On Thu 07 Nov, Lynn Tully wrote:
> One of our PhD supervisors has asked for advice as to what difficulties a
> dyslexic student might face in wrting a computer program and what measures are
> available to assist. the student is in year 2 of her PhD in the area of
> Software Techniques for Digital Systems and an integral part of her research
> involves some Fortran programming. The student has told the supervisor she is
> unable to write a program as she is dyslexic.
I am dyslexic too and writing accurate code can be a problem, but many of
the problems are due to inherently unfriendly systems.
My experience relates to BBC BASIC and HTML on Unix, DOS and ADFS:
Typos:
Programming commands/tags/file-names
mis-spelt/wrong case/ hence untraceable pointers
difficulty in proof-reading these mistakes
Memory overload:
Too many interlinked bits to hold in a relational structure in memory
Inability to retain ideas and pick-up a task after a break
Things that help:
Breaking a large task into smaller parts (PROCedures in BASIC,
separate pages in HTML) that can be tackled as a unit and then
slotted into the overall task.
A Unix shell that completes directory/file names on pressing <tab>
(Our Durham site had this, I wish Demon Internet supported it too!)
Graphic Interface on the (HTML) Editor - Click a button to add the
Commands/<tags> and put the cursor in the right place ready to type
additional text etc.
(Where commands come in pairs this is especially useful)
Forgiving de-bugging software that accurately flags errors and
suggests corrections would also help.
Regards
Ted
--
Ted Pottage. Chairman, BDA (British Dyslexia Association) Computer Committee
Webmaster for -> http://www.bda-dyslexia.org.uk/
we're A1 at BETT'97 too.
%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%
|