I have a student with visual impairments as well as not use of her arms. Right now she is pretty proficient with her nose on a giant ipad screen.  She is spunky, curious, and willing to try anything.  I want to give her the best education I can which includes computer science.  I am struggling to find the tools to help her learn and grow.

Hi Kristin,

If you would like to try Blocks4All, there is a beta version used for testing.  To get a code for download, contact Lauren Milne at milnel2@cs.washington.edu.  

I don't know the degree of vision your student has, but she may be able to use switch access on the iPad which is a hands-free method of access.   You can find it under "accessibility" in the settings. 

Please contact me at ladner@cs.washington.edu to talk about your student.  I would like to learn more.

Sarah,

Thanks for the comments.   There are a number of things to learn from Lauren's work.  First, it is always a good idea to leverage what students already know when you develop something.  In this case blind students are already exposed to the iPad and VoiceOver.   Second, it is always a good idea to think about universal design.  Blocks4All can be used by all children whether they be low-vision or blind or sighted.  For low-vision, students can make the blocks larger.  For blind, students can use the built-in screen reader.  Third, this accessibility issue has been around for many years.  When asked, developers often say "we're working on it."   That's ok for a year or two, but time is up to make it happen. 

Hi Sarah,

Thanks for the comment--your work sounds really interesting! A couple of lower-level things we found that were really inaccessible in most block-based environments (and likely to be widespread problems in other types of applications):

(1) Drag and drop is really challenging for children with visual impairments (even with the screen reader work-arounds), this could obviously be a challenge as well for children with visual impairments, so developers should build in a work-around if they are using this gesture in applications.

(2) Items "floating" in space are really hard to find without vision on a touchscreen. In most of these environments, block programs just float in the middle of the workspace. It was really hard for children to find these blocks without vision, so in my design the programs are tethered to the bottom of the screen. This would be a harder for developers to implement.

Lauren

I have a new car that has a touchscreen panel for the radio, volume,nav, etc. -and it's horrid to use because the screen is smooth and I have to actually look at it to find anything while driving, rather than being able to touch & feel the physical buttons & dials like on my old radio....so I (even fully sighted!) empathize with #2. I've wondered if there is a way to mark the screen with dots or lines to help identify locations on the screen. Do you know of anyone who's tried doing something with the physical screen?  Though I'm not willing to test nail-polish dots on my new car, it sure would help to use other senses to find & anchor those on-screen items in space. I know it shifts the issue to hardware instead of software, but it would be intriguing to figure that out.

Suzanne,

Great question and I empathize! As it happens, we actually have a project in the lab where we are thinking about these issues a lot. There are lots of ways that it can be approached, but the cheapest to commercialize is likely in vibro-tactile feedback. How to do it is complicated and we've been collaborating with some awesome neuro-psych folks and mechanical engineers, but the gist is that you end up controlling the motors (which vary a lot per device) to try to give clues and there's lots of ways to do that. We're putting out some vibration control libraries this summer on Android in the Quorum project as part of this and experiments on what is/is not effective are ongoing in St. Louis and in Maine.  We were thinking of effectiveness for the blind, but your application domain sounds just as valid.

Hi Suzanne,

A number of researchers have looked at using 3D printed overlays or attachments to smart phones and tablets to make them more usable or accessible.  Here is one example.

Shaun K. Kane, Meredith Ringel Morris, and Jacob O. Wobbrock. 2013. Touchplates: low-cost tactile overlays for visually impaired touch screen users. In Proceedings of the 15th International ACM SIGACCESS Conference on Computers and Accessibility (ASSETS '13). ACM, New York, NY, USA, , Article 22 , 8 pages. DOI: http://dx.doi.org/10.1145/2513383.2513442

Christopher,

Thanks for your comments.  As for scaling up, we are still in the research phase, but I see some avenues for scaling.  I think Lauren has some ideas too.  First, we want to make the iOS app available in the app store.  This should happen in the next few months.  Secondly, we would like to work with a larger company to improve the app.  As academics, we have limited time and resources to do so.  Third, we will encourage others providers to improve their blocks-base programming environments to make them accessible.  Our research will inform them on how to do so.

Andreas and Richard, thank you both for your responses.  In the nature of this work, we're always thinking about broader impacts and how to reach as many as possible, right?  As technology continues to become more innovative, keeping everything accessible becomes even more challenging.  Of course, I'm certainly not telling you anything new.  I wish you all the best as you continue and will be keeping an eye on your great outcomes.  

Pati,

Great question. Overall, I think about the problem of making computer science more accessible as one that goes across demographics, as I think you are implying in your question. By that, what I mean is that regardless of whether an individual is young or old, their disability should not be a block on their ability to participate in the discipline. Because of that, we engage groups across several dimensions.

For example, Lauren's work is cool because it's hitting younger demographics, which I don't think anyone has tried for the blind and visually impaired community. My team skews older and we've talked to devs in industry for years. Sometimes teams are responsive and sometimes they are not. Visual Studio, for example, is making some progress on accessibility right now, which is great to see. Microsoft, broadly, is also engaging across a number of disability groups (e.g., neuro-diverse) and at least to me, I think they're doing more than most at the moment.

Thus in our case, we are doing a few things: 1) building prototypes or products that help for groups/domains that are particularly problematic or where how to do the design is not obvious (e.g., computer graphics is heavily used in education, but not accessible to BVI and how you make it so is not clear in the literature), 2) talking to some partners in various settings (e.g., industry, academia). As an example, we recently held a Dagstuhl seminar that had a variety of conversations across these demographics and included a disabilities component: http://www.dagstuhl.de/en/program/calendar/semh... I was designing that event, I was pretty explicit in creating it such that this cross-demographic, both educational and industrial, impact was front and center.

In our related grant AccessComputing (http://uw.edu/accesscomputing), we work with folks in industry in a couple of ways.  One is to engage them in conversations about recruiting and retaining interns and employees with disabilities.  Having employees with disabilities may help to bring conversations about accessibility to the forefront. 

We also work with industry on initiatives related to teaching accessibility in computing education. Teach Access (http://teachaccess.org/) represents a number of companies and universities that have come together to encourage faculty in postsecondary institutions to teach more about accessibility.  Companies are saying that they need more staff that is knowledgeable about accessibility.  If all developers learn something about accessibility in the course of their education, it should help ensure that products are more accessible.

Hi Pati,

Interestingly, some companies will pick up on research ideas and put them into products or services.  We would certainly be happy if that happens.  That said, research papers don't always tell the whole story.  They don't talk about ideas that didn't work out, for example.  It is always a good idea for a company to seek out the researchers to ask them question about what in not in the paper.    Most likely, our main role in working with a company would be as a consultant.

Hi Pati,

Great question!  I'll add to the responses above.

I think there's a lot of interest in making these programming environments accessible from industry, but people aren't quite sure how to do it. It's also pretty hard to recruit participants to test these interfaces out, because the population of children who use screen readers is pretty small. We are hoping that this research helps with some of these problems: explicitly laying out what can be done to make these environments accessible and actually testing it out with blind children. 

We've actually been in talks with some of the big players in the space from industry. Hopefully they will start to implement some of the ideas!

I also have made the code behind Blocks4All available and hope to release the application in the app store this summer (after finishing up my dissertation).

Thanks,

Lauren

Hi Alan,

Thanks for your comments and question.  There is quite a bit of activity going on in the nation in making tools for STEM and Computer Science Learning Accessible.  Some of it not out yet.  AccessCSforAll has a set of "Development Partners" who are committed to and work on making accessible tools.  At SIGCSE 2017 in Seattle we held a workshop to promote accessible educational technology and accessible teaching strategies.  Follow link for proceedings.

https://www.washington.edu/accesscomputing/resources/making-k-12-computer-science-accessible-2017

Alan, searching for disability related videos (or articles or whatnot in different settings) can be difficult because of the variety of terms that could be used. In particular, some videos might address a particular disability like autism but not use the term disability.  Others might mention a variety of underrepresented groups, including disability a list of underrepresented groups but not addressing it substantively.  

We did identify some other videos that deal with accessibility and disability:

• Inventing, Designing, and Engineering on the Autism Spectrum
• IE Capstone Projects to Benefit Adults with Disabilities
• Project TACTIC: Teaching All Computational Thinking Through Inclusion and Collaboration
• Project ESCOLAR
• Doing the Math with Paraeducators
• Expanding Computing Education Pathways
• RAISE: STEM Career Development for Incarcerated Youth
• Teaching Mathematics to Struggling Learners

Awareness is a big issue when it comes to ensuring others address disability. We work to be the squeaky wheel in conversations about diversity and inclusion to ensure that disability isn't absent.  At times, folks seem hesitant to address disability because of concern over doing the wrong thing.  There are many people - our team included - who are happy to provide guidance for folks wanting to engage with disability-related issues.

Hi Allison,

I don't know the technology behind Alice, so I can't comment on how it can be made accessible.  My experience has been that if a tool is not "born" accessible in the first place, it is often hard to make it so, particularly if the output is an animation, which is very visual.  

I have heard about Teaching CS Through Story Telling, which is a wonderful concept.  A story doesn't have to be a visual animation, could be speech, music, or other audio output, or a robot action of some kind.   That said, Blocks4All is targeted at children in K-5, not middle school.  If you are willing, you might consider moving to the Quorum Language which is text-based and supports speech, audio, and some robots.  It is considered to be very learnable even by middle school children.  One feature of the language is the command "say."  

say "hello" goes to the speakers to speak "hello"

repeat 5 times

  say "hello"  

end

will speak "hello" five times.  

Hi Ron,

If you have access to the ACM Digital Library, there is a short 30 second video that shows a little more.  Try this link.

https://dl.acm.org/citation.cfm?id=3173643  

If you want to download a beta version for your iOS device please contact Lauren Milne milnel2@cs.washington.edu.   You should be familiar with VoiceOver, the screen reader for iOS to get the best feel for the environment.

The CHI video was required to be less than 30 seconds and the STEM for All less video than 3 minutes.   When the app is fully ready we'll do a demo video describing all the features.   

Hi Stacey,

I just heard about Apple's Everyone Can Code / Swift Playgrounds environment.  I'll be looking at it to learn more.  As I mentioned earlier the Quorum Language is a well tested platform for blind children to code in.   We had a video in last year's Showcase about it.

http://stemforall2017.videohall.com/presentations/900