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

盲人和视力受损的程序员与视力正常的程序员相比处于明显的劣势。这种缺点的原因是由于软件系统的复杂性急剧增加。该项目的目标是增加视障人士在软件开发领域的就业前景，更广泛地说，增加他们参与科学和工程的机会。为此，PI正在寻求通过提供旅行奖学金来提高SSBSE 2016会议上代表性不足的视障和盲人学生/研究人员少数群体的参与率，并赞助研究生竞赛。旅行奖将支持入选决赛的学生参加与生物启发技术应用有关的竞赛，以提高盲人和视障程序员对大型软件源代码的理解能力。比赛将于2016年10月8日至10月10日在SSBSE 2016（基于搜索的软件工程）会议上举行。 比赛的目标是利用SBSE社区的几位研究人员提出的新的可访问工具为开源系统提出有用的重构解决方案。PI将针对来自美国几所大学的盲人和视障学生提交一篇简短的论文到SSBSE 2016的挑战/竞赛轨道。这些论文将由至少三名评审员进行评审，然后由6名生物启发技术应用于软件工程的高级研究人员组成的小组将在会议期间评估决赛选手的结果。选定的SBSE研究人员还将提供一个讲座，围绕如何重构代码和重构的重要性很少有研究集中在评估提高程序质量对视障程序员的影响。其结果是，视障者越来越难以进入就业环境。目前，还不清楚视障程序员在使用屏幕阅读技术重构后是否能更好地理解源代码。如果代码重构技术可以帮助视障程序员更快地理解代码，这表明程序重构过程是一致的，对视障开发人员有益。对软件重构的更好的科学理解可能会导致构建无障碍工具，这些工具可以帮助视障程序员在改进与代码的模块化，可重用性和可理解性相关的质量因素后快速理解源代码。会议期间收集的视障程序员使用不同代码重构工具后的数据可以增强我们对盲人和视障程序员程序重构的好处的理解。

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.