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ADVANCING ACCESSIBILITY IN COMPUTER PROGRAMMING EDUCATION

Date: Thursday, March 21^st

Room: Grand AB

Time 2:20pm-3:00pm

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Presenters

Katrina Best

CATIS, COMS, CVRT, TVI

Accessible Coding Product Manager

kbest@aph.org

Michael McDonald

Senior Software Engineer

mmcdonald@aph.org

Lydia Smith

Product Engagement Manager

lsmith@aph.org

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Learning Objectives

Research
Survey
Solutions

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Survey Data

Coding and Technology Needs Survey

Distributed at conferences, APH newsletter

n = 63

General Education Technology Instructors – 8 (12.70%)
Special Education Service Providers – 17 (26.98%)
Blind or Low Vision Technology Professionals – 38 (60.32%)

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Student Tech

What are your students' preferred methods for accessing digital information?

Braille display – 85.71%
Screen reader – 85.71%
Digital magnifier – 42.86%
Switches and switch interface – 14.29%
Reading fluency tools (e.g., Immersive Reader) - 14.29%
Other – 14.29%

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Braille in Coding

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Screenreaders

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Professional CS Training

Method of Training
K-12 Classes	8.33%
College Courses	66.67%
Coding Bootcamp	16.67%
Self-Taught	75.00%

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Coding Languages

JavaScript – 63.64%
Python – 63.64%
HTML/CSS - 63.64%
Java – 36.36%
SQL – 36.36%
C# - 27.27%
C++ - 18.18%
Other – 54.55%

Most common response was Bash
Perl, shell script, Go, PHP, Kotlin, Rust, XML, G-Code

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IDEs and Interfaces

The most commonly used IDE reported by computer science professionals was VSCode (no student responses).
60% of professional coders prefer a combination of CLU and GUI (20% prefer only CLU, and 20% prefer only GUI)

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What do teachers need?

71.43% of teachers said they do not feel successful in supporting their students in a technology or computer science class.
42.86% of teachers said they felt Very Unprepared to support a student in a technology or computer science class (compared to 14.29% that said they felt Very Prepared)

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Unanswered Questions

Do your students use braille displays in coding? (2 responses, 1 Y, 1 N)
Is computer science part of the required curriculum in your state? (3 responses, 3 N)
What source do you use for your coding curriculum? (3 responses, 1 school district, 1 self-created, 1 other “None”)
What IDE do students use?

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Code Jumper

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https://codejumper.com/

Originally designed by Microsoft and Further developed by APH, Code Jumper allows you to put coding into the hands of ALL students and is 100 percent accessible for students who are considered to be blind or visually impaired. Code Jumper consists of 5 different types of pods that resemble the shape and size of a computer mouse and serve different purposes that you will find out when diving into the 19 lessons that are available on the Code Jumper website https://codejumper.com under the resources tab. Here you can find the Code Jumper Puzzles, Microsoft Learn Course, The Code Jumper User Guide, and the 19 lessons I just mentioned as well as the Code Jumper Assessments, and the Code Jumper Training Videos.

Question for the Chat

If you have completed all 19 of the Code Jumper lessons with your students, please ‘clap’

What is your favorite Code Jumper resource?

Have you tried Code Jumper with your students yet? Why or why not?

If you have tried Code Jumper what do you like about it?

What do your students like about Code Jumper?

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What’s Next?

Our Code Jumper fans out there in the audience (and in the classrooms) we have BIG news for you!!! Our busy elves in our APH workshop have been hard at work on developing a ‘text-based’ version of Code Jumper! So now, when you open the CJ App you will be able to navigate to the ‘Code’ Button which will display everything on the screen in the programming language called Python!

What is Python and Why did we choose it? Python is one of the world’s most popular programming languages! It is extremely versatile and can be used in many real-world situations. A text-based language, the readability and clear layout of its code make Python less daunting for beginners!

Question for the Audience

Have you tried out the Python programming language?

What tools do your students currently use to learn Python?

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Demo

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Link: https://forms.office.com/r/qzvZ2kjzQY