Addressing Accessibility Barriers in Programming for People with Visual Impairments: A Literature Review

Abstract

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.

Estratégias de Acessibilidade em IDEs para Pessoas com Deficiência Visual

“…Entrevistas conduzidas por [Huff et al 2020] buscaram compreender como a deficiência afeta o ambiente de trabalho de programadores com deficiência visual. O trabalho de [Mountapmbeme et al 2022] buscou identificar os esforc ¸os de pesquisa voltados para tornar os IDEs mais acessíveis para programadores profissionais e alunos com deficiência visual. [Baker et al 2019], por outro lado, quantificaram as barreiras enfrentadas por estudantes de cursos de Ciência da Computac ¸ão com deficiência visual, a fim de compreender melhor o impacto da deficiência no processo de aprendizagem.…”

“…Em se tratando especificamente de programac ¸ão de computadores, os Ambientes de Desenvolvimento Integrado 1 (IDEs) têm sido amplamente utilizados para aumentar a produtividade e eficiência de analistas e desenvolvedores de sistemas. Entretanto, a alta complexidade das interfaces dessas ferramentas [Petrausch and Loitsch 2017] aliado às particularidades intrínsecas da maioria das linguagens de programac ¸ão, pode representar um desafio para pessoas com deficiência visual que desejam atuar nesta área [Mountapmbeme et al 2022, Hadwen-Bennett et al 2018.…”

Tangible Programming Learning System (TPLS) for Programming Class with Visually Impaired and Sighted Students

“…Thus, in order to lower the programming barrier for the visually impaired, scholars are proposing innovative solutions. These can be classified into two categories: Using audio and Using tangible objects [3].…”

“…The tangible programming block is made up of essential blocks for sequence and iteration (Table I). Specifically, the types of programming blocks are move(↑), rotate(↷,↶), repeat(⟳,■), and number (3,4,5) blocks. The repeat block consists of a start block and an end block, and is used as follows: If you want to go forward three steps, you can combine the move block and the number block and put them inside the repeat blocks as follows.…”

“…Because of this problem, a programming learning system for visually impaired people has been developed. A typical example is a tangible user interface (TUI) based system [3]. It allows users to program through physical objects, which makes learning much easier and more intuitive [4].…”