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Empowering the Blind: Teaching Programming and Technology Accessibility

This workshop at the ITU focused on teaching programming to blind individuals to promote accessibility in technology. Professor Arun Mehta highlighted programming as a promising profession for disabled individuals, emphasizing its potential to secure employment and facilitate useful software development. By involving blind individuals in all aspects of the software life cycle—problem identification, design, coding, testing, and maintenance—this initiative aims to empower that community. Shared experiences from accomplished blind programmers illustrate the impact of technology on their lives.

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Empowering the Blind: Teaching Programming and Technology Accessibility

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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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