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This paper reports on a tool for assisting students with visual disabilities in learning how to program. The tool is meant to be used by computer science majors learning the programming language Java. As part of the developmental process of building this tool, we have implemented a rapid prototype to be used by people with disabilities in order to define appropriate requirements for the full version of the tool. This requires that the prototype is completely usable via a keyboard and speech interface, and it is easily adaptable for trying out different strategies. In this paper, we present the motivation and philosophy of the full tool, called JavaSpeak. We also present the details of a prototype implementation of JavaSpeak. Keywords

The hierarchical structure of a program can be quite complex. As such, many Integrated Development Environments (IDEs) provide graphical representations of program structure at different levels of abstraction. Such representations are not very accessible to non-sighted programmers, as screen readers are not able to portray the underlying hierarchical structure of the information. In this paper, we define a set of requirements for an accessible tree navigation strategy. An implementation of this strategy was developed as a plug-in to the Eclipse IDE and was tested by twelve student programmers. The evaluation of the tool shows the strategy to be an efficient and effective way for a non-sighted programmer to navigate hierarchical structures.

Students with visual disabilities face unique challenges in learning to be computer scientists. These challenges can be overcome, however, with the use of specialized software tools and hardware equipment, collectively called assistive technology. In this paper, we discuss the environment we are using for three students with visual disabilities who are starting in our programs this year. This environment includes a collection of commercial assistive technology and a programming tool that we have developed in-house.

Portrayingthe behavior of parallel programs can be done in a variety of ways. One way is to generate a graphical display related to the program's behavior so that a user can visualize what happens during the program's execution.As an alternative to visualization, auralization can also be used to portray the behavior of parallel programs.This paper explores how sound can be used to depict different events that take place during a parallel program's execution.In particular, the discussion is focused on dis@ibuted-memory parallel programs.Three mappings of execution behavior to sound were studied. The first mapping is related to process communication in a distributed-memory parallel program. The second mapping tracks the load balance of the processors of a system, In the third mapping, the flows-ofcontrol of the parallel processes are mapped to related sounds.