The Sonified Omniscient Debugger: A Program Execution and Debugging Environment for Non-Sighted Programmers Built from the Ground up

Comprehending and debugging computer programs are inherently difficult tasks for sighted programmers. These tasks are even more difficult for non-sighted programmers, who must rely exclusively on audio-based representations of programs. The current state-of-the art approach to building program execution and debugging environments for non-sighted programmers is to retrofit existing visual environments with screen readers. Because of intrinsic differences in the ways humans process audio (serially) and visual information (in parallel), we argue that effective programming technologies for the non-sighted must instead be built from the ground up. To illustrate what such an environment might look like, we present the Sonified Omnicient Debugger (SOD), whose auditory cues were derived from empirical studies in which sighted proxies performed audio-based program comprehension tasks. In an experimental study involving sighted proxies, we compared SOD to (a) an identical environment with auditory cues from a state-of-the-art screen reader, and (b) an identical visual environment. Our results show that, for program comprehension and debugging tasks, SOD is significantly more effective than the environment with auditory cues from a state-of-the-art screen reader.