Designing Educational Materials for a Blind Arduino Workshop

There is an overall shortage of accessible educational material available for blind and low vision learners. This shortage is especially pronounced in the domain of electronics, where the materials are historically visually-rendered and complex. To address this, we took a qualitative approach to designing and evaluating tactile graphics and textual descriptions when building circuits. To gain an understanding of their efficacy, we provided a circuit description [3], component diagrams (Figure 4), and a tactile schematic [9] as educational materials in a Blind Arduino workshop with eight participants and interviewed these participants about their experience. Our research revealed the complexities of designing these materials: our tactile component diagrams were usable and helpful, whereas our tactile schematics and circuit descriptions presented learning barriers in a microcontroller workshop. We provide recommendations for future research to design accessible materials to teach electronics.