An Empirical Study of Blindness and Program Comprehension

Blind programmers typically use a screen reader when reading code whereas sighted programmers are able to skim the code with their eyes. This difference has the potential to impact the generalizability of software engineering studies and approaches. We present a summary of a paper which will soon be under review at TSE that investigates how code comprehension of blind programmers differs from that of sighted programmers. Put briefly, we found no statistically-significant differences between the areas of code that the blind programmers found to be important and the areas of code that the sighted programmers found to be important.