Visual Debuggers and Deaf Programmers

We investigated how visual debuggers impact the performance of a Java programmer who is deaf or hearing impaired (DHI). In previous work, we had shown that despite having attended accessible java course, deaf programmers still perform poorer than their hearing counterparts in tasks like debugging. In this text, we show that visual debuggers present a hope of bridging the gap between the two populations. Typical debugging tasks were assigned to both groups who used industry standard IDE (Eclipse) and a Visual Debugger (JGrasp). Qualitative and quantitative analysis show advantages for the former.