xJFLAP

xJFLAP is an accessible version of the JFLAP software, mainly inspired by the possibility of applying the cooperative learning approach while teaching finite state automata and Turing machines to sighted and blind students. Software accessibility is an important topic for both legal and ethical reasons: in our case, however, we also wanted to make the accessible software usable by blind students in cooperation with the other students, in order to encourage the integration of the blind students within the rest of the class. For this reason, the accessible version of the JFLAP Turing machine simulator that we developed is as much similar as possible to and fully compatible with the original one. Moreover, we wanted to allow the users to use both the accessible and the non accessible interface of the application, and to let the two interfaces communicate to each other.

• The xJFLAP executable
  • xJFLAP makes use of other Java software: JFLAP (of course), FreeTTS and a multi-language version of FreeTTS.
  • We do not currently maintain xJFLAP anymore and we do not guarantee that xJFLAP always works as expected. We hope, however, it can be useful to you.

xJFLAP has been developed in collaboration with Leonardo Rossi and Riccardo Bernini, and Gianluca Apollaro.

If you like xJFLAP, use it. If you use it, please talk and write about it. If you write about it, please cite the following paper.

• • Pierluigi Crescenzi, Leonardo Rossi, Gianluca Apollaro. Making turing machines accessible to blind students, SIGCSE, 167-172 , 2012.