Software Development and Data Science Converge for Blind Students
The Disability Resource Center is highly committed to ensuring access is achieved to all students, employees, and visitors. Although a valued and highly utilized resource for the university, the DRC is regularly tapped for external partnerships and educational opportunities to collaborate and share accessibility best practices to help the community become a more accessible space.
Jeff Bishop, IT Accessibility Consultant, partnered with Blind Information Technology Specialists (BITS). In partnership with BITS, American Printing House, and several Microsoft employees, the team used their partnership to its fullest by tapping into the talents of each group to spend six months teaching over 140 blind and visually impaired students in the Python programming language. According to its site, “Python is an interpreted, object-oriented, high-level programming language with dynamic semantics.”
Due to the visual components of teaching programming skills, the team needed to create a process of teaching Python using an accessible platform along with a teaching style that could lead students through the process of learning. Because of the added level of complexity, a unique teaching style with accessibility in mind was the top priority.
“I played both a role of a facilitator and student,” explained Bishop. “Participating in this journey elevated my skills to bring abilities to my work to impact students and processes in our department using automation. This was all about empowering people and giving them the tools they need to succeed in their academic future.” This process allowed the students understand what their previous roadblocks were in attempts to learn Python. “I learned that it was accessibility, not coding itself, that was the problem for me. I was finally able to learn Python, and I have thoroughly enjoyed it,” stated a student from the program. “Not only that, but I am doing research with the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) this summer, and my project involves machine learning in Python. It has been a steep learning curve for me, but this class and how it was adapted for accessibility helped me to receive the Python foundation that I need to make my work possible.”
In addition to the incredible accessibility efforts made for these students, Smith-Kettlewell Eye Research Institute, in partnership with the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign invited several blind students to participate in a fully immersive data science course using a newly developed Python library called Maiddr (Multimodal Access and Interactive Data Representation). This library allows blind individuals to understand charts, graphs, and other data science visualizations using sonification, braille or text. These students were shown the capabilities of this library, instructed in its use, and were given real world examples and programming assignments to master the library at a basic level. “It is inventions like this that will change the landscape for teaching data science in the classroom,” explained Bishop. “Because the Maidr library is based on Pandas, Seaborn and NumPy, you can inject full accessibility by simply adding a few lines of code to truly make data visualization accessible and inclusive for all students.”
The information learned from this partnership, teaching visually impaired and blind students how to use Python will be a case study for how the DRC can inject similar processes for students in the future. The goal is always to make learning as accessible as possible, giving everyone, regardless of ability/disability, the same opportunities to learn and be successful.