Coding Accessibility: Becky

Foreign My name is Becky vivintendo in Scotland I started playing video games when I was three I am a teen artist and I use outrage and rebuild professional art packages to paint pictures using my eyes I also have a YouTube channel called Dad Gay’s girl hi guys this is eye gaze girl also known

As Becky I would like to show you my world this is how I build things I love it today I am going to show you my saddle into the woods made in greater I use adaptive technology practically all of the time as it is the daughter My independence We still have the majority of designers and programmers as young perfect non-disabled men in order to produce more in more inclusive technology we need people to help and understanding of the diversity of what it means to be human When I was growing up my family fostered one of the things we did was offer dress bike care so I was aware that there was a community of people who could be better represented and better supported by all of the advances in technology the first time I became interested in

Gaze tracking was when I was a teacher and a deputy of a special school and several of the children had cerebral palsy basically they couldn’t speak they were non-speaking but they spoke through their eyes i gaze technology allows me to control the software interfaces and it means

That this is one of the few things I can do totally independently I first learned about accessible technology for gaming from special effects especially thanks to charity that started because my background is in education and Technology the young people I was working with were asking if

I could help them to be able to play video games I decided to set up a charity that had therapists and had technical Specialists and we were able to do our best to actually carry out an assessment and help those individuals that’s why we started and the idea was to spread what

We learned around the world I was working for startup and getting a little bit bored so I was looking at this technology how to help people with disabilities to solve everyday problems I got in touch with special effect to find out if they might have things that they wanted a volunteer programmer to

Work on they told me they’d wanted for a long time to work on a better interface for Minecraft for a lot of their players I mind special features mean that I can combine Mouse movement and keep presses on their keyboard at the same time I tested these versions of the imod in

The face that Herman gave close to you my feedback Okay Becky how’s it going this week uh what have you been working on since last week I am working on excluding fruit that is bad to eat it is taking me a long time to find the right IDs as I have to print them out

Is there a better way to get the IDS okay um do you want to show me how you’re getting it I mine was built as a fork of the optical project which is writtenberg I called Julius Sweetland published to GitHub I initially started building something

From scratch but it was a very long way from what Tiki already offered it was a no-brainer to jump on and build on top of that excellent work please can we work on choosing a weapon today okay so this is the attacking mod can you get us to that new function choose

Weapon and then we can make some changes to it together how about you write the next line of code and so we’ll want uh ID for the crossbow it’s really important for children adults teenagers to be part of the culture that is around them you can explore you can be creative you can

Socialize a lot of people just go into Minecraft to hang out with their friends so it’s really a window into a world in which you can do all of the things that your friends are doing we’re not going to return anything so that’s a void okay are you happy with

What’s happening in this method now good brilliant let’s make this commit here and then we’ll push it to GitHub okay congratulations thank you and I will see you next week thank you we started working more closely together in Kirsty staff and choosing me to become a nightmare developer

I am now quoting some new modes myself to be incorporated into the imine interface in the future I am loving it it makes me feel valued and respected I’ve had many rows in keeping head of competing at the University of Indy it’s a teaching team we invited Becky to

Give a seminar to our undergrad students I then asked Mickey what did she want to do when she grew up and Becky said she would like to do competing and I said well have you thought about doing the competing degree at Sunday assures that it is possible to overcome

The barriers of disability and achieve it the top levels of Academia it helped me to realize what I could potentially achieve in a workplace and it gave me a way to give something back to the disabled Gaming Community it has been amazing and it has allowed

Me to show the world just what someone with severe disabilities can achieve I hope to open up many more opportunities for disabled people in the world of gaming and communication if Technologies don’t think about the diversity of the end user we are going to have a bigger

Gap between what people could achieve in what they can achieve we wanted our mind to be an example to the games industry to developers to show this is how you can make a mainstream game more accessible so that it was at the same time as giving a lot of people

Hopefully a lot of pleasure it was also giving a lot of developers some food for thought and an example that they that they might be able to bear in mind the next time that they develop a game it’s been really rewarding to see the value that can be added from not just a

Single piece of assistive technology about the potential that you can then unlock in an individual to add value back to their community and to build on that and take it further I hope that people can see that with emerging Technologies and a willingness of attitude from those in positions of

Authority that so much could be possible in the future and they’re truly inclusive world could be a reality for disabled people like me thank you