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Despite the interest in equity, little research has considered students with disabilities in PreK-12 computer science education. The 2022 Computer Science Teachers Association and Kapor Center facilitated Landscape Survey of PreK-12 CS Teachers, which had over 2200 responses, gives us new insight. There were few significant differences between the experiences and perceptions of teachers with disabilities and those without. Accessibility was the least taught computing concept. Furthermore, teachers reported on a variety of barriers that students with disabilities encounter related to structural barriers, students choosing note to take CS, and teachers' perceptions of student ability. The findings point to the need for interventions related to resources, outreach, and policy. 

The introduction of block-based programming has gradually changed the landscape of programming education, particularly for school children. Block languages today, however, have serious technical barriers to students with disabilities. For example, block languages are generally not screen reader accessible, incompatible with braille, and contain serious problems for users with motor impairments. No student with a disability should ever be denied access to learning computer science and they do not have to be. To help rectify this, we present a new approach to the design of block languages called Quorum Blocks. Quorum Blocks uses a custom hardware accelerated graphical rendering pipeline that takes into account how screen readers and other devices work under the hood. We discuss these technical details and demonstrate that accessibility support can be fully achieved without meaningfully losing either the look of modern blocks or their visual output. We present the results from focus groups that highlight the barriers students faced with a variety of disabilities when using the first version of Quorum Blocks. We focus especially on challenges with low vision users, screen reader users, or those using no mouse and only one hand to type. Block languages built using either our techniques, or on top of our libraries, would become accessible out of the box. 

Many scientific fields of study use formally established evidence standards during the peer review and evaluation process, such as Consolidated Standards of Reporting Trials (CONSORT) in medical research, the What Works Clearinghouse (WWC) used in education in the United States, or the APA Journal Article Reporting Standards (JARS) in psychology. The basis for these standards is community agreement on what to report in empirical studies. Such standards achieve two key goals. First, they make it easier to compare studies, facilitating replications, through transparent reporting and sharing of data, which can provide confidence that multiple research teams can obtain the same results. Second, they establish community agreement on how to report on and evaluate studies using different methodologies. The discipline of computer science does not have formalized evidence standards, even for major conferences or journals. This Dagstuhl Seminar has three primary objectives: 1. To establish a process for creating or adopting an existing evidence standard for empirical research in computer science. 2. To build a community of scholars that can discuss what a general standard should include. 3. To kickstart the discussion with scholars from software engineering, human-computer interac- tion, and computer science education. In order to better discuss and understand the implications of such standards across several empirical subfields of computer science and to facilitate adoption, we brought together participants from a range of backgrounds; including academia and industry, software engineering, computer- human interaction and computer science education, as well as representatives from several prominent journals. 

The impacts of many human factors on how people program are poorly understood and present significant challenges for work on improving programmer productivity and effective techniques for teaching and learning programming. Programming error messages are one factor that is particularly problematic, with a documented history of evidence dating back over 50 years. Such messages, commonly called compiler error messages, present difficulties for programmers with diverse demographic backgrounds. It is generally agreed that these messages could be more effective for all users, making this an obvious and high-impact area to target for improving programming outcomes. This report documents the program and the outputs of Dagstuhl Seminar 22052, “The Human Factors Impact of Programming Error Messages”, which explores this problem. In total, 11 on-site participants and 17 remote participants engaged in intensive collaboration during the seminar, including discussing past and current research, identifying gaps, and developing ways to move forward collaboratively to address these challenges.