On the Participation of Blind and Visually Impaired Individuals in STEM and Computer Science

Andreas Stefik, Ph.D.University of Nevada, Las Vegas

Employment needs are significant in the Blind and Visually impaired

community

• Federal spending on working-aged adults with disabilities totals $357 billion annually [U.S. Census]

• Approximately 56.0% of the 2.1 million Blind and Visually impaired working-aged adults living in the U.S. are out of the workforce [AFB, 2012]

• Of blind and visually impaired students, 89.51% take courses at mainstream K-12 institutions (out of approximately 58,939 children) [AFB, 2013]

• The BVI community needs viable career options• Can these students participate in K-12 STEM education?• Can blind students become successful software engineers?

Blind students face significant challenges in computer science

• Inconsistent screen reader support• Microsoft’s Visual Studio has some support• NetBeans (without modifications) has generally poor support

through the Java Access Bridge, and little on Mac OS X• Eclipse has moderate support across the board, although the

interface can be difficult to navigate with a screen reader

• Debugging: debuggers are often not accessible• Keypress syndrome: F5, F5, F5, F5, F5, F5• Generally, debuggers are hard to use with a screen reader

• Modern editors have excellent visual hints in source code, but these are usually not accessible• Red underlines might represent compiler errors• Yellow light bulbs provide refactoring or code modification support

In K-12, the situation for the blind is getting worse

Visualization may increase engagement, but should not come at the expense of those with disabilities

• Tools like Scratch or Alice are often claimed to increase engagement or transfer of learning, but controlled studies testing such claims are unclear• Dann et al. say it increases transfer of learning to text-based languages • Garlick and Cankaya ran a controlled experiment finding text-based

pseudo-code was a more effective learning aid than Alice

• In practice, both industry and universities uses text-based general purpose programming languages (e.g., C/C++, Java, Perl, Python, Quorum, Ruby, Groovy, Scala), which are more accessible

• Both Alice and Scratch do not work with screen reading devices• The toolkits used are not easily made accessible (scholars have tried)• Even if the buttons and widgets were made accessible, this would not

make the paradigm accessible• Even Oracle Corporation has difficulty making such tools accessible (see

e.g., the Java FX accessibility story)

Blind students can become successful computer scientists

Fixing these issues will take engagement and technology

• Engagement: The new computer science AP approach claims to be technology neutral, but in practice heavily pushes visual technologies. We need to help this community, while also reminding ourselves that:• Blind students have a legal right to participate in a K-12 CS education• Mathematics, physics, and other disciplines are arguably less exclusionary than

computer science, despite their own challenges (e.g., tactile calculus)• In some cases, these CS communities may not even be aware they are exclusionary.

Let’s help them and collaborate!

• Technology: New technologies for the blind and visually impaired would significantly help the state-of-the-practice. Some might include:• New cross-platform, technology neutral, screen reader standards: Write-once,

accessible anywhere. We can build this easily, but adoption would require industrial buy-in.

• Universally designed technologies that can engage students without being exclusionary (e.g., App creation in web libraries with HTML 5 accessibility support, Facebook or Twitter apps, Game libraries with OpenAL support)

• Modern development environments that maintain the advances from our best tools, but translate the information into reasonable aural feedback

Thanks!Find out more about accessible technologies at the Quorum website:

http://quorumlanguage.com/

Interested in learning about how to teach blind and visually impaired students computer science?

Come to Epiq 2014!http://tinyurl.com/od5s2dn