I’ve come up with a new word that exemplifies what I go through every time I attempt to learn something new or technical these days while blind. The lack of accessibility for blind students at various educational resources such as Treehouse and Khan Academy makes the entire experience absolutely frustrating.
Frustrating education = frustrucation.
I signed up with Treehouse last year when yearning to finally get into iOS development. My ultimate goal is to learn Swift and Python/JavaScript so I can market myself as an Accessibility Engineer, making it possible for me to fix issues I encounter rather than just pointing at them and telling people to fix it. Even knowing how to code would allow me to add that extra push to help educate the developers on exactly what is technically wrong with an issue and give them precise instructions on how to solve them.
Treehouse seemed promising, being a link sent to me by my Department of Rehabilitation counselor. The pages had mostly correct semantic structure, I managed to sign up for a free trial, plus I found the overall pricing to be quite reasonable for the tracks and education courses being offered. I navigated my way to the iOS Development course and started at square one, learning Swift. The training was accomplished in a series of videos and Code Challenges, plus each video had a transcript available along with Teacher’s Notes, links to further education on concepts within the Apple documentation, and forums where you could post questions to other students and to the teacher.
The teacher himself was pleasant to listen to and explained clear syntax while he was typing, something absolutely essential to learning how to code. The Code Challenges themselves were fun and interesting, and I usually tend to excel at learning by doing, and consisted of an accessible text field that contained code I could easily copy and paste into Xcode and edit. I’d complete the challenge task, copy and paste it all back into the text field and activate the Check Work function. It took a bit to understand the dynamic content arrangement on the site, but got the hang of it pretty quickly after some basic Heading navigation and exploration.
All was fine until I started getting into the more advanced concepts. The Code Challenges stopped working. I would go through them over and over again, following the instructions and writing the correct code, but kept getting work errors. A certain challenge wanted me to create a function with specifically named parameters that took specific types, but the parameter names were not given, so I figured I was being given the chance to come up with them myself. Lo and behold, that was not the case at all.
Having tried and failed multiple times to submit the work, I posted to the student group for that particular code challenge. A student said that the parameter names were given and that I should see them in the challenge text, but I reiterated that I was blind and using a screen reader to interact with the text. We ended up at an impasse until he actually typed out the list of instructions. Treehouse developers had put an unordered HTML list in the Heading tag. The entire Code Challenge text was wrapped in a heading tag, and not only is this breaking a bunch of WCAG guidelines, but automatically renders the list invisible to all screen readers since they are not expecting to read a list with a heading tag.
I completed the challenge and fired off a bug report to Treehouse. They came back first not quite understanding what I was pointing out, and annoyingly it took several back and forth emails with me explaining the Exact problem to the CSR handling my ticket. Finally getting to a manager, I received much the same input and ignorance of accessibility practices. I again told them Exactly what was going wrong, about the headings, the list within the headings, and how they should lay out their Code Challenge templates. They talked to their web designer finally and came back agreeing with me, offering a few solutions in the meantime that ultimately proved useless. By this point in all the feedback I had long since past my free trial date and was already into paying for their services, so I had them refund me immediately and put my account on hiatus until they fixed their issues.
A few months go by and they actually come back to me with a comprehensive list of all the changes they made based on my audit. I didn’t only tell them about the heading issue, but gave them a full and scathing accessibility report, chastising them for ignoring the blind and visually impaired while they had a fully robust set of features implemented for the deaf and hard of hearing. If Treehouse went through the process of making transcripts for all their videos, surely they could spare a tiny amount of time to make their site accessible set up to WCAG standards. Teachers who don’t talk about syntax while they are typing and rely wholly on visuals are also terrible.
During the iOS challenge fiasco, I decided to try other tracks on Treehouse. JavaScript is the next language I need to learn, and quickly jumped out of that track since the teacher wasn’t explaining what he was typing. “Ok, let’s write our first program!” *sounds of typing* “Ok, that looks pretty good!” *cue Marco slamming head on laptop* I brought that up along with the fact that none of the on-screen animations/info were called out in the transcript. Generally, audio description can be added into a transcript to make content fully available to the deaf-blind, but again, since blindness was completely ignored by Treehouse, attempting to find syntax in the transcript was a bust. I can’t verily type that program unless I know what to type, let alone not have any context whatsoever!
I’m now back in Treehouse months and months later, paying for the subscription again, but now running into something else entirely. The content itself is becoming dramatically inaccessible. iOS Development, at least for beginners, starts with tossing objects into Interface Builder and then associating those objects programatically to their functions that have been written in Swift. Manipulation of these objects happens visually, lots of clicking and dragging, errors and ambiguity called out with different colors, and the hoops that I have to jump through just to get any of this done and connected in Xcode using VoiceOver are numerous and anxiety-inducing. I’m listening to the videos, memorizing and understanding the concepts without the ability to actually test and play with them on my own, and am completing the quizzes from just reiterating rote knowledge with no actual physical knowhow.
Why is there not a similar course with all concepts done programmatically? How about a course in building an interface with code alone, negating Interface Builder and going through the same learning Swift track with the understanding that the final users will never actually see your content but only interact via VoiceOver. That the students themselves cannot see what you are doing in your video but know that it can be done entirely in code and just need some extra help making that jump from the Swift basics to placing the right kind of code in the correct area and file within the project. How to make things accessible from the get-go considering that the app I was supposedly building in the Make Your First App course would actually build on my phone, but I’d never be able to actually test or use it since none of the Accessibility flags had been called out nor had any views made accessible so the whole process is moot from the beginning.
This is the frustrucation at work. This exists not only online but in person as well with such companies as General Assembly, any of the other Bootcamps who don’t know how to handle blind students, and with general books and resources such as Learn Code The Hard Way. We need more accessible education along with continuing adult education resources, plus with courses that don’t just check off the checkboxes of WCAG standards, but are understandable and usable, not putting up additional barriers of inaccessible interaction between myself and the content that I want to learn.