I started my career at Bell Labs in the 80's and one engineer there made a huge impact on me. I learned more from him that any other single person I have worked with since. He suffered from progressive myopia so he had a rig with a camera and a big screen and a huge monitor. He coded slower than everyone else, but in a way, that was his secret power because his code almost never failed in testing. Also, he was brilli…
I always assumed Whistler in Sneakers was a reference to https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Joybubbles
I did as well. I can't find a reference at the moment, but I'm almost positive the authors of the screenplay said as much in the early 90s.
> " I can still touch type with Qwerty, but my hands hurt after 5 minutes. " That's not a good metric. In your case, you might be right, but for the general public it's like when picking up any new exercise or sport, like running or biking or anything really, when untrained you end up for the first few days with sore ligaments, joints and muscles. You get used to it. My hands never hurt, even though I love writing lo…
Indeed it's just my personal experience, but there's a fact that you seem to have missed: the distance that fingers must walk to type the same text is higher in qwerty than in dvorak, that's the whole point of dvorak and others such as bepo. So, typing in Qwerty is more physical work than typing Dvorak. There are ways to calculate that pretty accurately. I don't have proof that less finger distance means less hand wo…
It's also worth mentioning that some of the Qwerty pain can be psychosomatic in origin. Even for me, who hasn't suffered RSI, it was pretty clear that I didn't feel the exertion of Qwerty until I had gotten used to something better (Colemak, in my case.) Once I knew how nice it can feel to type on a keyboard, anything less nice starts mentally hurting – and I'm sure, for some people, also physically.
I fee like UI/UX needs to be completely redesigned and dvorak isn't even half (or any) of the battle. Single-key copy/paste, undo/redo, keyboard driven UIs, etc etc. I say this as I type on dvorak and while I love it, I also regret it due to interoperability issues and breaking of common keyboard shortcuts (I miss Ctrl+CVX). But I just aliased `us` and `dv` to setxkbmap shortcuts, so thanks for that!
That's what Colemak is for. IMO no one should consider learning Dvorak these days.
Dvorak still has the alternating hands rhythm that Colemak lacks, being more built on one-handed finger rolls than Dvorak. Most people I speak to prefer the finger rolls of Colemak, but some people (like me) prefer the alternating hands rhythm of Dvorak.
(That said, I still use Colemak because it happens to work better for my native tongue. If I only wrote English, I would have been a Dvorak user.)
I started my career at Bell Labs in the 80's and one engineer there made a huge impact on me. I learned more from him that any other single person I have worked with since. He suffered from progressive myopia so he had a rig with a camera and a big screen and a huge monitor. He coded slower than everyone else, but in a way, that was his secret power because his code almost never failed in testing. Also, he was brilli…
> but in a way, that was his secret power because his code almost never failed in testing.
Reminds me of the stories about Stephen Hawking and how it seemed like he was just sitting there miserable but he instead he was thinking very deeply and how his disabilities forced him to be able to think visually in his mind and compensate because he would only get a quick chance to absorb input.
Even with the aid of sight, I don't read an entire codebase at once. I follow the logic, a few lines at a time, as it moves through the parts I'm interested in. I use grep to find the things I ought to read. With this approach, I build a mental model of the codebase quickly, with lots of blanks - but with detail in the areas I'm focusing on. As for how to actually rig up braille readers on Linux, check out BRLTTY. It…
I think your use of the term "braille reader" might be causing some confusion. I know you use brltty. But do you use its text-to-speech output, or do you use a refreshable braille device that moves little pins up and down to form braille cells? If the former, I'd suggest referring to brltty as a screen reader. Also, do you run brltty on a Linux text console, or in a terminal window in your Sway session?
I use a refreshable braille display. I use it mainly on the Linux console, but I've been thinking about rigging something up for use with Sway.
It could be good idea to learn about accessibility API-s (MSAA, UI Automation, Accessible 2, ATK), in case you want to contribute to improving the screenreaders and/or create new accessibility tools, now or in the future.
> Try 5-6x. I've met some blind people who listen to audio so fast, it sounds like noise to me. As someone who isn't blind, I regularly listen to lectures and audiobooks on 1.75-2.5x (depending on the base rate) without issues, but 6x is just something else entirely. Yes, indeed. I was writing that original comment for someone just getting started. What ends up happening is no matter how fast the speech rate is, you'…
Does it affect listening to music? Does it also trigger the impatience?
I'm not blind but I do like to listen to podcasts, YouTube, etc at 1.5-3x and I've certainly caught myself getting annoyed at how long it takes to listen to a new album I want to check out, but I've never tried to speed it up, I just remember to relax and enjoy it.
I think your use of the term "braille reader" might be causing some confusion. I know you use brltty. But do you use its text-to-speech output, or do you use a refreshable braille device that moves little pins up and down to form braille cells? If the former, I'd suggest referring to brltty as a screen reader. Also, do you run brltty on a Linux text console, or in a terminal window in your Sway session?
I use a refreshable braille display. I use it mainly on the Linux console, but I've been thinking about rigging something up for use with Sway.
Wow, I underestimated your seriousness about adapting to alternate output methods. Did you have to buy that braille display at your own expense? As I'm sure you know, they're expensive. How recently did you start learning braille? Has it been a challenge for you to learn to read it with your fingers?