Re: [racket-users] Programming for blind students - sample code needed

[Emmanuel Schanzer]

Oh yeah, I’ve even had the opportunity to speak to T.V. Raman about it! Cool 
stuff, but it’s solving a different set of problems.

While it's a wonderfully powerful tool, Emacs is poorly suited to our 
educational context. We work in schools where teachers are nervous about the 
jump from Word to GDocs. Emacs is essentially a non-starter there. And while 
Emacspeak is a great way for visually-impaired users to use Emacs, it was never 
designed to address some of the working-memory challenges faced by 
visually-impaired programmers.

But don’t worry - we’re not ignoring it. In fact, some of the audio cues it 
introduced are pieces we plan to stea^H^H^Hintegrate into this tool as well. :)

Thanks, Chris!

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Re: [racket-users] Programming for blind students - sample code needed

[Christopher Lemmer Webber]

schanzer writes:

> Hi all - happy new year Racketeers!
>
> For the last two years, we've been thinking about making programming
> accessible for differently-abled students. We're focusing first on students
> with visual and sensorimotor impairments, by building an editor that allows
> students to navigate and modify the AST itself (rather than text). The
> editor implements a subset of Advanced Student Language, and we're looking
> to run some user studies in the weeks ahead. If you're curious, you can
> turn on your screenreader and play with it
> . Note:
> Editing is Not Yet Done (expect bugs!), but we're ready to test navigation
> for now.

Heya, this is really great!

BTW, it's a bit of a compexity jump, but I wonder if you know about
Emacspeak?

  http://emacspeak.sourceforge.net/

It has the usual high learning curve of Emacs, so I think your new
editor project is a great entry point.  But the advantage possibly long
term of using Emacspeak is you can do a lot of powerful things (it aims
to be a "complete audio desktop" in emacs) since emacs is so text-based
and has many features.  And of course, you can edit Racket code too :)
So it may be a good future-path moving from your project to this.

You're probably aware already... but there it is, if you aren't!

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[racket-users] Programming for blind students - sample code needed

[schanzer]

Hi all - happy new year Racketeers!

For the last two years, we've been thinking about making programming 
accessible for differently-abled students. We're focusing first on students 
with visual and sensorimotor impairments, by building an editor that allows 
students to navigate and modify the AST itself (rather than text). The 
editor implements a subset of Advanced Student Language, and we're looking 
to run some user studies in the weeks ahead. If you're curious, you can 
turn on your screenreader and play with it 
. Note: 
Editing is Not Yet Done (expect bugs!), but we're ready to test navigation 
for now.

*That's where you come in.* 

I'm looking for sample programs that meet the following criteria:
- Should be restricted to Advanced Student Language, but without local, case, 
shared, match-patterns, or any quoted, quasiquoted or unquoted expressions
- Should have at least 3-4 levels of nesting, somewhere in the program.
- Should be at least 40+ LOC
- Should have at least one expression that is evaluated only if *multiple* 
conditions are satisfied

Got any files, projects, or classroom assignments lying around that might 
fit the bill? Feel free to email programs, suggestions, etc to 
schan...@bootstrapworld.org. 

Thanks in advance!
Emmanuel

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