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The Tools of a Blind Programmer

parhamdoustdar.com

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Re: The Tools of a Blind Programmer

#41

Post by parham90 »

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

This was a problem years ago. however, nowadays almost all screen readers have a setting to report the indentation of the current line. This was popularized when NVDA (a Windows screen reader) and Orca (a screen reader for Linux) were written, since they are both in Python.

Re: The Tools of a Blind Programmer

#42

Post by parham90 »

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...

If I were to see this moment, I would wonder how you can bear using a mouse when the keyboard is so much quicker. However, you can probably use the mouse much faster than I can.

Why? It's probably the power of habits. Using a keyboard-mouse combination to interact with the computer is how you've always worked. Using a screen reader with a large number of specialized keystrokes is how I've always worked.

Re: The Tools of a Blind Programmer

#43

Post by Zecc »

skywhopper wrote: post #16
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.

Blind people likely understand space far better than sighted individuals. But computer desktop geometry is something entirely different, and not something that's easy to describe. In any case, it's never a good idea to question someone with a different set of abilities than you have with a "is it really that hard?" Their experience far outweighs your naive intuition about what's easy and hard for them.

> In any case, it's never a good idea to question someone with a different set of abilities than you have with a "is it really that hard?" Their experience far outweighs your naive intuition about what's easy and hard for them.

Wise words, certainly. I apologize if my tone came across as condescending. I asked out of genuine curiosity, as I figured that someone who did not rely on their eyes could have a different, but not worse, perhaps even better understanding of space and spatial relations than someone who does (accounting for individuals being unique, and all that).

But perhaps I'm being blinded by my own eyes. After reading the article wlesieutre linked to, I believe it might be the case.

Re: The Tools of a Blind Programmer

#44

Post by agumonkey »

taddeimania wrote: post #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…

The idea of a blind person investigating is one strong meta metaphor.

Re: The Tools of a Blind Programmer

#45

Post by treerock »

diskcat wrote: post #38
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.

There aren't that many people using i.e. 9 (for example) but still, a lot of companies make effort to support it.

Meanwhile there are huge numbers of people with poor eyesight or other disabilities. You'd think a business would be keen to get those customers.

Re: The Tools of a Blind Programmer

#46

Post by mwcampbell »

taddeimania wrote: post #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…

At least in the part of the demo I watched, I didn't hear his screen reader. But I know that it's difficult to make a screen reader's speech output audible over a VoIP program like Skype, without causing a nasty feedback loop. The last time I attempted it, several years ago, I had to use a USB audio device in addition to my computer's built-in audio output, with an analog audio cable between the two.

By the way, what version of Windows do you use, Parham? I ask because it looks like you're using the Windows Classic theme, which isn't available in versions after Windows 7 as far as I know. I know that using this theme used to improve compatibility with screen readers like JAWS and Window-Eyes, but as far as I know, it doesn't matter with NVDA, though I suppose using the simpler theme would still reduce CPU and memory usage.

Re: The Tools of a Blind Programmer

#47

Post by kriro »

Great post as it made me realize how ignorant I am at times. The idea that it must be really hard to understand data visualization, graphs and some chunks of mathematics if you're blind has been in the back of my head but I never really thought about the real life implications. Thank you for the post and the linked "Autobiography of a Blind Programmer".

I also noticed the "15 minute read" under the date. Haven't really seen that much but it must be pretty valuable if you're blind since you can't estimate the reading time from glancing at the scrollbar etc. [Even though I guess this could be automated as a feature in screen readers with a wordcount?]

This quote from the end of the article is a fantastic general attitude towards life: """There are a few things I love about being blind. One of them is the need to carve out your own path most of the time."""

Re: The Tools of a Blind Programmer

#48

Post by Fradow »

sotojuan wrote: post #28
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…

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.

There are several things that stop accessibility from being popular, here are the few I think about :

- developers generally don't need it, can't easily test it, and aren't even that aware of it

- "accessibility" can mean a lot of things. Are we talking about blind persons, daltonism, low visibility, limited motor skills, or something else I don't even know about? Each one has their challenge, and it's difficult to address all of them on purpose

- accessibility is often regarded as "niche" by stakeholders (unless one of them requires it or you really have a big scale), and thus not important. Unlike backward compatibility, it's not easy to have accurate numbers on how many of your users require it too.

That is not to say accessibility is not important.

Generally, the first steps to get it right is NOT to design anything specific for them, but instead to adhere to standards, semantic HTML (or whatever your platform use if you do a native app), have enough constrast, big enough fonts, and take user-settings into account (generally it's as easy as not overriding anything like zooming and scrolling).

The good thing about accessibility is if your app/website is accessible, it also benefits all your other users, in some ways.

Re: The Tools of a Blind Programmer

#49

Post by jdmichal »

x404 wrote: post #39
azhenley wrote: post #18

There is a professor at University of Washington that researches tools for blind programmers. For example:, StructJumper for code navigation: http://dl.acm.org/citation.cfm?id=2702589

Do you have the professor's homepage or name?

Not OP, but I did find from the linked paper Richard Ladner, whose bio indicates a primary focus on accessibility:

https://www.cs.washington.edu/people/faculty/ladner/

Lauren Milne and Catherine Baker are both graduate students of his, so I'm going to guess that he was the professor mentioned. He is also one of two professors at the "Taskar Center for Accessible Technology":

https://tcat.cs.washington.edu/people

Re: The Tools of a Blind Programmer

#50

Post by tetraodonpuffer »

parham90 wrote: post #41
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

This was a problem years ago. however, nowadays almost all screen readers have a setting to report the indentation of the current line. This was popularized when NVDA (a Windows screen reader) and Orca (a screen reader for Linux) were written, since they are both in Python.

thanks for chiming in, I was really wondering about it

btw, if you read this, do you have any recommendations for ways we can make sure our sites are accessible? Say for my blog I have alt= tags for everything and tried to organize things meaningfully in terms of H tags, I would like to also add aria tags but I am not sure how I can check that they were done correctly, as even if I installed a screen reader it I don't have any experience with it so I am not sure if what I hear is correct or not.

Do you have any suggestions?

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