While differently-abled students make up as much as 20% of the undergraduate population, very few educational IDEs take into account the needs of such students. For example, some neurodiverse (ND) students may struggle to comprehend the syntactic structure of programs, a preliminary to understanding deeper issues of semantics and design.

In this project, we extended the Scamper Educational Scheme IDE with a pair of explicit Abstract Syntax Tree (AST) visualizations whose nodes are screen reader-friendly and keyboard-interactive. In designing those ASTs, we also considered how these seemingly-visual interfaces could also be made accessible to blind and low-vision (BLV) students.

Preliminary explorations suggested that Scamper became appropriately navigable using a keyboard alone, with screen readers able to interpret interface components, tree structure, and navigation pathways. Users better understood code structure and more easily maintained context while navigating programs with ASTs.