Accessibility of Collaborative Programming for Blind and Visually Impaired Developers

Abstract

The profession of software engineering is highly collaborative. Developers must perform synchronous activities and are expected to be aware of each other's actions as they make asynchronous contributions to the source code. In a mixed-ability team involving sighted as well as blind and visually impaired (BVI) developers, effective collaboration requires accessibility considerations and improvements across four broad areas. First, the programming environment that comprises programming and collaborative software has to be made accessible. Second, the graphical information has to be adapted to the audio medium to support BVI developers' full participation in collaborative activities. Third, the growing popularity of cross-platform frameworks within product teams and their claims of creating accessible applications has to be questioned as they can have a bearing on BVI developers' workflows and the experiences of BVI end users. Finally, since all collaboration is centered around contributing maintainable source code, we need to consider BVI developers' readability preferences to ensure ease of programming on screen readers. This dissertation reports on four studies that investigated the areas mentioned above.

I first conducted a qualitative study to investigate the logistics of collaborative programming in mixed-ability workplaces. I identified various sociotechnical challenges that impacted communication, help-seeking, and collaboration between BVI and sighted developers. It revealed the extra articulation work BVI developers have to perform to modify the established work practices.

Drawing on the first study and existing research on group work, I implemented CodeWalk, a set of features to improve shared awareness during code walkthroughs. CodeWalk demonstrated that we can reduce the burden of additional work, specifically coordination work, on BVI developers by designing inclusive collaborative tooling.

Next, I conducted an empirical study to examine the accessibility of UI frameworks and libraries, which are growing in popularity across software engineering teams. I report how these enable BVI developers to upskill themselves as front-end and full-stack developers but also lead to breakdowns in code authoring, debugging, and collaboration. The study also yielded insights regarding setup work, which is the work that goes into finding, configuring, and installing accessible frameworks and tools.

I conclude with a study on what constitutes code readability for BVI developers. Code reading is a fundamental asynchronous programming activity critical to long-term software maintenance. I contribute a taxonomy for what is good code formatting on screen readers vs. GUIs to support better code readability in mixed-ability teams. I also derive recommendations for IDE tooling to reduce the effort that BVI and sighted developers need to expend toward maintaining code quality.

The primary contributions of this dissertation are the various forms of additional work BVI developers have to perform across synchronous and asynchronous collaboration. I offer recommendations for organizing information across GUIs and screen readers for accessible collaboration in mixed-ability contexts.