Blind Usability with NetBeans IDE at World Usability Day

From: prateek aggarwal <prateekagarwal99@xxxxxxxxx>
To: programmingblind@xxxxxxxxxxxxx
Date: Thu, 2 Dec 2010 13:21:40 +0530
hi list, i've been reading this somewhere on the web, and thought to
share this fantastic piece of interview with you all as well.

welldone mr. Andreas Stefik,, i think you are on the list as well.
we are proud of your works, keep it up!

regards,
prateek agarwal.

---
Blind Usability with NetBeans IDE at World Usability Day

Submitted by Tinu A on Wed, 2010/12/01 - 5:58am

Created by the Usability Professionals' Association,
World Usability Day
 is an annual initiative that promotes good usability research,
development and practices, to make sure that technology services and
products are user friendly
and make life easy.

In this interview, Andreas Stefik, a computer science professor and
member of the NetBeans Dream Team, talks about his work around
usability for visually
impaired developers, as well as his team's participation in this
year's World Usability Day which took place worldwide in November.

Please tell us about you and what you do.

My name is Andreas Stefik. I am an Assistant Professor of Computer
Science at Southern Illinois University Edwardsville working on
computer programming
technology. The current focus of my lab is to work on how humans
interact with programming languages and development environments,
including how these
tools are used by the blind and visually impaired.

With my colleagues (Chris Hundhausen at Washington State University
and Derrick Smith at the University of Alabama, Huntsville), students,
other professionals,
we are working alongside the National Science Foundation to research
and create tools, programming languages, auditory debuggers, and an
educational infrastructure
for blind individuals to learn to program.

Most people do not realize that there about four million blind or
visually impaired people living in the United States, and that the
percentage that is
out of the workforce is 61%--extraordinarily high, even with the
current recession. Instead of only making web browsers or other tools
more usable for
the blind, my team's aim is to also empower blind individuals to
create their own technology, to foster creativity and provide
opportunities for worthy,
high-paying careers in the process.

NetBeans at World Usability Day 2010, St. Louis
How did you choose to base your work on the NetBeans IDE?

When I was in graduate school at Washington State University, I
collaborated with developers at Microsoft on trying to make Visual
Studio more blind-friendly.
However, the reality was that since Visual Studio is a closed source
tool I was constantly blocked by some aspect of the environment that I
couldn't control.
There are a number of open source development environments out there,
but the NetBeans environment has a very strong user community, and
that was extraordinarily
helpful when I got started.

What was your contribution to World Usability Day (WUD) this year?

We participated in the broader World Usability Day in the St. Louis
area at the science center. One of the local groups in the area knew
about some of our
work and had asked us to come demo and let folks give it a try.

During the event, people from around the St. Louis area came up to a
series of booths focused on the usability of various products. For
example, some booths
tackled web usage and browsers; others, cellular phone usage (for
example, change the ringtone on four different devices), and so on.
When a person arrived
at a booth, they would do the activity and receive a stamp if they
completed it, which they could use to get small prizes.

In our case, when people came to our booth, we had them interact with
software written in our blind programming environment, without seeing
the screen.
One of the activities, for example, was a simple guessing game where
the computer gives you instructions aurally (e.g., your number is too
low/high) and
you have to guess that number without seeing the screen. We didn't
have people program blind, as this would have been pretty tough for
this crowd, but
hopefully it gave folks some small sense of how blind or visually
impaired individuals interact with a computer.

Do you work specifically on blind usability or other usability issues as well?

Blind usability is one of many projects I am working on. Probably the
largest related goal is centered around the usability of computer
programming languages.
Essentially, my lab and I are studying the syntax and semantics of
programming languages in an effort to make them more intuitive.

An example: Most developers probably think words like “for” or “while”
are perfectly reasonable choices for looping constructs in a
programming language,
but our recent study showed that words like “repeat” are rated as more
intuitive by novices by approximately 673%. Meaning, modern
programming languages
are much less intuitive than some computer scientists think they are.

NetBeans at World Usability Day 2010, St. Louis
What are some of the issues that your work addresses for visually
impaired developers?

The classic problem the blind face for almost any tool is probably the
“Where am I?” problem, which basically suggests that blind developers
have to continually
determine their context of use. For example, if you are at line 257 in
a document, what is the context of use of that line? What would you
change if there
is a bug? What code surrounds that line?

We try to tackle the issue in a number of ways, one of which is that
we have integrated a talking debugger into the NetBeans IDE. If you
use Visual Studio
and a screen reader, for example, and “step over” a piece of code,
Visual Studio will just say what key you pressed (for example, "F5").
In our tools,
we give the blind developer context of use. We might tell the blind
developer what the values of variables are as they go (For example, "a
to 5"), what
functions they've called (for example, "calling action main"), or
details about the state of a program (for example, "loop iteration
4").

But a second problem is that, when you design software for the blind,
you have to be very careful about what words or sounds are relayed to
the user, or
else you can accidentally make the tools very difficult to use. I
spent a few years toying with auditory choices in my debugger, for
example, but as I
was working on these problems, I began to realize that while I was
spending considerable effort making the audio output sensible the
actual programming
languages we were having people use (for example, C) were pretty
unintuitive. Therefore I thought, "What if I just write my own
programming language, but
then run lots of formal experiments using evidence to improve how
intuitive it is?" That goes back to the previous question. For
example, in our language,
you don't have "for" loops. Instead, you can say phrases like "repeat
10 times," the meaning of which is pretty obvious, even to
non-programmers. It also
has much less syntax, which is desirable for the blind, as screen
readers have to read those lines literally, character by character,
which can be extraordinarily
tedious.

The theme of WUD this year was "Communication", how does this fit in
with your work?

For sighted users, communication can mean a number of things, from the
color or shape of an icon, to the number of steps one has to complete
to finish a
project. With the blind, communicating is a more linear experience,
and in tools this typically happens through text-to-speech. So, our
goal here is to
try to give an idea of how this demographic communicates with the
computer, and more importantly, to let them experience that
themselves.

What are the next steps for your project?

The next immediate goal for us is releasing version 1.5 of the
Sodbeans project, probably in January 2011, which includes our
programming language implementation
and NetBeans embedded accessibility tools. Beyond that, the Washington
State School for the Blind starts teaching formal classes in Sodbeans
in February,
so I'm sure we will be doing bug fixing and maintenance to support
them. My team and I are pretty excited to get that going. Past that,
we are focusing
considerable effort in our programming language, conducting empirical
studies to test how intuitive our language is, to help us make it as
obvious and
easy to use as possible, both for blind and sighted individuals.

As for blind accessibility in NetBeans, some of the goals we have for
the near future are to try to give key presses and hotkeys more
semantic meaning.
Such as, instead of CTRL+C saying “control C” in a screen reader it
should say what the environment actually accomplished (for example,
you copied the
text “Hello, world”). For our talking debugger, we are also hoping to
get better at auditory summarization of programs. Consider if a blind
user pressed
the "continue" button in the debugger. Given an arbitrary length
execution of any number of codes, what is the best way to translate
all of that execution
into an English summary? That, amongst many other issues, is what we
are working on and looking forward to.
---

regards,
prateek agarwal.
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Blind Usability with NetBeans IDE at World Usability Day

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