RE: Some Fantastic News for the Blind Programmer Community
- From: "Homme, James" <james.homme@xxxxxxxxxxxx>
- To: "programmingblind@xxxxxxxxxxxxx" <programmingblind@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>
- Date: Tue, 15 Dec 2009 15:17:21 -0500
Hi,
I wonder if anyone at CMU would be interested in helping with this.
Jim
Highmark recipients, Read my accessibility
blog<http://mysites.highmark.com/personal/lidikki/Blog/default.aspx>
"If a green on green tree falls in the forest and you're there, can you see it?"
"Not unless you have a screen reader." :)
From: programmingblind-bounce@xxxxxxxxxxxxx
[mailto:programmingblind-bounce@xxxxxxxxxxxxx] On Behalf Of Andreas Stefik
Sent: Tuesday, December 15, 2009 2:17 PM
To: programmingblind@xxxxxxxxxxxxx
Subject: Re: Some Fantastic News for the Blind Programmer Community
Inthane,
You bring up an excellent point that me, and the rest of the team, have been
thinking about carefully. The grant we're working on only has us distributing
tools to K-12 schools, however, we ideally want these tools to work for the
broadest number of users possible, including those in community college.
This is why, a few months ago, I decided to split the project into what are
called externally chained NetBeans modules, which basically means that we have
two products. Product 1, Sappy, is a tool that very generally makes NetBeans
more accessible to the blind, and believe it or not, we're actually far enough
along that we're doing some user testing. It's very exciting.
Second, is our tool Sodbeans, which includes a custom compiler, debugger, and
tons of other tools. Sodbeans is massively more accessible than Sappy, but only
works for our one, custom, programming language for very, very complicated
technical reasons. So, in short, we're going to be distributing Sappy to
everyone, but we'll be using Sodbeans in the K-12 schools.
And the best part, we "think," is that by doing it this way, we hope to be able
to allow other institutions that want to have some blind support to basically
be able to just download Sappy and let people get started in any language
supported by NetBeans, which is quite a few nowadays. They won't get all of the
accessibility enhancements that Sodbeans provides, but it should work for a
broad swathe of users in a broad swathe of programming languages, which is what
you really need at the college level. And it is much better than NetBeans out
of the box, especially on Mac OS X, where NetBeans, through no fault of the
folks at Sun, has serious accessibility problems.
So the short answer is that we definitely want to help the broadest number of
people possible. Our current tech isn't a perfect solution to that, but it's
getting better everyday and colleges could realistically import our modules
into NetBeans right now and it would still be a huge step up in terms of
accessibility if they have blind students, and we haven't even gone alpha yet!
And of course, everything we are doing is open source and 100% free on
sourceforge, so we welcome new contributions, patches, or anything else people
want to contribute.
If you are interested in contributing to getting a college level version of
Sappy inthane, we'd be happy to get you hooked up. We have a bigger, and
growing, development team and we can always use more sets of eyeballs.
Andreas Stefik, Ph.D.
Assistant Professor
Department of Computer Science
Southern Illinois University Edwardsville
On Tue, Dec 15, 2009 at 2:48 AM, The Elf
<inthaneelf@xxxxxxxxxxxxxx<mailto:inthaneelf@xxxxxxxxxxxxxx>> wrote:
Andreas,
a note, I don't know if your abilities will be able to do anything with or
about this, but a number of blind programmers and other computer specialists
are trained at local colleges especially, but also at universities, when and
where they can get the instructors to work with them, which in my experiences
at Santa Ana college in orange county, city of Santa Ana, California. was
quite good, as good as they could make them for me, though lack of accessible
tools did hinder me several times.
availability to such organizations would be phenomenal as well, if doable
hope this information can be of some use,
inthane
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