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How a Blind Developer uses Visual Studio [video]

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Re: How a Blind Developer uses Visual Studio [video]

#31

Post by Pigo »

Semaphor wrote: post #28
hacker_9 wrote: post #2

I always wondered how someone could use text-to-speech effectively, especially with a programming language full of symbols with long names such as 'semi-colon', 'underscore', 'left parenthesis' etc. The answer it seems is to speed up the voice tenfold! Honestly incredible he's fine-tuned his other senses well enough to be able to code at a reasonable speed again.

I was at a web design conference once with a talk by a heavily vision-impaired guy. I was amazed at the speed when he went to his IDE to fix a bug. I couldn't make out a word it was saying and he didn't seem slower working with it than I would be.

I'm glad you mentioned that. After watching this it made me wonder if this is normal, or if this guy is some sort of auditory wizard. It seems like an awful lot of work to master, but maybe not if it's a skill you're using everyday.

Re: How a Blind Developer uses Visual Studio [video]

#32

Post by Pigo »

Zekio wrote: post #3

Damn, he works faster than me... the only thing I could have done faster was removing the " Edit: wrote semi colon instead of " double quote

I know it's no where near the same thing. But this reminds me of when I broke my arm very bad as a kid, and was in a cast without the use of my fingers. I learned how to play Mario Brothers and Zelda with just my left hand in a few weeks. Besides a few key combinations, like working up speed in Mario, I ended up being better with one hand than two.

Re: How a Blind Developer uses Visual Studio [video]

#33

Post by [deleted] »

Pigo wrote: post #31
Semaphor wrote: post #28

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I was at a web design conference once with a talk by a heavily vision-impaired guy. I was amazed at the speed when he went to his IDE to fix a bug. I couldn't make out a word it was saying and he didn't seem slower working with it than I would be.

I'm glad you mentioned that. After watching this it made me wonder if this is normal, or if this guy is some sort of auditory wizard. It seems like an awful lot of work to master, but maybe not if it's a skill you're using everyday.

[deleted]

Re: How a Blind Developer uses Visual Studio [video]

#34

Post by Klathmon »

j_s wrote: post #24
melling wrote: post #4

I imagine many would benefit if we had a smart developer assistant where it could have a higher level understanding of programming. "Jarvis import library foo" - could be said from anywhere in file "Jarvis jump to file bar.c" "Jarvis declare var current temperature equals zero" - var currentTemperature = 0 "Jarvis write for enumeration on var word over var name list" "Jarvis build and run" or simply "Jarvis run" By t…

Voice input is an option when other types of input are not. In the same vein, I am learning morse code. Any resources helping with this would be appreciated. I would like to use morse code for silent, no-look I/O on my phone. I'm not sure vibrations can be quiet enough; might have to use something special-purpose plugged into the headphone jack.

You could design a keyboard for it on Android at least.

Make the whole keyboard area a blank "tap zone" where you can just use any digit to tap text into an input field.

Re: How a Blind Developer uses Visual Studio [video]

#35

Post by rjdavis3 »

This is great. I always wondered how blind developers managed to navigate IDEs at a decent pace.

I can't help but wonder how Saqib Shaikh navigates through log files for large applications though. Log files usually generate a large amount of noise in the form of time stamps, thread names, log levels, stack traces, etc. that overtime I've learned to "scan" instead of read to find what I am looking for. I would love to see a video of him navigating through a log file to see how he does it. Maybe just lots of string searches?

Re: How a Blind Developer uses Visual Studio [video]

#36

Post by johnhattan »

hacker_9 wrote: post #2

I always wondered how someone could use text-to-speech effectively, especially with a programming language full of symbols with long names such as 'semi-colon', 'underscore', 'left parenthesis' etc. The answer it seems is to speed up the voice tenfold! Honestly incredible he's fine-tuned his other senses well enough to be able to code at a reasonable speed again.

I watched the video twice, and I picked up a lot more the second time. At first, it seemed like he had the speech set to "incomprehensible chirping".

I'm still impressed at how he found the syntax error, though.

Re: How a Blind Developer uses Visual Studio [video]

#37

Post by masklinn »

Pigo wrote: post #31
Semaphor wrote: post #28

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I was at a web design conference once with a talk by a heavily vision-impaired guy. I was amazed at the speed when he went to his IDE to fix a bug. I couldn't make out a word it was saying and he didn't seem slower working with it than I would be.

I'm glad you mentioned that. After watching this it made me wonder if this is normal, or if this guy is some sort of auditory wizard. It seems like an awful lot of work to master, but maybe not if it's a skill you're using everyday.

> After watching this it made me wonder if this is normal, or if this guy is some sort of auditory wizard.

The "visual cortex" area is not deactivated but gets re-tasked with non-visual processing tasks, even in "late blind" people (people who lost their sight after age 12): https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3667661/

Considering the amount of visual information the sighted process more or less effortlessly, that's a pretty significant amount of processing capabilities which can get retasked with e.g. auditory processing.

Re: How a Blind Developer uses Visual Studio [video]

#38

Post by Birch-san »

jrimbault wrote: post #18
melling wrote: post #4

I imagine many would benefit if we had a smart developer assistant where it could have a higher level understanding of programming. "Jarvis import library foo" - could be said from anywhere in file "Jarvis jump to file bar.c" "Jarvis declare var current temperature equals zero" - var currentTemperature = 0 "Jarvis write for enumeration on var word over var name list" "Jarvis build and run" or simply "Jarvis run" By t…

If I'm reading or thinking and leaning back in my chair I often want to say or gesture a command to scroll up or down for example, it happens more often than not when reading long articles. (btw, if anyone knows anything about software/hardware to do that? let me know) It would good to have the options to voice or gesture command a desktop computer.

I used to do this with Dragon Dictate. It worked very well; I recommend it.

I created speech bindings for my most common navigation tasks:

- "Down" -> presses PgDn

- "Down a bit" -> presses "down" a few times

- "Switch" -> presses Cmd+Tab (next application)

- "Backtick" -> presses Cmd+` (next window)

- "Apple L" -> presses Cmd+L (focus address bar)

Latency was good enough. Bindings have a higher priority than dictation, so if it hears one of your custom bindings: it will immediately action it instead of waiting to hear a full sentence.

Mac version was mostly only reliable for triggering keyboard shortcuts. Dictation of sentences worked pretty well, but there were (many) significant bugs that meant it was not generally viable.

I eventually stopped because of one of the following (can't recall):

- OS updates broke it - lost the license in a computer switch - hands got better

Re: How a Blind Developer uses Visual Studio [video]

#39

Post by woliveirajr »

I met two blind programmers. The process they used was exactly how it's described in this video.

What was odd was that:

1 - they were given the worst place in the room: no windows, literally facing a wall. Took some time to realize why they didn't complain.

2 - The computer had monitors. Then I learnt that Windows (don't know what version it was) wouldn't work it no monitor was attached.

Re: How a Blind Developer uses Visual Studio [video]

#40

Post by melling »

c3833174 wrote: post #19
melling wrote: post #4

I imagine many would benefit if we had a smart developer assistant where it could have a higher level understanding of programming. "Jarvis import library foo" - could be said from anywhere in file "Jarvis jump to file bar.c" "Jarvis declare var current temperature equals zero" - var currentTemperature = 0 "Jarvis write for enumeration on var word over var name list" "Jarvis build and run" or simply "Jarvis run" By t…

Drop the prefix keyword and then we might start talking about "smart". Oh, and it must work locally instead of sending everything to the cloud.

Yep, there are demands you can certainly make after the problem is solved.

For now, it would be helpful to many if there were no such limitations. In other words, comments like "Make it even smarter and it can't go to the cloud then I might use it" can safely be ignored for now. There's a market for an MVP that does a lot less.

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