Increasing access to computer science for blind students

Abstract

Computer science has many aspects that are inaccessible to someone who is blind. My research has focused on identifying the different barriers that exist for blind students in computer science and creating technology to overcome them. I have done two projects towards this goal, StructJumper and a survey and interviews with blind students about their experiences learning programming. StructJumper is a tool that creates a tree based on the structure of the code, which can be used for navigation and discovering contextual information in the code. The surveys and interviews focused on the barriers that blind students faced in learning computer science. For my dissertation, I am proposing one more project investigating how to convey updates to data structures.