Visual Programming Languages for Programmers with Dyslexia: An Experiment

A survey of 351 programmers, including people with dyslexia, has found that programmers with dyslexia are 33.4% more productive if they use a visual programming language. This paper presents important aspects of the profile of programmers with dyslexia, introduces the most commonly used textual programming languages (TPL) by a group of programmers, classifies the 31 most common visual programming languages (VPL) for the study group, and analyzes some technical and facilitation features to support the needs of programmers with dyslexia, in five of these languages that have been considered current and relevant for the purposes of this research. The visual programming language Alice has been selected as the language to be included in a comparison experiment with the Java programming language. Results of the experiment establish preferences and levels of effectiveness of Alice against the other language, according to the performance of a group of programmers who participated in the experiment.