Making Blockly Universally Accessible

Posted by Neil Fraser, Chief Interplanetary Liaison

We work hard to make our products accessible to people everywhere, in every culture. Today we’re expanding our outreach efforts to support a traditionally underserved community -- those who call themselves "tlhIngan."

Googles Blockly programming environment is used in K-12 classrooms around the world to teach programming. But the world is not enough. Students on QonoS have had difficulty learning to code because most of the teaching tools arent available in their native language. Additionally, many existing tools are too fragile for their pedagogical approach. As a result, Klingons have found it challenging to enter computer science. This is reflected in the fact that less than 2% of Google engineers are Klingon.

Today we launch a full translation of Blockly in Klingon. It incorporates Klingon cultural norms to facilitate learning in this unique population:

• Blockly has no syntax errors. This reduces frustration, and reduces the number of computers thrown through bulkheads.
• Variables are untyped. Type errors can too easily be perceived as a challenge to the honor of a students family (and we’ve seen where that ends).
• Debugging and bug reports have been omitted, our research indicates that in the event of a bug, they prefer the entire program to just blow up.

Get a little keyboard dirt under your fingernails. Learn that although ghargh is delicious, code structure should not resemble it. And above all, be proud that tlhIngan maH. Qapla!

You can try out the demo here or get involved here.

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Make Your Websites More Accessible to More Users with Introduction to Web Accessibility

Eve Andersson, Manager, Accessibility Engineering

Cross-posted with Google Developers Blog

You work hard to build clean, intuitive websites. Traffic is high and still climbing, and your website provides a great user experience for all your users, right? Now close your eyes. Is your website easily navigable? According to the World Health Organization, 285 million people are visually impaired. That’s more than the populations of England, Germany, and Japan combined!

As the web has continued to evolve, websites have become more interactive and complex, and this has led to a reduction in accessibility for some users. Fortunately, there are some simple techniques you can employ to make your websites more accessible to blind and low-vision users and increase your potential audience. Introduction to Web Accessibility is Google’s online course that helps you do just that.



You’ll learn to make easy accessibility updates, starting with your HTML structure, without breaking code or sacrificing a beautiful user experience. You’ll also learn tips and tricks to inspect the accessibility of your websites using Google Chrome extensions. Introduction to Web Accessibility runs with support from Google content experts from September 17th - 30th, and is recommended for developers with basic familiarity with HTML, JavaScript, and CSS.

There’s a lot to learn in the realm of web accessibility, and a lot of work to be done to ensure users aren’t excluded from being able to easily navigate the web. By introducing fundamental tips to improve web usage for users with visual impairments, Introduction to Web Accessibility is a starting point to learn how to build accessibility features into your code. Registration is now open, so sign up today and help push the web toward becoming truly universally accessible.

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