Are Visual Programming Tools for Children Designed with Accessibility in Mind?

Visual programming tools provide a visual programming and execution environment in addition to other visual resources and tools appropriate for creating visual programs for a particular domain. Several visual programming tools have been created for teaching children to program at an early age such as Scratch, ScratchJr, Pocket Code, Code.org and Kodu. Research on the use and benefits of these tools as aids for children to learn academic and non-academic skills has reported positive results. However, children with learning disabilities including those also diagnosed with autism spectrum condition are left out of this area of research. This paper builds on a previous study on the accessibility of Scratch by inspecting other existing visual programming tools targeted at children to determine whether they have features that mitigate accessibility difficulties similar to those that were identified in Scratch. The paper contributes to knowledge by providing an insight into the features of popular VPTs that are likely to cause difficulties for children with learning disabilities and autism spectrum condition.