Evidence supports that reducing cognitive load (CL) improves task performance for people of all abilities. This effect is specifically important for blind-and-low-vision (BLV) individuals because they cannot rely on many common methods of managing CL, which are frequently vision-based techniques. Current accessible "solutions" for BLV developers only sporadically consider CL in their design. There isn't a way to know whether CL is being alleviated by them. Neither do we know if alleviating CL is part of the mechanism behind why these solutions help BLV people. Using a strong foundation in psychological sciences, we identify aspects of CL that impact performance and learning in programming. These aspects are then examined when evaluating existing solutions for programming sub-tasks for BLV users. We propose an initial design "recommendations" for presentation of code which, when followed, will reduce cognitive load for BLV developers.

翻译：证据表明，降低认知负荷（CL）能够提升不同能力人群的任务表现。这一效应对盲人与低视力（BLV）个体尤为重要，因为他们无法依赖许多基于视觉的常见认知负荷管理方法。当前针对BLV开发者的无障碍“解决方案”在设计中对认知负荷的考量较为零散，无法确认这些方案是否有效缓解了认知负荷，也不清楚缓解认知负荷是否构成这些方案帮助BLV人群的内在机制。基于心理科学的坚实理论基础，我们识别了影响编程表现与学习的认知负荷关键维度，并以此评估现有面向BLV用户的编程子任务解决方案。我们提出一套初步的代码呈现设计“建议”，遵循这些建议将有助于降低BLV开发者的认知负荷。