Addressing Accessibility for Blind and Visually Impaired Live Coders

Live coding environments that use text input and audio output have the potential to be accessible and expressive
for Blind and Visually Impaired (BVI) people. However, little is known about their compatibility with the assistive
technologies BVI people use, including screen readers and braille displays, or the experiences of BVI live coders. To
address this gap, we formed FiLOrk, a live coding ensemble made up of five BVI high school students at the Filomen
M. D’Agostino Greenberg Music School (aka the Fil’). We introduce the goals and open questions guiding FiLOrk and
report initial findings from our experiences designing a learning environment and building a custom, collaborative text
editor, text.management.