Tactile coding – bridging the digital divide for visually impaired learners

Opinion piece by Jean Greyling in The Herald, 4 September 2023

The digital divide is a harsh reality that divides people roughly based on their access to technology, and thus the advantages it brings.

Those on the wrong side of the divide often suffer from a lack of access to information, bad health care, and limited access to government services.

As a Christian this is why I am in academia, and specifically Computing Sciences – I believe it is a calling to make a difference through education. Over the years I became acutely aware that many learners had very low awareness of lucrative career opportunities in our discipline. The digital divide literally kept them away from well-paid careers.

When Byron Batteson came up with his own honours proposal to develop a mobile game that would introduce learners to coding without the need for computers, electricity, or the internet, he had no idea of the impact that this would have over the next 6 years.

Through the apps TANKS, RANGERS, and BOATS literally 1000’s of learners (and teachers) were “carried over” the digital divide in relation to computer programming. In partnership with the Leva Foundation, the Tangible Africa movement is now active across the continent as well as in Europe.

Inclusive education & ensuring all have equal access, is a shared objective that Tangible Africa and the Bona uBuntu Programme have. They strive to ensure that partially sighted and blind children in our province have access to quality education & equal opportunities. ?

Their primary focus is working with various stakeholders to ensure that these children develop their full potential and participate in an inclusive society, at home, school and in communities. The words “full potential” and “inclusive society” indicate a strong synergy between Bona Ubuntu and Tangible Africa.

So, when the two organisations started talking, it was a no brainer what could be done – adapt the Tangible tools to be accessible to the visually impaired!

Bona Africa was born.

As a first awareness drive a group of cyclists took the message to the Karoo to Coast Mountain Bike Challenge in September 2022. Funds were raised through a crowd sourcing drive for Bona uBuntu to start developing tools.

Robyn Fick, Bona uBuntu Programme coordinator and her team started exploring various ways to convert the TANKS game into a fully accessible game for both blind and low-vision children to play. For the blind learners, it was obvious that the tokens used for the TANKS coding game had to be tactile & include braille, while the coding challenges on the phone had to be made concrete and tactile.? Thus, she partnered with Jonathan Kruger from Craft3D, and together they developed various relevant 3D designs.

For the partially sighted learners, the emphasis was on contrast, colour, and shape – which would enable them to use their remaining vision to play. Roslyn Tait from Tangible Africa redesigned the interface of the TANKS app, to provide a high contrast mode, and much bigger tokens were printed.

Furthermore, supporting materials were adapted to ensure they are accessible. Specially designed grid mats are being produced in Soshanguve, black cloths for high contrast come from Mthatha and other tactile objects are manufactured by a local Gqeberha couple.

While the tools were being developed, facilitators from Tangible Africa attended sensitivity training by the Bona uBuntu staff. For many, this was a very emotional experience to, for the first time, understand the world of the visually impaired.

During the Tangible Africa Mandela Day coding event, three local blind learners participated alongside the other learners. For Robyn Fick, this was one of the highlights of her career, “No one knew they were different. They just played and enjoyed themselves. It was inclusion in action and was amazing to witness.”

Over the next few weeks, the Bona Africa project will go national, in partnership with the South African Democratic Teachers’ Union. Across all 9 provinces, 16 workshops will be presented to teachers who work at schools for the visually impaired.

During these workshops they will be equipped to effectively use the tactile tools and TANKS app to introduce learners to the wonderful world of coding.

You may ask, “But can a blind person become a software developer?”

A recent study involving 64?000 developers on the StackOverflow platform, found that 1 out of every 200 developers are blind.

Florian Beijers, a blind developer, who uses screen reader software explains: “How I code does not actually differ all that much from how sighted developers code. I’ve learned how to touch type, and mentally conceptualize my code so that I can work with it just like others do.”

So what the Bona Africa project does, is as real as it gets! We have a vision that many visually impaired developers will result from this project.