Southern Illinois University-Edwardsville and Washington State University propose to develop a new educational K-12 infrastructure aimed at increasing the participation of blind individuals in secondary schools, and ultimately in undergraduate computing programs and the software engineering profession. When it comes to computer programming, blind and visually impaired individuals are at a significant disadvantage compared to their sighted counterparts. Computer programming is a highly visual task, and modern programming tools are designed almost exclusively for sighted users. Moreover, computing curricula at schools for the blind are nearly non-existent; those rare blind individuals who are able to enter the computing profession are largely self-taught. This is an unfortunate state of affairs, as computer programming offers the blind population both a rich world to explore -- one that is potentially accessible through carefully designed auditory cues -- and a lucrative career path. The proposed project, in collaboration with five K-12 schools for the blind and a mentorship board of successful blind programmers, will develop and empirically evaluate a new educational infrastructure for the blind. It has three key components. The first is a novel auditory programming environment tailored to the special needs of the blind. The second is a new studio-based computing curriculum that engages students in the construction, customization, and sharing of auditory virtual worlds with the goals of teaching computer programming skills and inspiring students to consider computing as a career. The third is a blind-accessible, web-based community portal designed to facilitate peer mentoring and support, and to provide opportunities for students to interact with role models who have overcome their visual impairment and succeeded in the computing profession.
The proposed project will address two significant research questions: How can the highly-visual, cognitively complex task of computer programming be made both accessible and engaging to middle and high school blind students through computing education infrastructure consisting of an audio-based programming environment, specialized curriculum, and web-based community portal? And how can a such a computing education infrastructure be best designed so as both to facilitate their wide-scale adoption by K-12 schools for the blind and to broaden the participation of the blind population in computing?
The broad purpose of this award was to make it possible for children with blindness or visual impairments (henceforth "BVI") to participate in the discipline of computer science. Such children in the U.S. have traditionally had few options for learning computer science, in part because of 1) lack of tool support, 2) lack of educational options, and 3) lack of computer science expertise at residential schools for the blind. As a result of this project, we believe that these circumstances have changed. We report on several outcomes. First, we have developed the tools Sodbeans and Quorum, designed to make it easier to teach children with BVI computer science. Second, we have established partnerships throughout the U.S. with residential schools for the blind, ultimately training teachers from approximately 17 school districts—more than triple what we originally proposed. Many of these partners now teach BVI students computer science using our technologies, establishing an educational infrastructure and pathway to learning that did not exist for this population only a few years ago. We think it is plausible that these institutions will continue teaching computer science to these children long after the end of our project, potentially giving permanent institutional change. Finally, while we originally designed the Quorum programming language to be easier for BVI children to use, formal randomized controlled trials conducted to augment this project showed that they make programming easier for all people, with or without a disability. The reason this appears to be the case is that BVI children need carefully chosen words and phrases for programming because they have to listen to the software they write instead of seeing it. Thus, by optimizing the auditory pipeline to be easy to understand for people with BVI, we may have ultimately invented programming language technologies that are easier to use for everyone.
