Accessibility issues with programming languages and programming environments pose a major barrier for students with visual impairments to participate in computing related courses as well as threatens the productivity of professional programmers with visual impairments. To remedy this, the past two decades have witnessed an increase in accessibility research designed to investigate and address the challenges faced by people with visual impairments while programming or learning how to program. We conducted a literature review of accessibility research in this domain. The aim was to identify, aggregate, and highlight known accessibility barriers to programming faced by professional programmers and students with visual impairments learning how to code as well as to identify all solutions that have been proposed to address these barriers. We selected and analyzed 70 papers reporting on accessibility of programming and programming environments for people with visual impairments. Numerous barriers to programming by people with visual impairments have been identified in the literature. Some of these barriers are understudied and present opportunities for future work. A lot of studies have also proposed tools and new accessible programming languages to address the accessibility issues of current programming languages and programming environments.
Students with motor disabilities like cerebral palsy face challenges when learning how to program. This is because most programming platforms require a certain level of dexterity that students with cerebral palsy do not possess. Block-based programming environments are one of such platforms. These environments are useful when teaching programming concepts to beginners, however, their drag and drop nature makes them inaccessible to students with cerebral palsy. This limitation deprives students with cerebral palsy of experiences that may allow them explore careers in computing. As a solution, I propose the use of speech as an alternative form of input in the Block-based programming environment, Blockly. This voice-enabled version of Blockly will reduce the need for the use of a mouse or keyboard, hence increase accessibility for students with cerebral palsy. As part of my approach, I incorporate a speech recognition API into the Blockly environment, as well as create a custom function that uses voice commands to simulate keyboard and mouse actions. An exploratory study is currently in the works and a usability study and A/B test will be conducted after the prototype has been fully implemented.
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