Indiana School for the Blind Students Help Make micro:bit Coding Accessible to Screen Readers

Seven students at the Indiana School for the Blind and Visually Impaired (ISBVI) in Indianapolis helped develop a new accessibility feature for the micro:bit, the small educational computing device used to teach block-based coding in classrooms, Chalkbeat Indiana reported on September 21, 2026.

The project began last year, when the Micro:bit Educational Foundation contacted Shawn Humphrey, the school's media specialist. Students set to work editing Braille materials and testing whether a screen reader could read what the computer was displaying inside Microsoft MakeCode in a way they could actually understand. Seventh grader Arabella Zink, who is blind, used the tool to program micro:bit into a die, listening to the computer's voice as she dragged and dropped blocks on screen.

The resulting feature, built with the Micro:bit Educational Foundation and the open source educational coding tools Microsoft MakeCode and Blockly, makes the micro:bit compatible with computer screen readers. Because it was developed at the Blockly layer, the accessibility work extends beyond MakeCode to other coding programs built on Blockly. Students could also follow a physical outcome without sight: after shaking the micro:bit, they identified the number it landed on by counting the beeps it emitted.

The micro:bit is used in 85 countries to bring coding into classrooms, with lessons that include programming the device to play games such as rock, paper, scissors. Humphrey said the students were among the first in the world to try particular coding lessons using the accessible version of the tool. "It's one of the coolest things I've ever heard in education, having our students have that opportunity," he told Chalkbeat. "It has opened up coding for visually impaired students."

For the students involved, the work connects to longer-term ambitions. Maddilyn Peters, a seventh grader who helped develop the feature, said she is interested in coding so she can build robots, and would like to create animatronics of the kind seen in the horror film "Five Nights at Freddy's" — "but not hostile," she clarified.

The project illustrates a recurring theme in accessible technology development: users with disabilities acting as design partners rather than late-stage testers, and accessibility work done at the platform or component level reaching a much wider set of downstream products.