Document Type

Conference Paper

Publication Date

2026

DOI

10.1145/3770762.3772669

Publication Title

SIGCSE TS 2026: Proceedings of the 57th ACM Technical Symposium on Computer Science Education V.1

Volume

1

Pages

603-609

Conference Name

SIGCSE TS 2026: The 57th ACM Technical Symposium on Computer Science Education, February 18-21, 2026, St. Louis, MO, USA

Abstract

The growing demand for computer professionals, driven by the expanding Information Technology industry, has led to numerous inclusive computing education efforts. These efforts have even included blind or visually-impaired (BVI) students, who are being increasingly encouraged to pursue education and a career in computing, despite the visually-oriented nature of the discipline. Extant literature has predominantly focused on identifying and addressing the accessibility barriers faced by BVI students to promote more inclusive learning environments. While few studies have also investigated the accessibility of computing education from the perspectives of BVI learners and instructors, these have been primarily situated in the Global North contexts; there is still a knowledge gap regarding the teaching and learning experiences of instructors and BVI students, respectively, in resource-constrained Global South contexts, where accessibility awareness and inclusion efforts are at nascent stages. To fill this gap, we conducted an interview study with 15 participants in India, where we inquired with BVI students, instructors, and BVI professionals, regarding their challenges, experiences, and needs pertaining to computing education. The study revealed that BVI students face significant difficulty in comprehending the instructional materials, the instructors often deal with courses not progressing as planned despite meticulous preparation, the students heavily depend on peer learning for grasping computing concepts, and they need additional support for managing the cognitively-burdensome task of simultaneously learning computing concepts and screen readers. Informed by the findings, we offer recommendations to improve computing curricula for BVI students and discuss self-learning assistive tools to supplement accessible computing education.

Rights

© 2026 Copyright held by the owner/authors.

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International (CC BY 4.0) License.

Original Publication Citation

Nayak, A. K., Prakash, Y., Ferdous, M. J., Jayarathna, S., Lee, H.-N., & Ashok, V. (2026). Examining inclusive computing education for blind students in India. In T. T. Yuen, D. Joshi, J. Prather, E. Fouh, & N. Kiesler (Eds.) SIGCSE TS 2026: Proceedings of the 27th ACM Technical Symposium on Computer Science Education V.1 (pp. 603-609). Association for Computing Machinery. https://doi.org/10.1145/3770762.3772669

ORCID

0009-0000-9992-9706 (Nayak), 0000-0001-8593-327X (Prakash), 0000-0002-9065-0968 (Ferdous), 0000-0002-4879-7309 (Jayarathna), 0000-0002-2183-1722 (Hae-Na Lee), 0000-0002-4772-1265 (Ashok)

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