A Support to Increase the Participation of Blind and Visually-Impaired Researchers and Students to the Search-Based Software Engineering Conference- October 8-10, 2016, Raleigh NC

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Blind and Visually-Impaired programmers are at a steep disadvantage compared to sighted programmers. The reason for this disadvantage is due to the dramatic increase in the complexity of software systems. The goal of this project is to increase the employment prospects for visually impaired persons in the field of software development and more generally their participation in science and engineering. To this end, The PI is seeking to increase the participation rate for the under-represented minority group of visually impaired and blind students/researchers at the SSBSE2016 conference by offering travel fellowships, and to sponsor the graduate students competition. The travel awards will support selected student finalists in the competition related to the application of bio-inspired techniques to improve the understandability of large software source code for blind and visually impaired programmers. The competition will be organized at the SSBSE2016 (Search Based Software Engineering) conference from October 8th until October 10th, 2016. The goal of the competition is to propose useful refactoring solutions for open source systems using new accessible tools proposed by several researchers from the SBSE community.The PI will target blind and visually impaired students from several universities in the US to submit a short paper to the challenge/competition track of SSBSE2016. These papers will be reviewed by at least three reviewers then a panel of 6 senior researchers in the application of bio-inspired techniques to software engineering will evaluate the results of the finalists during the conference. Selected SBSE researchers will also provide a lecture around how to refactor the code and the importance of refactoring Very few studies have focused on evaluating the impact of improving the quality of programs on visually impaired programmers. The result has been an increasingly inaccessible employment environment for visually impaired persons. At present, it is unknown whether visually impaired programmers comprehend source code better after refactoring using screen reading technology. If code refactoring techniques help visually impaired programmers comprehend code more quickly, it would suggest that program refactoring processes are consistent and beneficial for visually impaired developers. A better scientific understanding of software refactoring may lead to build accessibility tools that could help visually impaired programmers in quickly understanding source code after improving quality factors related to the modularity, reusability and understandability of the code. The data, collected during the conference, from the visually impaired programmers after using the different code refactoring tools could enhance our understanding of the benefits of program refactoring for blind and visually impaired programmers.