Blind teaches blind children programming to live in smart cities

Ragheed Ayoub

Among the giants talking about our cities, how they can become smart by adopting technology at the Kitcom conference currently taking place in the capital Doha, Nick Peterson sat the blind explaining to the public how with simple equipment that blind or autistic children can learn programming principles.

The only blind
Swede Peterson lost his sight in a bicycle accident when he was 13 years old to grow up, he says, a consumer of technical services provided by those who do not know what blind people suffer to adapt to their products.

This is where he learned information technology at York University in Toronto, Canada, where he emigrated to become the only blind person at IBM in Canada.

"Imagine being the only blind person among the 200 employees of the largest technology company," Peterson told Al Jazeera.

Love and work
Peterson moved to the United States in 2009 to meet his wife, Lisa, who is blind and hearing-impaired.

In 2014, they founded their company, Miles Access, which specializes in training people with special needs in the use of technology, and trained many children and adults in the use of technology to lead a normal and independent life.

Smart cities with blind programmers
Peterson attended the KITCOM conference in Doha at the request of Qatari SuperWire, a company specializing in technology for people with special needs, to showcase some of the technologies that help to integrate blind children in the technology world easier.

He holds a handful of tools that seem at first glance like brightly colored games. "These tools are called Code Jumps," he said. "They are produced by American Printing House in collaboration with Microsoft to teach blind students the principles of programming."

Each of these tools forms a code string, and by combining them, an integrated code is created. For example, the tool in yellow sentence repetition in the programming language or what is known as loop (orange) to the sentence condition "if .. then" (IF. THEN). When the student logically collects these tools, the connected computer executes the program sentence so that a certain song is heard several times or several sentences or release a sound in a particular case so that the student knows the validity of the code generated by hearing.

“I'm delighted to be able to come and showcase this wonderful tool that helps students understand programming,” says Peterson. "Imagine the vast IT field where there are no blind programmers because there are no programming tools to learn for this category."

In conclusion, Peterson hopes to increase the number of programmers who are blind to make more programs and tools to help this group to engage in smart cities that we will inhabit in the future.