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The Tools of a Blind Programmer

parhamdoustdar.com

21–30 of 58 posts

Re: The Tools of a Blind Programmer

#21
I was incredibly lucky enough to recently do a live broadcasted interview where Parham (op) talked about his experience in tech, his country (Iran), and even showed us some of his tools to write and debug code. It was an incredible interview and can be viewed here:

https://www.livecoding.tv/parham90/videos/z8MoB-how-do-blind...

edit: you may have to fast forward about 17 minutes in to get past the intro buffer.

Also part 2 is where all of the demo stuff is:

https://www.livecoding.tv/parham90/videos/nD1Er-how-do-blind...

Re: The Tools of a Blind Programmer

#22
post #6

I wonder if it might be worthwhile for sighted developers to set up a system that a blind person would use and then blindfold themselves, and start using the system... Perhaps that would make it easier for us to develop software that works well for blind people?

I imagine that if we tried to make programming by voice more practical, that would help solve part of the problem. A few developers have made it work but it requires a lot of setup. http://ergoemacs.org/emacs/using_voice_to_code.html More resources here: https://github.com/melling/ErgonomicNotes/blob/master/progra...

i think coding by voice is solving a different challenge than blind developers are facing. Blind developers have no issue with manipulating a keyboard. I feel the most immediate accessibility issue facing blind and low vision developers is quickly being made aware of context changes and making sure the element you expect to have selected is actually selected.

An IDE is pretty much useless to a blind developer if the screen reader cannot adequately relay the current context to the developer.

Re: The Tools of a Blind Programmer

#23
post #4

Is it really that hard for a blind person to intuit geometry? I would have figured one does not require working eyes to understand space.

http://www.newyorker.com/tech/elements/people-cured-blindnes... might be of interest.

One particular point that seems obvious after reading, but would not have occurred to me: If you ask a sighted person to imagine a nearby and distant object (say, a car), the distant object is imagined as smaller than the nearby one. But that distance / visual size relationship is a totally visual thing because you're imagining seeing the objects; a blind person's mental model of the object would be built from touch and is the same regardless of distance. They don't have the visual perspective cues. (If the object make sounds, I suppose it's imagined as quieter?)

To take that a bit further, I'd guess that blind people's metal models of geometry, whether it's a small object or navigating within a building, is purely orthographic in nature. They wouldn't have any use for our ideas of visual perspective, field of view, lines of sight, or any of that. Artists didn't work out how to replicate it properly until the renaissance, so it's not as though people have an innate conscious grasp of how it works; we just understand perspective as an innate part of our sight.

And on the other hand, the blind probably have a much more developed model of spatial acoustics: changes in reverberation as you pass an open doorway, move from a corridor into a larger space, etc., which our brains for the most part don't learn to build.

Re: The Tools of a Blind Programmer

#24

I was incredibly lucky enough to recently do a live broadcasted interview where Parham (op) talked about his experience in tech, his country (Iran), and even showed us some of his tools to write and debug code. It was an incredible interview and can be viewed here: https://www.livecoding.tv/parham90/videos/z8MoB-how-do-blind... edit: you may have to fast forward about 17 minutes in to get past the intro buffer. Also…

Very cool. Thanks for the links!

Re: The Tools of a Blind Programmer

#25

Fascinating. We programmers live by our eyes, and I've had a few frightening flights of fancy about losing my sight, and what employment would be like in this field. I still wonder though how you'd go about reading other people's (bad) code, since there isn't any prior memory about what it was _supposed_ to do, and how you perform major refactors that just appear so "visual" to my way of thinking, e.g. hollowing out…

I'd like to believe, given that the largest part of the brain is devoted to visual processing, that it gets freed up for memory\creativity etc.

Given the right kind of guidance and development people with "disabilities" could bring a very unique perspective and new ways of thinking to problems and algorithms.

Deaf people for example think visually from birth as they have never heard sound. And we still don't even have a good way of representing sign language on paper or digitally.

Re: The Tools of a Blind Programmer

#26

Fascinating. We programmers live by our eyes, and I've had a few frightening flights of fancy about losing my sight, and what employment would be like in this field. I still wonder though how you'd go about reading other people's (bad) code, since there isn't any prior memory about what it was _supposed_ to do, and how you perform major refactors that just appear so "visual" to my way of thinking, e.g. hollowing out…

Yes, I also have the fear of losing my sight when I'm getting older. I hope I could code even I'm 70 or 80 years old. It's not just for make living, also for dignity.

Re: The Tools of a Blind Programmer

#27
post #4

Is it really that hard for a blind person to intuit geometry? I would have figured one does not require working eyes to understand space.

I'm genuinely curious how you would think of three dimensional objects without ever being able to see them... I guess you would have to describe them. As a suggestion - and not an attack in any way because I'm not sure how I'd do it! - without reference to anything you can see with your eyes, how would you describe space?

What? How would you think of three dimensional objects without ever being able to feel them? (I say as a someone that's got reasonable vision, but surely sound and especially touch is much better at spatial positioning that mere faulty "stereoscopic" vision -- there's a reason why you might want to practice martial arts with a blindfold...).

Re: The Tools of a Blind Programmer

#28

Cool, there is also a stackoverflow thread which is pretty interesting: http://stackoverflow.com/questions/118984/how-can-you-progra... What I think stinks is that companies seldom thinks of accessibility. In many cases, there are more people in need of special accessibility tools than support for lower web browsers, yet all focus is on the latter when it comes to web development. A good thing can be to follow the st…

I wonder what is stopping accessibility from being as popular as backwards compatibility... none of the resources I used when I started learning web development ever mentioned it (aside from alt text in the image tag). You really have to seek out information about it purposely.

Re: The Tools of a Blind Programmer

#29

Fascinating. We programmers live by our eyes, and I've had a few frightening flights of fancy about losing my sight, and what employment would be like in this field. I still wonder though how you'd go about reading other people's (bad) code, since there isn't any prior memory about what it was _supposed_ to do, and how you perform major refactors that just appear so "visual" to my way of thinking, e.g. hollowing out…

Actually, a lot of things you may perceive as visual are not visual, at least if you imagine "visual" as something I (a blind person) cannot understand.

I do a lot of refactoring, maybe even more than you do, simply because I can't understand functions that have two indentation levels (like two if statements inside each other), or functions that go above 15 lines. I'm saying that I may do it more than you because, unlike sighted people, we can't glance at 6 lines at once; we have to look at the code one line at a time. So, the smaller each section (whether it's an if statement, a loop, or a function, depending on the language itself), the better for me.

Re: The Tools of a Blind Programmer

#30

Fascinating. We programmers live by our eyes, and I've had a few frightening flights of fancy about losing my sight, and what employment would be like in this field. I still wonder though how you'd go about reading other people's (bad) code, since there isn't any prior memory about what it was _supposed_ to do, and how you perform major refactors that just appear so "visual" to my way of thinking, e.g. hollowing out…

I'd like to believe, given that the largest part of the brain is devoted to visual processing, that it gets freed up for memory\creativity etc. Given the right kind of guidance and development people with "disabilities" could bring a very unique perspective and new ways of thinking to problems and algorithms. Deaf people for example think visually from birth as they have never heard sound. And we still don't even hav…

This is really one of the points that always amazes me. We have all this potential, right here on earth. Why are we looking for aliens? Why aren't we spending more time in knowing how people with different senses missing understand a particular concept?

This occurred to me while I was struggling with linear regression and its use in machine learning.

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