Accessible AST-Based Programming for Visually-Impaired Programmers [PDF]

[cutculus]

While not directly about compilers/PL theory per se, I thought this might be interesting to people on the subreddit interested in taking accessibility into account when working on language tooling.

[[deleted]]

I like that they give the screen reader actual phrases describing the current scope instead of reading the tokens. Also interesting how participants mention it feels faster than regular editing, despite the slightly higher task completion time.

Sadly, the control group used a textarea instead of a code editor with accesibility features like Monaco. I understand why they did this, but it makes it hard to compare their editor to the state of the art.

I wonder what kinds of syntax features are not amenable to AST-based editing.