Here I hope that we can get some ideas as to how scratch can be more accessible. I know very well what a handicap is like: My grandmother is legally blind by macular degeneration, cataracts, myopia, and glaucoma, and my uncle was born with cerebral palsy.
I know that I have shown scratch to both of them, and there were two problems:
1) Because the interface is geared to 'look good,' it wasn't very visible to my grandmother.
2) Because of the click-drag-drop basis of scratch scripting, my uncle found he couldn't do it nearly as fast as necessary.
In streak, I have implemented a Blind Mode, in which everything is bigger, and some colours have been changed to increase contrast.
However, I have not yet done anything to help mobility impairment.
Here, I would appreciate it if you would post your ideas about what the scratch team can do to make scratch more accessible.
Hopefully the they will take some of your ideas into consideration.
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One way to make Scratch more accessible to deaf and hard of hearing users would be to closed caption the "how-to" videos. Since MIT participates in Google's pilot automatic captioning for YouTube videos program, maybe the Scratch videos could be included in that.
Here is a link to the Google Blog article on Automatic Captioning:
http://googleblog.blogspot.com/2009/11/automatic-captions-in-youtube.html
(P.S. this is not really tektek writing, it's his mom who does not have her own Scratch account.)
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tektek wrote:
One way to make Scratch more accessible to deaf and hard of hearing users would be to closed caption the "how-to" videos. Since MIT participates in Google's pilot automatic captioning for YouTube videos program, maybe the Scratch videos could be included in that.
Here is a link to the Google Blog article on Automatic Captioning:
http://googleblog.blogspot.com/2009/11/automatic-captions-in-youtube.html
(P.S. this is not really tektek writing, it's his mom who does not have her own Scratch account.)
Good idea! I'll try to include this in the next release of the streak documentation... And we'll hope that the scratch team finds this post, so they can follow suit!
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