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by russomf
3521 days ago
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I am an adjunct professor in a CS department. I usually end up with introductory level courses, often for non-majors. This semester I have a visually impaired student in an introductory Java course who is unable to see the screen. He uses JAWS as his primary screen reader. To my great surprise, most of the tools we typically use were completely inaccessible to screen readers. I spent the first several weeks of the semester scrambling to find a reasonable set of tools that would work for him. We settled on Notepad++ and the terminal. Also, I provide him with special versions of the slide decks, readings, assignments, quizzes and exams. I would be very interested to learn how visually impaired developers such as yourself and others got started, and for any suggestions for how I can make my student's experience more positive. Thanks. |
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Further down the line, the student might find that programming is no longer so new to them that they can afford to explore something else. But at the moment, if they're a beginner, trying to learn a tool like an IDE, which is supposed to make your life easier but generally has the opposite effect for blind devs, is just going to confuse matters. So I would stick with what you're doing, because you probably won't get any better support from the disability services team at the university because it's not an area they know.
Your student needs to learn, sometimes the hard way, that if you're blind and want to make things, you have to be prepared to do things in ways which go completely against the grain - having to basically use Windows to be productive is one of them - and to solve these boilerplate accessibility problems without becoming discouraged.