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carpentries / community-facilitators-program

Repository with context, resources and curriculum for The Carpentries Facilitators Program
https://carpentries.github.io/community-facilitators-program/
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How to make sure blind learners can recognize important symbols, spaces, or tabs #22

Open naoe-tatara opened 3 years ago

naoe-tatara commented 3 years ago

This is not experienced case with blind learners, but a problem that was discussed during preparation of SWC Plotting and Programming in Python lesson.

When blind learners who use a screen reader learn about programming in Python, there are a lot of symbols, spaces, or tabs that play an important role to make codes work. My understanding is that many blind people are using screen readers but probably not so many use an braille because they are quite expensive. In the live coding, many instructors read out loud what they are typing, including these symbols, spaces or tabs. The problem is then whether or not screen readers read out loud something like "[", "(", "/", "|", or even spaces or tabs that are written in the lesson materials, for example when they work on exercises. Also, I would guess symbols like pipe "|" may not be often used and it could be difficult to find out how to type it.

This article details out the relevant problems with many examples and test results of various common screen readers.

ErinBecker commented 3 years ago

Thank you @naoe-tatara for this feedback. I am bringing this to the Curriculum Development Team at our meeting next Tuesday for discussion and possible solutions.

tobyhodges commented 3 years ago

We discussed this today in the Curriculum Team and I have agreed to take responsibility for addressing this issue. I have unassigned the other team members accordingly.

After some preliminary reading around the topic, I think we can expect screen reader users to arrive at our lessons with a good understanding of how to use their chosen screen reader software. But, given that most of our lessons are aimed at novices, I think it could be the first time they have needed to configure their screen reader to read out the special characters common in programming: [ ] { } ( ) | etc. It appears that many popular screen reader tools can be configured for specific characters.

In the short term, my suggested resolution is to add some guidance somewhere - probably in the community handbook - about which characters it is important to tell the screen reader to read out to follow our lessons. I honestly do not know if this will work for whitespace characters, and need to do some more reading and testing for that.

In the medium term, we hope to be able to consult with users of screen readers to develop a more integrated and coherent approach. We intend to arrange user testing to improve the accessibility of our resources in the future, in which participants would be compensated financially for their time. A note to anyone reading this who uses a screen reader: we would love to hear your feedback and/or to know if you would be interested in participating in this kind of user testing. You can contact us by email at community@carpentries.org