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The Tools of a Blind Programmer

parhamdoustdar.com

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Re: The Tools of a Blind Programmer

#51

Post by nunobrito »

Good article. Only when we first had a visually impaired end-user asking for accessibility is that we understood what was wrong.

As result, the next generation of our tooling runs from the command line without a mouse. Solved two problems, 100% accessibility (no mouse involved nor graphs, just log files or console output) and automation (make things easier to deploy without user input).

Accessibility doesn't need to be an after-thought. When planned ahead can actually make tooling simpler.

Re: The Tools of a Blind Programmer

#52

Post by mwcampbell »

tetraodonpuffer wrote: post #50
parham90 wrote: post #41

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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'…

(Not the OP, but I have experience in this area too.)

You're on the right track. As a finishing touch, you should add role="main" to whichever element contains the main page content (in this case, the article or the most recent articles). That way, screen reader users can easily skip past all the navigation links and other auxiliary elements that are common to every page.

Re: The Tools of a Blind Programmer

#53

Post by tetraodonpuffer »

mwcampbell wrote: post #52
tetraodonpuffer wrote: post #50

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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'…

(Not the OP, but I have experience in this area too.) You're on the right track. As a finishing touch, you should add role="main" to whichever element contains the main page content (in this case, the article or the most recent articles). That way, screen reader users can easily skip past all the navigation links and other auxiliary elements that are common to every page.

thanks for the tip!

Re: The Tools of a Blind Programmer

#54

Post by parham90 »

mwcampbell wrote: post #46
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…

Yes, I'm using Windows 7. I use that theme because my screen reader is more responsive the less CPU and memory usage I have. So for example, if I open a heavyweight IDE, the fact that it's using so much CPU will make my screen reader lag.

Re: The Tools of a Blind Programmer

#55

Post by parham90 »

tetraodonpuffer wrote: post #53
mwcampbell wrote: post #52

Earlier quoted context omitted.

(Not the OP, but I have experience in this area too.) You're on the right track. As a finishing touch, you should add role="main" to whichever element contains the main page content (in this case, the article or the most recent articles). That way, screen reader users can easily skip past all the navigation links and other auxiliary elements that are common to every page.

thanks for the tip!

Sorry for being late to this thread.

You can also use some accessibility evaluation tools. I would suggest that you go here, and check the box that says "WCAG 2.0" to get some tools that check accessibility in general:

http://www.w3.org/WAI/ER/tools/

If you fix stuff that these evaluation software show you, I think your blog will be among the very well thought-out websites in terms of accessibility. WAI-ARIA is for times that your application does a lot with Javascript, such as updating a region of text, or when you start using non-semantic elements for stuff they are not meant for (for example using the i tag for an icon, or the span tag as a link, etc).

Re: The Tools of a Blind Programmer

#56

Post by scrupulusalbion »

parham90 wrote: post #29
lr4444lr wrote: post #17

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, un…

> depending on the language itself

Are there any languages or language families that you find easier to use? (inb4 COBOL is the easiest)

Re: The Tools of a Blind Programmer

#57

Post by tetraodonpuffer »

parham90 wrote: post #55
tetraodonpuffer wrote: post #53

Earlier quoted context omitted.

thanks for the tip!

Sorry for being late to this thread. You can also use some accessibility evaluation tools. I would suggest that you go here, and check the box that says "WCAG 2.0" to get some tools that check accessibility in general: http://www.w3.org/WAI/ER/tools/ If you fix stuff that these evaluation software show you, I think your blog will be among the very well thought-out websites in terms of accessibility. WAI-ARIA is for t…

thanks for the extra information

Re: The Tools of a Blind Programmer

#58

Post by x404 »

jdmichal wrote: post #49
x404 wrote: post #39

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

Thanks
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