Apple has announced that it is now teaming up with leading educators to bring its Everyone Can Code program to schools for blind and deaf communities in the U.S. Starting this fall, the company plans to bring accessible coding to schools supporting students with vision, hearing, or other assistive needs, working with the schools to tailor the lessons to leverage Apple’s accessibility technology to augment the curricula as needed, including providing additional tools and resources like tactile maps for use by non-visual learners.
For this collaborative effort, Apple has brought together engineers, educators, and programmers from various accessibility communities to take the company’s Everyone Can Code curricula and adapt and augment it for those with assistive needs, allowing them to learn to write code using Apple’s Swift language. Apple has published an initial list of eight participating schools in California, New York, Florida, Illinois, Massachusetts, and Texas, and reports that students at those schools are already eager to participate in the program.