Topic by Oscar 2024-03-19 22:18:26

  • Oscar
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Hello.
I'm taking a class called Computer Science Principles next year in 10th grade as part of my electives. There are 4 classes to it, this is just the first.
Anyways, the class uses Python for 70% of the year, and HTML for the other 30%.
I was in there today, doing some testing with the website that they have the online textbook in, just to see if it was accessible and it was.
But I was looking at some of the lessons, and quite a few of them used Turtle graphics with Python.
Now, this isn't my biggest problem because as far as I know I can still code it, but I obviously won't be able to see what it does with said code after I'm done with it on the screen.
So I think that will be Okay.
But my big question is that we're also going to be doing pair programming.
I've heard from a few people that Pair Programming is pretty difficult when you're blind. Now, as I understand it, Pair Programming is where you have 2 people working at one computer, 1 codes, the other is looking at the code that you write, and makes suggestions and things like that while the other person is coding.
Now, for obvious reasons, I won't be able to make suggestions while someone is coding in real time, which may or may not defeat the whole purpose of it.
And there's probably other things that would make it harder that I don't know of.
So I'm wondering if I can't do pair programming at all or what I can do about it.
Thank you.

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Reply by camlorn 2024-03-19 23:13:27

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You can't do pair programming effectively.  You can do it if the other person watches and is very very good at communicating with the blind guy and doesn't just "over there" and shit.  There are things in VSCode which are supposedly accessible which supposedly let you share like Google Docs.  I'd have not used them, I don't expect them to be efficient.  For what little it is worth I do not believe pair programming to be common in the industry anymore.  It's one of those things that sounds great on paper and teachers love it but in practice you'll never be required to do it if you don't want to do it in the real world.

As for turtle graphics find out what they have you doing, print thing to the terminal instead.  If it is fundamentally graphical and not like drawing text or sorting lists or something, it'd be reasonable to ask for alternative assignments and is also what you'd have to do anyway because there's no other way.  Turtle graphics or even graphics in general, though, is yet another thing you don't have to code in the real world if you're doing Python--that module basically exists only for education at the high school good-vibes level.

I'd be more worried about the html because they may spring CSS on you or "make the graphic follow the mouse" or something. You might want to see if they'll talk to you about what the specific  assignments are ahead of time to find out just how much of an issue this is going to be.  If there is no way to get alternate assignments because it's too graphical...them's the breaks, college will be better because in college we don't bullshit and do actual coding...but.

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Reply by amerikranian 2024-03-19 23:19:07 (edited by amerikranian 2024-03-19 23:20:30)

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Quick response here because I'm short on time:
Suggest an alternative to turtle. Do more printing type of applications. Your teacher can easily come up with some. Finance? Tip calculator? basic calculator? Hangman? Guess the number? Etc. They'll still teach you what the turtle module does for your peers and are frankly more useful than drawing pictures. This goes for anyone, not just you.


I'm afraid pair programming is going to be a bust. I had to do it in college, scroll through my topics and you'll find me asking a similar thing, but at your level just see if your teacher will cooperate with you and make you do an alternative assignment or something. Short answer: It doesn't work without a lot of frustration on somebody's end. The longer answer is that yes, you kind of can't contribute in realtime (the best you can do is pseudo realtime--setup liveshare on two PCs and read as they type), but this still suffers because you'll have to split your attention three different ways: One for listening to your screen reader, one for thinking about what you hear, and one for talking to your partner/propose stuff. Yes. It sucks.

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Reply by TheTrueSwampGamer 2024-04-11 23:29:33

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Oscar, what website are you using? If I know which one it is, please, please find every single little accessibility issue, and continue my legacy. The past 3 years or so I've been working with myPLTW directly to get a lot of accessibilty issues fixed, like talked to some of the VP's of departments and stuff and I still find issues to this day.

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Reply by leibylucw 2024-04-12 03:08:06

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Echoing similar sentiments here as above: figure out what their using turtle for and print to stdout where possible. Paired programming in the traditional sense won't work, but knowing some Git, opening a pull request and a subsequent code review on GitHub would be the closest comp that's legitimately something you'd do in industry.

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