Re: Some Fantastic News for the Blind Programmer Community
- From: Andreas Stefik <stefika@xxxxxxxxx>
- To: programmingblind@xxxxxxxxxxxxx
- Date: Tue, 15 Dec 2009 14:56:08 -0600
Jim,
We'd be open to collaboration with other groups, to be sure. In fact, I
would really enjoy getting other folks involved.
Andreas Stefik, Ph.D.
Assistant Professor
Department of Computer Science
Southern Illinois University Edwardsville
On Tue, Dec 15, 2009 at 2:17 PM, Homme, James <james.homme@xxxxxxxxxxxx>wrote:
> 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>
> 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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