The College Board's AP Computer Science Principles (CSP) content has become a major new course for introducing K-12 students to the discipline. The course was designed for many reasons, but one major goal was to broaden participation. While significant work has been completed toward equity by many research groups, we know of no systematic analysis of CSP content created by major vendors in relation to accessibility for students with disabilities, especially those who are blind or visually impaired. In this experience report, we discuss two major actions by our team to make CSP more accessible. First, with the help of accessibility experts and teachers, we modified the entire Code.org CSP course to make it accessible. Second, we conducted a one-week professional development workshop in the summer of 2018 for teachers of blind or visually impaired students in order to help them prepare to teach CSP or support those who do. We report here on lessons learned that are useful to teachers who have blind or visually impaired students in their classes, to AP CSP curriculum providers, and to the College Board.

One of the challenges to working with canines is that whereas humans are primarily vocal communicators, canines are primarily postural and behavioral communicators. It can take years to gain some level of proficiency at reading canine body language, even under the best of circumstances. In the case of guide dogs and visually-impaired handlers, this task is even more difficult. Luckily, new technology designed to help monitor canines may prove useful in helping handlers, especially those with visual impairments, to better understand and interpret what their working partners are feeling or saying.

Training animals is a process that requires a significant investment of time and energy on the part of the trainer. One of the most basic training tasks is to train dogs to perform postures on cue. While it might be easy for a human trainer to see when an animal has performed the desired posture, it is much more difficult for a computer to determine this. Most work in this area uses accelerometer and/or gyroscopic data to produce data from an animal's current state, but this has limitations. Take for example a normal standing posture. From an accelerometer's perspective, it closely resembles the "laying down" posture, but the posture can look very different if the animal is standing still, versus walking, versus running, and might look completely different from a "standing on incline" posture. A human trainer can instantly tell the difference between these postures and behaviors, but the process is much more difficult for a computer.

Our goal in creating the Graph SKetching tool, GSK, was to provide blind screen reader users with a means to create and access graphs as node-link diagrams and share them with sighted people in real-time. Through this effort, we hoped to better include blind people in computing and other STEM disciplines in which graphs are important. GSK proved very effective for one blind computer science student in courses that involved graphs and graph structures such as automata, decision trees, and resource-allocation diagrams. In order to determine how well GSK works for other blind people, we carried out a user study with ten blind participants. We report on the results of the user study, which demonstrates the efficacy of GSK for the examination, navigation, and creation of graphs by blind users. Based on the study results, we improved the efficiency of GSK for blind users. We plan more enhancements to help meet the need for accessible graph tools as articulated by the blind community.

Combinatorial graphs, often conveyed as node-link diagrams, figure prominently in Computer Science and other Science, Technology, Engineering, and Mathematics (STEM) disciplines. Unfortunately, they are most often inaccessible to blind students and professionals. This paper introduces GSK, a self-contained Graph SKetching tool that allows blind and sighted people to easily create, edit, and share graphs in real-time using interaction mechanisms (mouse, keyboard, monitor, screen reader) that are standard for them. GSK was successfully used by a blind Computer Science student and his sighted instructors to create and access graphs specific to his automata theory and operating systems courses. Our hope is that GSK will enable more blind STEM students and professionals to actively participate in their disciplines by providing them and their sighted colleagues with a cross-collaboration tool that allows them to share graphs just as easily as they share text and word processing documents.

As a research community, we currently know very little about the challenges faced by blind software developers. Without knowing what those challenges are, the community cannot effectively address these challenges. In this paper, we describe the first exploratory empirical study, where we conducted eight interviews with blind software developers to identify aspects of software development that are a challenge. Our results suggest that visually impaired software developers face challenges, for instance, when using screen readers to look up information when writing code. We discuss a variety of implications, including that blind software developers need additional support in discovering relevant software development tools.