Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

The Tools of a Blind Programmer

parhamdoustdar.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

31–40 of 58 posts

Re: The Tools of a Blind Programmer

#31

Post by parham90 »

wlesieutre wrote: post #23
Zecc wrote: 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 seei…

That is very true. My colleagues had a hard time explaining how one can draw in 3D on a 2D medium, like a board. It was there that I figured sighted people see things differently when it's away from them. It's different than how I hear the sound. At least, it hasn't been researched as widely as there has been research done on sight.

Re: The Tools of a Blind Programmer

#32

Post by parham90 »

chris_wot wrote: post #7
Zecc wrote: 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?

The thing with 3 dimensional objects is that you get a lot of those in real life. All it takes to show a blind person what 3 dimensional looks like is to pick up a keyboard, show its different sides, and describe that "This is the height, this is the width, and this is the depth."

Re: The Tools of a Blind Programmer

#34

Post by tyrylu »

tetraodonpuffer wrote: post #33

how would a blind programmer deal with something like python? it seems that having indentation be part of the syntax would make it difficult to figure out, unless the screen scraping software was made to understand same indentation = same block

From my personal experience, it's useful if the editor has at least some basic support for this kind of blocks, e. g. enter key opens a line with same indent level etc. And editor scripting also helps, then you can write a script toreport the indent level on demand. Of course, many screen readers can report the number of spaces/tabs (e. g. the raw value), but you usually want only the level with respect to the current codebase and most likely only sometimes e. g. not on every line movement, you can infer the blocks sometimes from context and recheck only if needed/things go wrong.

Re: The Tools of a Blind Programmer

#35

Post by voltagex_ »

staticelf wrote: post #3

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…

Just remember that WCAG isn't the be-all-and-end-all [1]

[1]: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0ijIzUUXdTM

Re: The Tools of a Blind Programmer

#36

Post by gchpaco »

chris_wot wrote: post #11
gchpaco wrote: post #8

Earlier quoted context omitted.

As a counterpoint it's routine in topological mathematics to work with 8 or 12 or 11 dimensional objects.

Good point! But is this done without any reference to 3 dimensional objects, or does it take the principle and not make any assumptions, or describe it in such a way that the concept is explained without any aspects related to sight? Genuinely curious...

It is ... difficult for me to describe just how dangerous it is to try to use 3 dimensional intuitions in a higher dimensional space. As the number of dimensions increases the amount of "space" there is for things to get weird get much more complicated; for example any knot that exists in 3 dimensions can be untied trivially in a 4 dimensional space.

Suffice to say if you try to use your ordinary everyday life intuitions doing higher dimensional mathematics you will continuously embarrass yourself until you learn not to. Some folks develop the necessary adjustments and have higher dimensional intuitions; I do not and have to do the math anywhere higher than around 4.

Re: The Tools of a Blind Programmer

#37

Post by gchpaco »

chris_wot wrote: post #13
gchpaco wrote: post #10

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Part of the problem is that most accessibility software has a hell of a learning curve, that the blind have implicitly overcome already to use the thing at all. (e.g. emacspeak) It can be very daunting to try to use it as a sighted person with a blindfold over their eyes.

Have blind people overcome this because of past experience and living with the fact of being blind, or is it the case that the software isn't necessarily intuitive in the first place? I think when I have a moment I might attempt this as an exercise...

I do not, myself, know why this is the case. I can come up with several plausible reasons; for example, you're basically coming up with an alternate input device for your computer piggybacked onto something that's already there. Additionally these programs basically are the computer if you're blind; you develop a lot of experience with them quickly because the alternative is not using it at all. And some amount of it is probably cultural/historical, we make it hard because it's always been hard. Truly, I don't know, and I don't know anyone who does.

Re: The Tools of a Blind Programmer

#38

Post by diskcat »

staticelf wrote: post #3

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…

>What I think stinks is that companies seldom thinks of accessibility.

that's because there aren't as many blind people as seeing people.

Re: The Tools of a Blind Programmer

#40

Post by Zecc »

chris_wot wrote: post #7
Zecc wrote: 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?

> I'm genuinely curious how you would think of three dimensional objects without ever being able to see them... [...] > without reference to anything you can see with your eyes, how would you describe space?

But the thing is: I wouldn't have to. People without sight live in space too. What mental models of the universe anyone has inside their head may vary wildly, but at the end of the day a torus is still torus-shaped when the lights are out, and West is to your right when you turn North while upside down.

Post reply on HN