Auditory interface ideas, what would help?

  • From: Andreas Stefik <stefika@xxxxxxxxx>
  • To: programmingblind@xxxxxxxxxxxxx, Sodbeans <sodbeans-developer@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>
  • Date: Fri, 28 Aug 2009 11:37:00 -0500

Hello folks,

We're getting pretty close here in our netbeans tools, possibly within the
next few months, to adding some very nice auditory enhancements to NetBeans
for blind users. I've got an overwhelming number of ideas about what could
help, but I can't implement them all and would like to get some feedback
from the community. Specifically, we're looking for some ideas in two main
areas, code completion and auditory navigation.

1. Code completion --- Whenever I've talked to folks in the past about code
completion with audio, people have suggested that one of the most annoying
issues with code completion is changes in focus.

Anyone have ideas about auditory code completion? Besides managing focus
better, anyone have any ideas on how to make it more accessible?

2. Auditory navigation --- I have a graduate student currently working on a
blind code navigation system. Right now, the system allows you to jump
around the source window and find variable declarations, method
declarations, and other similar things, but we want to expand the navigation
to make things easier.

One idea I had, for example, was to make the navigation window "debugger
sensitive" so that if you are navigating around while your code is
executing, there will be audio that tells you more information about what
you've browsed to. For example, if you navigate and land on a variable, it
might tell you its name, type, and if the debugger is running, what its
value is, or other information, depending on how much useful audio we can
put into a short cue.

But really, we're doing this project for this community. We genuinely want
to make our tools as accessible as humanly possible, and we're going out of
our way to make it so. If anyone has any ideas about what kind of tools
would help you, go ahead and put them here, I'd love to hear about them!
Obviously, we have limited development time, so it's unlikely we'll
implement every suggestion, but brainstorming helps.

Andreas Stefik, Ph.D.
Department of Computer Science
Southern Illinois University Edwardsville

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