MAKING TURING MACHINES ACCESSIBLE TO BLIND STUDENTS

In this paper we describe how we tried to make the well-known JFLAP Turing machine simulator accessible to blind students taking a theoretical computer science course. Software accessibility is an important topic for both legal and ethical reasons: in our case, however, we also wanted to make the accessible software usable by blind students in cooperation with the other students, in order to encourage the integration of the blind students within the rest of the class. For this reason, the accessible version of the JFLAP Turing machine simulator that we developed is as much similar as possible to and fully compatible with the original one. In the paper, we also report some very satisfactory preliminary validation results that indicate how the new software can really make Turing machines accessible to blind students.