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

Software development and screen readers at 450 words per minute

vincit.fi

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

71–80 of 109 posts

Re: Software development and screen readers at 450 words per minute

#71

Post by elboru »

tom_mellior wrote: post #45
alkonaut wrote: post #24

I wonder how many times in a regular day a blind person nearly throws thew computer out the window because some application randomly does something inaccessible and they get stuck. Some tray app from dell popping up a dialog about your trial backup subscription expiring, with no standard/accessible UI? Things like that. This is what surprises me most about not having a screen. I get that a blind person doesn't NEED t…

> This is what surprises me most about not having a screen. That thing on the right of the photo is a closed laptop. This person does have a screen, it's just not constantly in use. (Not "in sight", as the article puts it.) They can open up the laptop to show stuff to others when needed. This is how my blind colleague does it.

I've always wondered, is performance an issue with your colleague? Does he need to put extra hours or effort to finish some jobs? Or maybe he can be faster than the average developer with other tasks?

Re: Software development and screen readers at 450 words per minute

#72

Post by Joeri »

torgoguys wrote: post #44
seanwilson wrote: post #5

> A screen reader intercepts what's happening on the screen and presents that information via braille (through a separate braille display) or synthetic speech. And it's not the kind of synthetic speech you hear in today's smart assistants. I use a robotic-sounding voice which speaks at around 450 words per minute. After listening to the English sample....maybe I'm being naive but is it typical to be able to understan…

You work your way up to it. Open up a podcast app and start listening at 1.5x. After a while (days to weeks), that becomes comfortable. Then work your way up to 2.0x. Once you're at that point, listening to familiar shows (familiar people/voices), at 1.0x makes them sound drunk. They seem. to. speak. so. slooow. Some podcasts I listen at 3x which feels near my limit of comfort (comprehension drops off at speeds highe…

I've tried going faster but found that I had to concentrate too hard on listening to leave time for reflection during the listening, which is the whole point for me of listening podcasts. I wonder if a blind person struggles with similar issues, where they have to dose the speed reading to allow them to actually think about what they heard.

Re: Software development and screen readers at 450 words per minute

#73

Post by zokier »

Klockan wrote: post #41
jhgb wrote: post #20

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Wouldn't a proper structured editor be more suitable for blind coding? The market isn't large but I can't imagine blindly navigating through a sea of characters. Sounds terrifying.

People once coded in ed and it is kinda like coding blind. You don't have a display, instead you can move to specific line numbers and print or replace them. It sounds impossible at first but you get used to it if you only use ed.

I've been thinking that doing a "30 day command-line challenge" might be cool, idea being that you'd be limited to command-line based tools only. No fancy visual editors or ncurses browsers. Just pure line-oriented bliss (or more likely, hell). ex would be likely candidate for text editor in such experiment.

Re: Software development and screen readers at 450 words per minute

#74

Post by jareds »

alkonaut wrote: post #24

I wonder how many times in a regular day a blind person nearly throws thew computer out the window because some application randomly does something inaccessible and they get stuck. Some tray app from dell popping up a dialog about your trial backup subscription expiring, with no standard/accessible UI? Things like that. This is what surprises me most about not having a screen. I get that a blind person doesn't NEED t…

I'm a blind developer and I've found Windows 10 to be pretty good about not throwing up popups if you configure it well. This is because we have a good IT group who builds machines from scratch so there's no trial software. I build my personal computers from scratch so install the OS avoiding junk software. When Windows does have notifications it's pretty good about putting them in the notification center so I can look at them when I want instead of having to deal with an notification dialog right away. I had the IT group find me an old external monitor. Although I don't need it it's much easier to have the screen at eye height when a co-worker is standing then requiring them to hunch over and look at a 13 inch laptop screen.

Re: Software development and screen readers at 450 words per minute

#75

Post by stordoff »

Justsignedup wrote: post #58

450 wpm. I can't even descipher 2 words out of that. It is amazing if he can understand that fast. Did his brain just rewire the visual cortex to process audio? Makes me wonder what a human would be with double the neurons in the brain.

After two or three listens, the only bit I couldn't make out was "(through a separate braille display) or synthetic speech". I imagine I could build up to that speed if I had to.

Re: Software development and screen readers at 450 words per minute

#76

Post by tyingq »

mstade wrote: post #26

I'd love to read more specifically how coding style makes things easier or harder. It'd be really interesting to know if there are some general rules in this space, and if so how they may or may not help sighted programmers read code. Really interesting perspective on a topic which is usually just a mosh pit of opinions.

That would be interesting. I wonder, for example, if underscores are better or worse than camelcase. Or if screen readers know when to say "dot" vs "period". Or if screen readers are reasonable for odd stuff like regex syntax and multi character constructs like ->.

Re: Software development and screen readers at 450 words per minute

#77

Post by jareds »

vimy wrote: post #12

> Windows is the most accessible operating system there is I was under the impression macOS and iOS are the preferred platforms for people with disabilities?

I’m totally blind and bought a Mac several years ago hoping to learn iOS programming. As far as I can tell it’s impossible to create a simple app without using drag and drop in XCode. While it’s technically possible to do drag and drop with Voiceover I can never get it to work correctly. Apple has not put out any documentation on how to use XCode when blind that I’ve been able to find. This is disappointing since I find iOS to be much easier to use then Android. I also find Voiceover on the mac does not have quite as many shortcut keys as my Windows screen reader when reading the web, for example I cannot jump to a heading at a specific level or move by region. While Mac OS did have easy availability of Unix tools as a plus that no longer is a point in its favor. I find WSL to be quite good and accessible. Luckily the 11 inch MacBook Air was the best ultra-book I could get at the time so I don’t feel like I wasted my money even though I boot into Windows 95% of the time. For general use Mac OSX is pretty good. I find the screen reader to be quite intuitive and there is a good tutorial to help you learn it. Voiceover just doesn’t have the breadth of shortcut keys or customizability of Jaws for Windows which is my preferred screen reader despite its cost.

Re: Software development and screen readers at 450 words per minute

#78

Post by OtterCoder »

freehunter wrote: post #38
OtterCoder wrote: post #31

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's a disingenuous title. The article is cool, but not what I was lead to believe.

It really is. There is nothing "software development" about the speed of his text-to-speech other than he uses it for reading code in addition to reading normal sentences. The more accurate title would be "Software developer reads at 450WPM". Still interesting enough to get people to click to find out how, but "development at 450wpm" really really does sound like he's typing at 450wpm. Reading code is not "software d…

A very skilled reader can read text at around 400wpm with good comprehension, so I can believe he can listen to code at those speeds.

A professional typist is somewhere around 80wpm, and a stenographer can reach up to 250wpm. 450 would have to represent an enormous innovation in typing methods.

Frankly, even if you could, 450wpm would be an irresponsible speed to code at. As mediocre as my own typing speed is, it's never the limiting factor when I code. There's just too much to consider.

Re: Software development and screen readers at 450 words per minute

#79

Post by hellcow »

jareds wrote: post #77
vimy wrote: post #12

> Windows is the most accessible operating system there is I was under the impression macOS and iOS are the preferred platforms for people with disabilities?

I’m totally blind and bought a Mac several years ago hoping to learn iOS programming. As far as I can tell it’s impossible to create a simple app without using drag and drop in XCode. While it’s technically possible to do drag and drop with Voiceover I can never get it to work correctly. Apple has not put out any documentation on how to use XCode when blind that I’ve been able to find. This is disappointing since I f…

If you're discussing storyboards in XCode (given you mentioned drag and drop), you actually don't need that feature and can lay out both iOS screens and the flows between them programmatically. I actually prefer writing views programmatically for iOS--it gives you readable diffs, which is especially helpful for code reviews.

Re: Software development and screen readers at 450 words per minute

#80

Post by WalterBright »

jareds wrote: post #74
alkonaut wrote: post #24

I wonder how many times in a regular day a blind person nearly throws thew computer out the window because some application randomly does something inaccessible and they get stuck. Some tray app from dell popping up a dialog about your trial backup subscription expiring, with no standard/accessible UI? Things like that. This is what surprises me most about not having a screen. I get that a blind person doesn't NEED t…

I'm a blind developer and I've found Windows 10 to be pretty good about not throwing up popups if you configure it well. This is because we have a good IT group who builds machines from scratch so there's no trial software. I build my personal computers from scratch so install the OS avoiding junk software. When Windows does have notifications it's pretty good about putting them in the notification center so I can lo…

I think the D programming language site is accessible to the blind, but I don't know what inadvertent accessibility problems there might be with it. If you could please have a look and let me know about any difficulties, I'll get them taken care of.

https://dlang.org/

Post reply on HN