Programming Education for Blind and Low Vision Users: Beyond Reading the Screen

Learning to program is often considered a difficult task, but this difficulty is multiplied for blind and low vision users, especially among young learners who may be learning about their assistive technologies (such as screen readers) alongside learning to program. In this position paper we argue that the entire paradigm of screen-reading is a flawed way to construct an auditory interface for users with limited or no functional vision. We contend that block-like paradigms – despite historically being inaccessible – actually point towards a superior design where the abstract syntax tree is used to produce an auditory interface directly, rather than relying on reading out a plain-text rendering of the syntax tree. We believe that this can have benefits for learners and professionals alike.