VISION CODE: Coding for Young People with Vision Loss
Year Awarded
2024
Amount
€52,336.87
- Organisation:Trinity College Dublin (TCD)
- Audience:Post Primary - Junior Cycle
- Format:Non-formal Education
- Topic:Technology
Project Summary
VISION CODE teaches core coding skills to young people who are blind or have low vision. A partnership between Trinity College Dublin and Fighting Blindness, the learners, through a mix of in-person workshops and online, family-based instructional sessions, learn to code with Python using Micro:bit kits. They then co-create the kinds of workshops that will see them applying their coding skills in different disciplines, using coding as a gateway into wider STEM and STEAM activities.
As young people who use niche technologies like refreshable braille displays or screen readers, young people with vision loss may want to ‘hack’ their current technologies to better suit their needs or to build new accessible tech solutions. Yet their opportunity to do these things may be hampered by exclusion from mainstream formal and informal coding instruction (Mountapmbeme et al, 2022) or exclusion from burgeoning coding communities of their peers because of their disability.
There are 27,373 people in Ireland between the ages of ten and twenty with sight loss (CSO, 2022). Of those at university, only 55 (21.1% of low-vision students) do STEM subjects (AHEAD, 2021). VISION CODE is an expanding programme that uses the multidisciplinary nature of Trinity and its EDI (Equality Diversity and Inclusion) supports to draw volunteer skills from engineering, physics, genetics, geography, medical devices, digital humanities into coding areas that the young people would like to pursue.
VISION CODE is built on an initial informal pilot with four families trialled by Fighting Blindness over the past few years.