say ‘we’ I mean the new colleague that we will hire for this! We have found an amazing lady to work with us on this: Anna van der Meulen.
