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TheThirdOne / rars

RARS -- RISC-V Assembler and Runtime Simulator
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RARS accessibility issue #105

Open mmansour1097 opened 3 years ago

mmansour1097 commented 3 years ago

One of our students at the American University in Cairo is a visually impaired student majoring in computer science. He is taking a course in computer organization that requires using RARs simulation tool.
We tried using the tool with JAWS screen reader and unfortunately, nothing is readable by JAWs. Do you have any recommendations on how to help support the student to avoid him dropping the course? Many thanks

TheThirdOne commented 3 years ago

Unfortunately I have no experience in making things accessible to screen readers. I believe that "Java Access Bridge" is necessary for screen readers to work with Java Swing GUIs. If that is not installed, please give it a shot.

Venus may be a workable simulator for your course. It has a more limited feature set, but might be enough depending on the course.

RARS on the command line might be a solution. I don't think it would be a great experience, but it should provide all the strictly necessary information to debug programs.

If the student is comfortable with GDB and the command line in general, I would suggest using gas, spike and gdb. It is a more professional set of tools and thus is not ideal for students, but should be more than sufficient to handle undergraduate coursework. rv8 or qemu should also work as a replacement for spike, but I have never used gdb with them.