Program editor design for accessibility 
Supervisors: Professor Michael Kolling & Dr Neil Brown 

Most program editors use text for editing. Screen readers can be used with text-based editing by 
visually-impaired programmers, but the syntax can often be confusing. Whitespace and punctuation 
are highly significant in program text but often omitted or have poor interaction with screen readers. 
Block-based editors rely less on syntax, so are potentially more suitable for accessible programming - 
but blocks are often manipulated only through drag-and-drop interactions which are ill-suited to 
visually-impaired users. Our existing Stride editor combines keyboard interactions with structural 
programming, but does not yet have support for accessibility tools. This project would look at 
improving the Stride editor to work well with accessibility, especially for vision-impaired users, 
including the design, implementation and evaluation of the editor with actual users.
informatics-phd-projects-2022-23