TabGO: Towards Accessible Computer Science in Secondary School

Abstract

While computing skills grow in importance in today's technology-centered society, the learning of these skills still isn't accessible easily for young visually-impaired students: in French schools for example, online platforms (like Scratch) are more and more used by teachers, but unfortunately these platforms rely heavily on visual elements. As an inclusive approach would suggest, modifications and adaptations of such platforms would favour collaboration between sighted and visually-impaired users: tangible stimuli are then favoured to compensate for visual elements, while visually-impaired and sighted communities are prompted to use the same tools. Even if tangible solutions are suggested through scientific studies in the accessibility field, a young visually-impaired student still can't use these solutions autonomously: many of these prototypes still require the intervention of a sighted third party. In this article, we describe our solution TaBGO (Tangible Blocks Go Online) which consists of enhanced tangible Scratch's blocks and an associated optical recognition software. We then present a planned user study to establish if this solution is usable and easily handled by young visually impaired and sighted students, considering users' feedback about usability, satisfaction and cognitive load.