[nfbcs] Accessible interactive coding platforms?

[Mabry, Jessie]

Hi everyone,

I am collaborating with a national organization that establishes coding clubs for middle school and high school students. We would like to find accessible platforms and activities that will allow blind students to participate. The current curriculum allows students to program in Scratch, Earsketch, Khan Academy, Codesters, and Actimator. Some of these platforms teach universal languages that would be useful to learn, like Python and JS, but the interface itself is just unusable with a screen reader, and the lessons involve drawing and animation. Then there are platforms like Scratch where the language is proprietary on top of the inaccessibility. I'd prefer something accessible that will also teach a language students can use later on, unless that's just not as practical for very young children. The other condition is that the platform can't involve downloadable components, since many of the clubs take place in libraries or in schools with restricted computers.

So I have a few questions I'm hoping some of you can help me with.

First, I've heard that Quorum's web compiler is undergoing major enhancements and should soon be able to do a lot of what the downloadable platform can do. Have any of you used Quorum or tried its tutorials? Do you think it would be worthwhile to develop some activities with it to incorporate into clubs for blind and sighted students?

Second, I saw Codecademy and W3Schools mentioned on the list as potentially accessible platforms, but when I tried the tutorials, neither Jaws nor NVDA would read what I typed in the program editor in real time, though I could read it below the editor afterward. I'm using the latest versions of both screen readers with Firefox. It's particularly frustrating, because that seemed like the only thing I couldn't do. I could read all the text and examples, but couldn't practice in the editor. Have other people experienced the same issue, or is it something to do with my settings? I just hear "blank" every time I should hear a character.

Are there other usable platforms that you know of? I've heard of block languages that are being made accessible for young students, and SwiftPlayground is supposed to be VoiceOver-friendly.

Finally, for those of you who were exposed to coding at a young age, what kinds of activities did you like to do with it?

Thanks in advance for your feedback.

Jessie Mabry