Nonvisual tool for navigating hierarchical structures

Abstract

The hierarchical structure of a program can be quite complex. As such, many Integrated Development Environments (IDEs) provide graphical representations of program structure at different levels of abstraction. Such representations are not very accessible to non-sighted programmers, as screen readers are not able to portray the underlying hierarchical structure of the information. In this paper, we define a set of requirements for an accessible tree navigation strategy. An implementation of this strategy was developed as a plug-in to the Eclipse IDE and was tested by twelve student programmers. The evaluation of the tool shows the strategy to be an efficient and effective way for a non-sighted programmer to navigate hierarchical structures.