Tree diagrams are used in computer science education to teach how to decompose expressions. By representing expressions as trees, students can learn the precedence and associativity rules necessary for an expressions’ decomposition. However, tree diagrams are just an illustration of those concepts, meant to display them with lines and circles. People with visual impairments or blind people may find it difficult, or even impossible, to understand them. The purpose of this bachelor project is to study the problems that visually impaired students encounter when following the Programming Fundamentals 2 course. After their study, the project aims to create a better experience for such students, and make visual simulations (e.g. tree diagrams) more accessible. Because we think that tree diagrams area powerful representation that can be useful also for visually impaired students, and in this bachelor project we aim to validate our hypothesis by studying how to present tree diagrams to them.
In this repository you find two folders: one containing the grammar that we developed (in Grammar) for our Domain Specific Language (DSL) and one containing the Accessible Expression Tutor tool (in Converter), a conversion tool that permits to display, convert, create, modify and export tree diagrams imported from the Expression Tutor, from a text file or from a specific TREE file.