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Blind and Visually Impaired Community

Full History - 2018 - 12 - 13 - ID#a60rqf
7
is scratch programing language accessible? (self.Blind)
submitted by enzwificritic
hey everyone,

I have a windows 10 computer running NVDA. i want to get into programing. so is scratch programing language accessible for screen readers?

if not is python programing language accessible?

thanks.
pitermach 4 points 4y ago
No, Scratch is not accessible, because it runs inside Adobe Flash which doesn't have much of any accessibility support. On top of this if I understand correctly the scratch language is very visual and revolves around dragging blocks around to build a program. A while ago I remember seeing a scratch project that someone made to make Scratch accessible, but it offered a very small subset of features of Scratch (iirc it was just blocks to make a loop and play some Star Wars sounds) so it's not really worth looking at.
wheresmyglasses12 1 points 4y ago
Scratch is not accessible. Neither is MIT AppInventor. Both are block-based programming languages--in which you drag blocks around to write the code, and therefore, extremely visual.
kimthegreen 1 points 4y ago
If you are only starting, text editor and then compiling from command line should be fine in java. Python doesn't have to be compiled so it would be one step less. I am not familiar with scratch or accessible ides but maybe you could ask over at r/learnprogramming or r/computerscience. I hope there will be someone who can help you
Laser_Lens_4 1 points 4y ago
The languages themselves are just text so it's a matter of finding a code editor or IDE that's screen reader friendly. Windows 10 has Code Writer built in. That should be a pretty safe bet. Sublime is a third party code editor. Not sure if it will be fully compatible but it doesn't have anything particularly fancy or complex in the program. GitHub also has their own open-source code editor called Atom.

If all else fails you can write the simpler scripting and markup languages in a plain text editor. I don't recommend this though as they aren't optimized for code. It won't add in all the proper spaces and indentations and tags automatically for you. Those are important even without sight in order to keep your code organized and human readable.

If you're looking into doing a programming language like Java or C or C++ then you'll need an IDE in order to manage all the files. I don't want to recommend any of them since I know even less in this area and they seem to beyond the scope of what you asked about. The Arduino IDE isn't screen reader friendly. That's all I know. Or at least it wasn't back when I was playing with it.
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