Title of the talk: A paradigm shift in nonvisual programming
Speaker: Venkatesh Potluri, Assistant Professor, School of Information, University of Michigan, Ann Arbor
Date and time: 12 December 2024; 11:30 AM to 12:30 PM
Venue: Room No. 102, Seminar Hall, Department of Computational and Data Sciences
About the talk: Programming and software engineering are of keen interest to the blind or visually impaired (BVI) community, spurring accessibility enhancements to programming tools that simplify nonvisual code navigation and debugging. Though these enhancements improve the general accessibility of software engineering, they fail to address accessibility of specialised programming domains, such as user interface design, physical computing, and data science due to their reliance on visual code outputs. Consequently, these domains have become inaccessible to BVI developers. In this talk, Dr Venkatesh Potluri will present his work contributing new interaction techniques, access to data representations, and data-driven studies to make this visual information in widely-used programming tools accessible, thereby increasing accessibility of the aforementioned programming domains. He will conclude with recommendations drawn from BVI developer experiences, to ensure that the paradigm shift in programming ushered in by the recent adoption of Generative AI tools remains accessible.
About the speaker: Venkatesh Potluri is an Assistant Professor at the School of Information, University of Michigan, Ann Arbor. He graduated with a PhD in Computer Science from the University of Washington. His work has received several recognitions in top-tier conferences such as ACM ASSETS, and CHI, and he was recognised with a Google Lime Scholarship and an Apple AI ML PhD Fellowship. He examines accessibility barriers experienced by people who are blind or visually impaired through a combination of qualitative, data driven, and ethnographic research methods. He contributes datasets and real world systems to enhance these accessibility barriers.
