Hello,
I am blind, and am using a screen reader to access the computer. Basically what the screen reader does is installs hooks, or watches window messages and translates based on those. It translates the text on the screen (window titles, captions, etc), to synthesized speech so I understand what’s going on.
I just recently started playing with scratch. I’m an administrator on a list that is used for discussing topics of relevance to the blind community, such as accessibility. Upon downloading scratch, I noticed three huge things. First, your sb files can not be written with a normal text editor, which removes the possibility of switching editors. Second, the editor that I found with scratch doesn’t even show a menubar to my screen reader, it’s just a blank window. Third, and of least importance is the help type. Adobe has been said to be accessible, but I among quite a few others haven’t had much luck reading pdf documents.
I’m mostly worried about the second problem, as adobe can be dealt with.
Is there any possible chance in making this accessible? I know a bunch of blind teens who are interested in programming, but for whom learning something like c/c++ at a lower level would be the end of their programming dreams. I’d like to be able to turn them on to scratch, if at all possible. My goal would be to make it as painless as possible, wihle still teaching them the fundamentals and techniques of basic programming. Then they could progress to something lower level, or another script-like language.
Thanks,
Sorressean
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