Sighted programmers often rely on visual cues (e.g., syntax coloring, keyword highlighting, code formatting) to perform common coding activities in text-based languages (e.g., Python). Unfortunately, blind and low-vis...
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ISBN:
(纸本)9781450393201
Sighted programmers often rely on visual cues (e.g., syntax coloring, keyword highlighting, code formatting) to perform common coding activities in text-based languages (e.g., Python). Unfortunately, blind and low-vision (BLV) programmers hardly beneft from these visual cues because they interact with computers via assistive technologies (e.g., screen readers), which fail to communicate visual semantics meaningfully. Prior work on making text-based programming languages and environments accessible mostly focused on code navigation and, to some extent, code debugging, but not much toward code editing, which is an essential coding activity. We present grid-coding to fll this gap. grid-coding renders source code in a structured 2D grid, where each row, column, and cell have consistent, meaningful semantics. Its design is grounded on prior work and refned by 28 BLV programmers through online participatory sessions for 2 months. We implemented the grid-coding prototype as a spreadsheet-like web application for Python and evaluated it with a study with 12 BLV programmers. This study revealed that, compared to a text editor (i.e., the go-to editor for BLV programmers), our prototype enabled BLV programmers to navigate source code quickly, fnd the context of a statement easily, detect syntax errors in existing code efectively, and write new code with fewer syntax errors. The study also revealed how BLV programmers adopted grid-coding and demonstrated novel interaction patterns conducive to increased programming productivity.
We demonstrate grid Editor, an implementation of our novel grid-coding paradigm for addressing code navigation, editing, and associated challenges for blind and low-vision (BLV) programmers with text-based programming...
详细信息
ISBN:
(纸本)9781450393218
We demonstrate grid Editor, an implementation of our novel grid-coding paradigm for addressing code navigation, editing, and associated challenges for blind and low-vision (BLV) programmers with text-based programming. grid Editor is implemented as a spreadsheet-like web application to render Python code in a structured 2D grid. The Editor represents a single line with a row, a single scope with a column, and replaces traditional whitespace-based indentation with meaningful indentation cells. As a result, grid-Editor supports quickly navigating source code to find context, detecting syntax errors, managing indentation, and writing syntax-error-free source code.
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