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Software development and screen readers at 450 words per minute

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

#81

Post by WalterBright »

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 wish my Roku box would provide a speedup option, as well as my Comcast DVR.

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

#82

Post by stillhere »

christiangenco wrote: post #67
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.

I've been making a habit of listening to audiobooks, podcasts, and YouTube videos at increasingly faster speeds, and after listening to the clip two or three times can understand about 80% of it. My comprehension problem with it right now is the style of the voice, not the speed it's talking. Like anything, I think understanding this computer voice at 450 wpm is a skill anyone could learn with practice.

Though I'm not blind I would imagine it is like speedreading. Occasionally skipping words has no effect to the main idea of a sentence because the mind fills in the blanks. Anyway disability related tech news is very cool stuff and I hope to see a lot more on HN.

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

#83

Post by jareds »

hellcow wrote: post #79
jareds wrote: post #77

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

I have not found an introduction tutorial that assumes you go from no iOS knowledge to a working app with just code instead of storyboards. DO you know of a tutorial that does this?

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

#84

Post by nerdponx »

zokier wrote: post #73
Klockan wrote: post #41

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 vi sual editors or ncurses browsers. Just pure line-oriented bliss (or more likely, hell). ex would be likely candidate for text editor in such experiment.

What options even exist outside of ex in that case?

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

#85

Post by yorwba »

nerdponx wrote: post #84
zokier wrote: post #73

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 vi sual editors or ncurses browsers. Just pure line-oriented bliss (or more likely, hell). ex would be likely candidate for text editor in such experiment.

What options even exist outside of ex in that case?

If you want something even more bare-bones than ex or ed, you could use cat as a write-only editor. In combination with head and tail, replacing parts of a file would be possible as well.

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

#86

Post by sobani »

Joeri wrote: post #72
torgoguys wrote: post #44

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Instead of listening to a podcast/audiobook once on normal speed, you could try listening to it twice on double speed.

* Especially audiobooks generally have only one core idea so even if you miss a part, you're not missing much.

* By listing twice, you will 'revisit' the topic, increasing comprehension.

* Most podcasts/audiobooks actually don't have a lot of new ideas (especially after you've heard a lot of them), so in those cases you're only wasting half the time.

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

#87

Post by tom_mellior »

elboru wrote: post #71
tom_mellior wrote: post #45

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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?

No, they get the things done that they are assigned. Watching them work, yes, some things are clearly less efficient than for someone who can see the whole screen at once. But overall it works well for our particular setting.

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

#89

Post by yjftsjthsd-h »

yorwba wrote: post #85
nerdponx wrote: post #84

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What options even exist outside of ex in that case?

If you want something even more bare-bones than ex or ed, you could use cat as a write-only editor. In combination with head and tail, replacing parts of a file would be possible as well.

Or sed, which for many editing purposes is probably easier to use.

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

#90

Post by yjftsjthsd-h »

jondubois wrote: post #50

I'm not blind but I also hate side by side diffs. When resolving conflicts, I prefer opening the raw text file with the conflict segments and manually delete and copy paste stuff; it's so much faster and more flexible.

There is a fairly popular thought that software which is accessible tends to be better for "normal" users as well.
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