Code readability is crucial for program comprehension, maintenance, and collaboration. However, many of the standards for writing readable code are derived from sighted developers’ readability needs. We conducted a qualitative study with 16 blind and visually impaired (BVI) developers to better understand their readability preferences for common code formatting rules such as identifier naming conventions, line length, and the use of indentation. Our findings reveal how BVI developers’ preferences contrast with those of sighted developers and how we can expand the existing rules to improve code readability on screen readers. Based on the findings, we contribute an inclusive understanding of code readability and derive implications for programming languages, development environments, and style guides. Our work helps broaden the meaning of readable code in software engineering and accessibility research.

The lack of accessibility awareness among industry professionals is one of the reasons for rampant inaccessible websites and applications. This problem is exacerbated by the industry norm of having a single place dedicated to accessibility in the documentation of UI frameworks, which makes accessibility difficult for developers to discover and implement as part of their workflows. This paper presents the Blended Approach (BA), a novel approach and framework for improving accessibility awareness through documentation. Unlike the conventional practice, it recommends sprinkling and repeating short snippets on accessibility throughout the documentation while linking developers to detailed explanations on the dedicated accessibility page. Thus, BA places the topic of accessibility on an equal footing as other common programming concerns such as performance, security, and UX. As a case study, we applied BA to the onboarding tutorial of Flutter, a popular UI toolkit. The positive feedback we received in our evaluation with 11 professional developers suggests BA can be a viable and effective approach.

COVID-19 accelerated the trend toward remote software development, increasing the need for tightly-coupled synchronous collaboration. Existing tools and practices impose high coordination overhead on blind or visually impaired (BVI) developers, impeding their abilities to collaborate effectively, compromising their agency, and limiting their contribution. To make remote collaboration more accessible, we created CodeWalk, a set of features added to Microsoft’s Live Share VS Code extension, for synchronous code review and refactoring. We chose design criteria to ease the coordination burden felt by BVI developers by conveying sighted colleagues’ navigation and edit actions via sound effects and speech. We evaluated our design in a within-subjects experiment with 10 BVI developers. Our results show that CodeWalk streamlines the dialogue required to refer to shared workspace locations, enabling participants to spend more time contributing to coding tasks. This design offers a path towards enabling BVI and sighted developers to collaborate on more equal terms.

The availability of numerous UI components, the promise of accessibility, and cross-platform support have made UI frameworks (e.g., Flutter, Xamarin, React Native) and libraries (e.g., wxPython) quite popular among software developers. However, their widespread use also highlights the need to understand the experiences of programmers with visual impairments with them. We adopted a mixed-methods design comprising two studies to understand the accessibility and challenges of developing interfaces with UI frameworks and libraries. In Study 1, we analyzed 96 randomly-sampled archived threads of Program-L, a mailing list primarily comprising programmers with visual impairments. In Study 2, we interviewed 18 programmers with visual impairments to confirm the findings from Study 1 and gain a deeper understanding of their motivations and experiences in using UI frameworks. Our participants considered UI development essential to their programming responsibilities and sought to acquire relevant skills and expertise. However, accessibility barriers in programming tools and UI frameworks complicated the processes of writing UI code, debugging, testing, and collaborating with sighted colleagues. Our paper concludes with recommendations grounded in empirical findings to improve the accessibility of frameworks and libraries.

There has been a growing interest in Computer-Supported Cooperative Work and Human-Computer Interaction to understand the experiences of programmers in the workplace. However, the large majority of these studies has focused on sighted programmers and, as a result, the experiences of programmers with visual impairments in professional contexts remain understudied. We address this gap by reporting on findings from semi-structured interviews with 22 programmers with visual impairments. We found that programmers with visual impairments interact with a complex ecosystem of tools and a significant part of their job entails performing work to overcome the accessibility challenges inherent in this ecosystem. Furthermore, we find that the visual nature of various programming activities impedes collaboration, which necessitates the co-creation of new work practices through a series of sociotechnical interactions. These sociotechnical interactions often require invisible work and articulation work on the part of the programmers with visual impairments.

Crowd testing is an emerging practice in Graphical User Interface (GUI) testing, where developers recruit a large number of crowd testers to test GUI features. It is often easier and faster than a dedicated quality assurance team, and its output is more realistic than that of automated testing. However, crowds of testers working in parallel tend to focus on a small set of commonly-used User Interface (UI) navigation paths, which can lead to low test coverage and redundant effort. In this paper, we introduce two techniques to increase crowd testers' coverage: interactive event-flow graphs and GUI-level guidance. The interactive event-flow graphs track and aggregate every tester's interactions into a single directed graph that visualizes the cases that have already been explored. Crowd testers can interact with the graphs to find new navigation paths and increase the coverage of the created tests. We also use the graphs to augment the GUI (GUI-level guidance) to help testers avoid only exploring common paths. Our evaluation with 30 crowd testers on 11 different test pages shows that the techniques can help testers avoid redundant effort while also increasing untrained testers' coverage by 55%. These techniques can help us develop more robust software that works in more mission-critical settings not only by performing more thorough testing with the same effort that has been put in before but also by integrating them into different parts of the development pipeline to make more reliable software in the early development stage.

People often use text in their drawings to communicate their ideas. For visually impaired people, adding textual information to tactile graphics is challenging. Labeling in braille is a laborious process and clutters the drawings. Audio labels provide an alternative way to add text. However, digital drawing tools for visually impaired people have not examined the use of audio for creating labels. We conducted a study comprising three tasks with 11 visually impaired adults. Our goal was to understand how participants explored and created labeled tactile graphics (both braille and audio), and their interaction preferences. We find that audio labels were quicker to use and easier to create. However, braille labels enabled flexible exploration strategies. We also find that participants preferred multimodal interaction commands, and report hand postures and movements observed during the drawing process for designing recognizable interactions. Based on our findings, we derive design implications for digital drawing tools.