Since many of you are interested in visual programming, I wonder what your take is on accessibility issues. Motivated by this message found on today's Emacs News (https://lists.gnu.org/archive/html/emacs-devel/2020-09/msg00286.html) which basically says "Emacs is a great application platform for blind users like myself because it has a plain text user interface that can be adapted to voice I/O."

yeah, very good question. I've been thinking about this myself as well since I am working on a visual tool. Since 25% of users (I heard this number last week in a seminar about this topic, but can't find online docs to support this) of regular websites have some sort of (temporarily) accessiblity issues, this deserves attention. I can imagine that it should be possible to "tab" through a visual flow following the connections somehow. Keyboard access in general is needed offcourse. And also simply using color combinations with a good enough contrast ratio. But I wonder if a "nodes and wire" visual-model helps people who are blind, even if a screenreader would work properly with such interface. Would this give you a proper mental model of the visual flow? Would a different kind of flow work better? In my day job I have to take accessibility into account (the website/webapp I currently work on has users who are blind for example). But for my own flow-based-programming project I don't take this into account yet (I simply dont have the time and its a project without users anyway currently), but in the future I probablly will take it into account.

Super relevant link on the topic https://twitter.com/HilaCodes/status/1296138844677390336?s=20

Maybe more than an educational experiment than a real tool blind people can use, but some years ago a French teacher has developed a system to program Scratch with real LEGO blocks with Braille symbols on them so that blind people can create things with Scratch. I guess here you have real "tangible" programming! Here is some links (in French): https://www.lemonde.fr/blog/binaire/2017/05/22/apprendre-a-programmer-les-yeux-fermes/ https://manipulatelearnlooktouch.wordpress.com/mallt-algo-en-main-accessidvscratch/