1. International Telecommunication Union ITU Workshop on Accessibility Bamako, Mali, 13 – 15 October 2009 Teaching Programming to the Blind Professor Arun Mehta President, BAPSI arun.mehta@gmail.com ITU Workshop on Accessibility/Atelier UIT sur l’accessibilité Bamako, Mali 13 – 15 October 2009

2. International Telecommunication Union ITU Workshop on Accessibility Bamako, Mali, 13 – 15 October 2009 2 Why? Programming is an excellent profession for the disabled: pays well, can be done via the Net Software that works for the blind also allows the illiterate to use the computer, including via the phone Secures the lifecycle of software products for the disabled

3. International Telecommunication Union ITU Workshop on Accessibility Bamako, Mali, 13 – 15 October 2009 3 Software Life-Cycle Identification of problem, solution design, coding, testing, maintenance In all of these aspects, except the coding, we like to involve the blind Why not in coding? A person whose life is improved by some software has lifetime commitment to it

4. International Telecommunication Union ITU Workshop on Accessibility Bamako, Mali, 13 – 15 October 2009 4 Examples of Great Blind Programmers Chris Hofstader, wrote the screen reader Jaws:”The greatest thing for me was the freedom to invent my future. I was building technology that the next day I could use myself” T.V. Raman wrote emacspeak, which leveraged emacs to make all computer functions accessible

5. International Telecommunication Union ITU Workshop on Accessibility Bamako, Mali, 13 – 15 October 2009 5 Resources http://www.blindprogramming.com/ bp-projects at freelists.org: Where members and friends of the Blind Programming list can discuss any programming-related projects they choose to collaborate together on http://www.panix.com/~kestrell/math.html http://www.panix.com/~kestrell/math.html seeks to make maths accessible to blind people

6. International Telecommunication Union ITU Workshop on Accessibility Bamako, Mali, 13 – 15 October 2009 6 Our Efforts I volunteered for two years at the National Association for the Blind, to teach programming in Visual Basic 6 My students were the only blind programmers on the Obi project (open source Daisy authoring software) Starting a web programming workshop with some blind people in Sri Lanka