Joan Francioni

Joan is currently a Full Professor of Computer Science at Winona State University, a state university in southeastern Minnesota. She began teaching in 1983, two years after receiving the first Computer Science Ph.D. degree awarded by Florida State University. Although teaching has always been her main interest in academics, she served as the Department Head at the University of Louisiana in Lafayette for five years and has enjoyed doing research throughout her career as well.

One of the very exciting parts about her work these days is a research project that combines teaching with the study of a particular computer-human interface. Specifically, she is working on an NSF-sponsored project to figure out effective ways to teach computer science to students who are blind or have severe visual disabilities. As part of this project, Joan and Ann Smith, the Co-PI of the grant, are developing an assistive software tool for learning to program, called JavaSpeak. Basically, JavaSpeak is an editor with aural feedback designed to provide a user with useful information about a program’s structure and semantics. It is designed to parse the program and "speak" the program’s structure to a blind user, much in the same way that separate lines and indentation and color help "show" the structure of the program to a sighted user. A prototype of the tool has already been built, and tests with blind programmers will begin as early as the summer of 2000.

Outside of work, Joan enjoys as much time as she can outdoors. It's been a little tricky in the winter in Minnesota for her (Joan is originally from New Orleans, Louisiana) but with the help of snowshoes and cross-country skis, she's adapting. During the summer, she and her partner spend lots of time gardening and bicycling. In the summer of 1999, they did a cross-country bike trip with the American Lung Association, which in her words was "a blast and a great adventure."