[NFBCS] Some Access Questions for Intro CS Class

Tue Aug 4 20:48:06 UTC 2020

Yes, there is a python client that is used. If you do not already have
python installed, you can install it from here:
note: be mindful of the version of python you are installing. I would
ask your professor what version of python they are teaching for the
class, it can matter.

https://www.python.org/downloads/

So to give a little clarification since I was  a little confused how
you were using the repl. A repl, or read-eval printloop, which is a
very unhelpful name. is an environment that you can type code into one
line at a time and get immediate feedback. This is versus the standard
way of typing your code up into a text file, and then running that
file using python in this case.
I forget that repls can be web based, but traditionally, they are
commandline tools. Not sure if you have used the commandline much, but
all it is, is a window in which you can type in commands, to control
any aspect of your computer, and get text output. Command lines are
generally great for accessibility because it is just text input and
text output. The shell, or program that you are running your commands
in, can be more or less accessible though, and so you have to watch
out for that.
Anyways, the command prompt on windows is the default shell for
running commands. I have found the command prompt on windows to be the
most accessible shell for windows. It is the oldest, and the newer
shell you will probably here about is power shell. It is newer, takes
slightly different commands, and I have found to not be as accessible
as the command prompt.
Once you have python installed you should be able to press your
windows start key to open the start menu, and type command prompt.
Once the command prompt is open, you should be able to type
py
which will open the python repl in the command line. You can now start
typing python code, and execute it as you go one line at a time, so
you could enter in:
print('hello world')
which whill just print the phrase hello world to the screen.
To read the output, you can do like I mentioned before, control plus m
to turn on mark mode, and then standard reading keys apply, or you can
rout your cursor in jaws.

To rout your cursor in jaws, it depends on if you are using a laptop
layout, or a desktop layout. Basically do you have a num pad or not.
if you have a num pad, you can hold down 0 on the num pad and press
minus on the num pad to rout your cursor to pc, this will allow you to
read the command prompt window or most other windows that jaws may not
read for you line by line. to get out of that mode, press the plus key
on your num pad.
If you do not have a num pad, and you are using laptop layout, where
your jaws key is your capslock key, then press capslock plus left
bracket, it is just to the right of the p, which will rout jaws to pc,
and you can do capslock plus semicolon to get jaws back to pc cursor.

If you are not in mark mode, or routing your cursor, up and down arrow
in the command prompt, and most other shells, will move up and down
through your command history.
I recommend looking up some basic windows commands just to get used to
the command prompt.
Here are a few basic ones
dir /b
lists all files and folders in the current directory
cd
change to a new directory, so for example
cd documents
would take you into your documents. if you do not provide the path to
the place you want to change directories to, it just outputs your
current directory, which is given to you anyways by default.

Anyways, that will get you into a python repl, if you want to run some
python code in the command prompt, you could just right up a simple
text file in python, since that is all that code files are no matter
the language, and just change the extention, so perhaps you open
notepad and save your file and call it hello_world, you would want to
make sure the extention is .py
hello_world.py
would be the name of your file, make sure you get rid of the .txt.
then you can open up the command prompt, and you will have to cd to
where your python file is, so if your python file is in documents
cd documents
then run
py hello_world.py
which will run your python file that you just created.
So to clarify, just py by itself will open the repl for executing code
on the fly, and py followed by a filename with a .py extention will
run a python file.

This is how I learned python, since the alternative is to use
something more complicated such as py charm, eclipse, visual studio,
etc... which will provide you a user interface for basicly clicking a
button running your python code, and throwing any errors to a
sepparate window. This sounds great, and it is very helpful, but I
personally found trying to learn a complex development environment
with a screenreader while learning how to program was  more trouble
than it was worth. You have to learn a lot of keyboard shortcuts and
it help s to understand how code projects are structured. A
screenreader just makes it very hard and overwhelming in my opinion
when you are first learning. So I used ED Sharp, which is pretty
basic, for writing all of my code, and used the commandline to run my
code. ED Sharp is just a really fancy notepad.

I graduated with my bachelors last year, and I did not pick up a full
blown development environment until I was a few classes deep into the
computer science program.

On 8/4/20, Littlefield, Tyler via NFBCS <nfbcs at nfbnet.org> wrote:
> Hello Natalie,
> Please find my answers inline with your questions.
> On 8/4/2020 3:21 PM, Natalie via NFBCS wrote:
>> Hello:
>>
>> I'm new to the list and apologize if these issues have been explored
>> before.
>>
>>
>>
>> I will be taking a university intro CS class this fall and have been in
>> contact with the professor around what platforms will be used to
>> troubleshoot accessibility. Below is a list of some programs I was hoping
>> to
>> gather info about.
>>
>>
>>
>> *	PyCharm, a tool for writing Python code
> Someone on this list said this was accessible a few days ago, so I'm
> hoping that they'll provide some information on how they made it happen.
> I didn't manage much success with it, however when I tried last year,
> and the company only pointed me at forum posts as an explaination for
> how it can be made accessible. If this does not work, Notepad++ is a
> great alternative; you can have JAWS (or any screen reader) announce
> indentation levels for you.
>> *	GitHub, a widely used code hosting platform where students store
>> their code
>
>
> I have not ran into accessibility issues with Gitub. You will likely
> just be using the website to create and manage repositories; a lot of
> people use the visual Git GUI, but I would recommend you simply learn
> the command line version. There are cheatsheets all over the place and
> tutorials, and you will generally be much more productive with mastery
> over the command line interface to Git. Please feel free to ask
> questions here.
>
>
>> *	Repl.it, provides a way to embed live code samples into the course
>> web pages
>
> I usually do not see much accessibility with tools like this. Github has
> Gists which are fairly useful, if you are able to you might also simply
> request the code samples from your professor so you can run them yourself.
> This is not optimal so I'm hoping someone else has other ideas here.
>
> HTH,
>   Does anyone know if the above are screen reader accessible and if not, do
> you know of any good alternatives?
>
>
>
> I tried a quick test of repl.it and was able to see the code, but could not
> seem to access the output.
>
>
>
> Any info is appreciated. Thanks!
>
>
>
> Sincerely,
>
> Natalie
>
>
>
>
>
>
>
>
>
>
>
>
>
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>
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Skype: timothyjb310 at outlook.com

https://www.linkedin.com/in/timothybreitenfeldt/