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Teaching Programming to the Blind

ITU Workshop on Accessibility/Atelier UIT sur l’accessibilité Bamako, Mali 13 – 15 October 2009. Teaching Programming to the Blind. Professor Arun Mehta President, BAPSI arun.mehta@gmail.com. Why?. Programming is an excellent profession for the disabled: pays well, can be done via the Net

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Teaching Programming to the Blind

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  1. ITU Workshop on Accessibility/Atelier UIT sur l’accessibilitéBamako, Mali 13 – 15 October 2009 Teaching Programming to the Blind Professor Arun Mehta President, BAPSI arun.mehta@gmail.com

  2. Why? • Programming is an excellent profession for the disabled: pays well, can be done via the Net • Software that works for the blind also allows the illiterate to use the computer, including via the phone • Secures the lifecycle of software products for the disabled

  3. Software Life-Cycle • Identification of problem, solution design, coding, testing, maintenance • In all of these aspects, except the coding, we like to involve the blind • Why not in coding? • A person whose life is improved by some software has lifetime commitment to it

  4. Examples of Great Blind Programmers • Chris Hofstader, wrote the screen reader Jaws:”The greatest thing for me was the freedom to invent my future. I was building technology that the next day I could use myself” • T.V. Raman wrote emacspeak, which leveraged emacs to make all computer functions accessible

  5. Resources • http://www.blindprogramming.com/ • bp-projects at freelists.org: Where members and friends of the Blind Programming list can discuss any programming-related projects they choose to collaborate together on • http://www.panix.com/~kestrell/math.html seeks to make maths accessible to blind people

  6. Our Efforts • I volunteered for two years at the National Association for the Blind, to teach programming in Visual Basic 6 • My students were the only blind programmers on the Obi project (open source Daisy authoring software) • Starting a web programming workshop with some blind people in Sri Lanka

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