A Visually Impaired Coder's User Story

Summary

A user story is a description of a system, from the point of view of a user of the system. Here give the user story a person who's blind attending a software boot camp.

For background see User Stories and Acccessibility. Every Thursday (18:30 to 19:30 UK time) there's a zoom TeX Hour. Details here.

Once upon a time …

This month on the Visually Impaired coders list Jana Schroeder wrote

I joined this list a month or two ago because I was enrolled in a 12-week computer coding boot camp after being laid off from my non-tech job of 16 years. I have found the people on this list to be extremely responsive and encouraging. Most recently, I have been following with interest the thread about coding after losing one's sight. Although I have always been blind, some of the advice has been relevant to me as well.

… not all was happy …

Jana had some difficulties on the coding boot camp.

Unfortunately, I have not been able to get a good enough grade at the end of the first of three modules in the boot camp program to progress further. The academy I attend is very supportive, but they have not had a blind student before. They are willing to give me another chance, but before that, we are looking to try to figure out some different things to do next time so I can be successful.

… making the best of things …

Jana understood the problem and asked for help.

I would be interested in creating a website similar to Applevis where info could be posted about IDE's and other coding tools that would be categorized and given ratings regarding how accessible they are. With permission of the posters, I would also take useful information shared on this list and in other venues for blind coders so they could be found by search engines and organized.

… and help was offered.

Timothy Breitenfeldt wrote

I am absolutely willing to help contribute to such a project, and I think a zoom call with those on the list who are interested would be a great idea. As I mentioned above, I think that ideally, we should be thinking beyond just the problems we have as blind programmers, and consider a larger community driven resource for other subjects.

The whole story

Every good story has characters, twists, turns and human drama. Are you a developer of mathematics accessibility software? If so perhaps you should read the whole story, from beginning to end.

Perhaps in this user story there's something that helps you create better software. Software that works better for people who have a disability.

Or perhaps you'd like to help Jana, Timothy and all the other visually impaired coders. Take a look at the whole story. There are many ways you could help.

The whole story is about 18 messages. You'll find links at the foot of here.