PPIG 2016 - 27th Annual Workshop
Work in Progress: A Nonvisual Interface for a Blocks Language
Varsha Koushik, Clayton Lewis
Abstract: Visual programming systems, including blocks languages like Scratch (Maloney et al., 2010) are widely used to introduce children and other learners to programming, but in their present form they cannot be used by blind people. Following up work on the nonvisual dataflow language Noodle (Lewis, 2014), and building on the Blockly language system (https://developers.google.com/blockly/; Fraser, 2015) we are building a nonvisual interface to a blocks language. We present a pseudospatial interface for the language, similar to that of Noodle, and compare it with other approaches to accessibility for blocks languages.