Multimodal programming for dyslexic students

As the Web's role in society increases, so to does the need for its universality. Access to the Web by all, including people with disabilities has become a requirement of Web sites as can be seen by the passing of the Americans with Disabilities Act in 1990. This universality has spilled over into other disciplines, e.g. screen readers for Web browsing; however Computer Science has not yet made significant efforts to do the same. The main focus of this research is to provide this universal access in the development of virtual learning environments, more specifically in computer programming. To facilitate this access, research into the features of dyslexia is required: what it is, how it affects a person's thought process and what changes are necessary to facilitate these effects. Also, a complete understanding of the thought process in the creation of a complete computer program is necessary.

Dyslexia has been diagnosed as affecting the left side of the brain. The left side of the brain processes information in a linear, sequential manner. It is also responsible for processing symbols, which include letters, words and mathematical notations. Thus dyslexics have problems with the code generation, analysis and implementation steps in the creation of a computer program. Potential solutions to this problem include a multimodal programming environment.

This multimodal environment will be interactive, providing multimodal assistance to the user as they generate, analyze and implement code. This assistance will include the ability to add functions and loops via voice and receiving a spoken description of a code segment that has been selected by the cursor.