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Ask HN: Alternatives to Scratch for a blind child?

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Re: Ask HN: Alternatives to Scratch for a blind child?

#31

Post by fhd2 »

Mezzie wrote: post #28
zersiax wrote: post #24

Hoo boy, this is a fun one :) Disclaimer: Fully blind programmer, have been for several years,learned as a teenager, later went on to teach various blind individuals as a side hustle for a while, culminating in a 2 month course done for the folks who make CodeJumper. With all that out of the way, let's go. First, let me just comment on that comment by @conviencefee999. Kindly do your research before chiming into a di…

> First, let me just comment on that comment by @conviencefee999. Kindly do your research before chiming into a discussion you quite clearly know very little about. I don't know your unique set of circumstances, but stating that one of the most viable career paths for a blind individual is not a viable career path is rather against the current and, as you yourself helpfully point out, anything but helpful. While it i…

I'm not blind, but a relative turned blind relatively early in their life (when I was still a child), so it's been present in my thoughts at least. I love the take that there is an advantage - building stronger conceptual skills is what I'd say you're describing. In my experience it's quite difficult to find programmers with strong conceptual skills, so this rings true to me.

Re: Ask HN: Alternatives to Scratch for a blind child?

#32

Post by hugs »

I'm making an open source, programmable tactile display called PinThing. Like the classic "Pin Art" pinscreen desk toy, but each pin is motorized and programmable.

I didn't design PinThing specifically for people with blindness, but since it's a real 3D display, it could be useful as a 3D display for shapes, graphs... or even as a real 3D output display for Scratch.

For awhile, this has been a side/passion project, but if there's interest, I'd love to get them a prototype.

Software demo: https://www.pinthing.com/

Hardware demo: https://youtu.be/tx4W3ZDA_Vg

Re: Ask HN: Alternatives to Scratch for a blind child?

#33

Post by nathell »

hugs wrote: post #32

I'm making an open source, programmable tactile display called PinThing. Like the classic "Pin Art" pinscreen desk toy, but each pin is motorized and programmable. I didn't design PinThing specifically for people with blindness, but since it's a real 3D display, it could be useful as a 3D display for shapes, graphs... or even as a real 3D output display for Scratch. For awhile, this has been a side/passion project, b…

Hey, OP here. This is great! I’d love to get this into the hands of Adrian (that’s the kiddo’s name).

Unfortunately, my hardware assembly skills are next to zero. Is there any chance to get a pre-assembled prototype? I’d happily pay for the BOM and blog about Adrian’s experience with this.

Re: Ask HN: Alternatives to Scratch for a blind child?

#34

Post by vidarh »

Mezzie wrote: post #28
zersiax wrote: post #24

Hoo boy, this is a fun one :) Disclaimer: Fully blind programmer, have been for several years,learned as a teenager, later went on to teach various blind individuals as a side hustle for a while, culminating in a 2 month course done for the folks who make CodeJumper. With all that out of the way, let's go. First, let me just comment on that comment by @conviencefee999. Kindly do your research before chiming into a di…

> First, let me just comment on that comment by @conviencefee999. Kindly do your research before chiming into a discussion you quite clearly know very little about. I don't know your unique set of circumstances, but stating that one of the most viable career paths for a blind individual is not a viable career path is rather against the current and, as you yourself helpfully point out, anything but helpful. While it i…

> one of the stumbling blocks for humans learning to speak computer is wanting or needing visual representations of things and building layers of abstraction in part to deal with that need.

I'm not blind, but fairly recently (couple of year; I'm 47) realised I have aphantasia. I didn't even know it was a thing or that others could see things in their minds eye - I thought people spoke metaphorically.

After learning that I realised that the way I "see" software structure as abstract relationships without a visualisation was very alien to a lot of people, who tend to rely on seeing the code.

Visual layout helps me build that abstract model rapidly, but once I have that model in my head I can mentally plan out code changes without looking much at the code, so I totally agree that needing visual representations can be a massive hindrance.

Re: Ask HN: Alternatives to Scratch for a blind child?

#35

Post by gus_massa »

One of my coworkers was blind. With an screen reader, he used Excel, LaTeX and other computer stuff, but IIRC he didn't program.

I'd recommend to skip Scratch and clones. Jump directly to Python. The indentation may be a problem, so you must find out how to configure the screen reader to say this invisible spaces of the indentation. Perhaps it's better to use tabs for the children, because they are easier to count. (Some editors show a small arrow instead of a tab, so I'm optimistic this is fixable.)

I recommend t create a small library to play sounds for the kid, so he can use it directly without caring about the nasty details. Something like

  sound("thunder.wav", left = 80, right = 20)
My idea is that he can make a small game where you walk and hear the sound in each room of a (haunted?) house. The volume and direction can gives cues. (The code to handle arrows may be tricky too, perhaps encapsulate it in another library.)

(When my daughter was young, I made a 3D library for red-blue glasses. He used it do draw simple objects and buildings (something like the front of the Parthenon with square columns).)

If he is old enough and likes math, perhaps he can learn to nest a few `for` and `if` and bruteforce some elementary math problems. I'm not sure if the screen reader is good enough for this. Perhaps a text to downloaded speech library may be useful, so he can use

  say("The result is", r)
instead of

  print("The result is", r)

Re: Ask HN: Alternatives to Scratch for a blind child?

#36

Post by hugs »

nathell wrote: post #33
hugs wrote: post #32

I'm making an open source, programmable tactile display called PinThing. Like the classic "Pin Art" pinscreen desk toy, but each pin is motorized and programmable. I didn't design PinThing specifically for people with blindness, but since it's a real 3D display, it could be useful as a 3D display for shapes, graphs... or even as a real 3D output display for Scratch. For awhile, this has been a side/passion project, b…

Hey, OP here. This is great! I’d love to get this into the hands of Adrian (that’s the kiddo’s name). Unfortunately, my hardware assembly skills are next to zero. Is there any chance to get a pre-assembled prototype? I’d happily pay for the BOM and blog about Adrian’s experience with this.

I'd be happy to make it for free just for the feedback! My contact info is in my HN bio.

The downside to a motorized display is the cost. Each motor is roughly $1.50 USD. When you include all the other stuff (electronics, 3D printed parts, etc.), it's at about $2/pin. A relatively small 10x20 display (minimum size for a Tetris board, for example) would cost $400 USD just in raw cost.

At retail, that 10x20 board would likely be around $1000 USD. Arguably this is why no one has mass-produced something like this yet. A larger display would just be too expensive to be practical for most people.

BUT!... Like I said, the feedback would valuable to me so am happy to make one for free. Classic warnings apply: it's still a prototype, so supervised play would definitely be required.

Re: Ask HN: Alternatives to Scratch for a blind child?

#37

Post by y-curious »

hazelnut-tree wrote: post #25

The Quorum programming language was originally designed for blind children. The language scope has expanded to appeal to all children. https://quorumlanguage.com/ Although the language is not widely known, the language creator posted to Hacker News in 2018: > Hi all, this is Andreas Stefik (I invented Quorum)....First, people saying Quorum was originally designed for blind children are correct. Originally, we were to…

Thank you for pulling this up, I had never heard of it. It warms my heart to see that people go out of their way to make coding accessible. Do you happen to know of any ways I can help in making coding more accessible?

Re: Ask HN: Alternatives to Scratch for a blind child?

#38

Post by y-curious »

hugs wrote: post #36
nathell wrote: post #33

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Hey, OP here. This is great! I’d love to get this into the hands of Adrian (that’s the kiddo’s name). Unfortunately, my hardware assembly skills are next to zero. Is there any chance to get a pre-assembled prototype? I’d happily pay for the BOM and blog about Adrian’s experience with this.

I'd be happy to make it for free just for the feedback! My contact info is in my HN bio. The downside to a motorized display is the cost. Each motor is roughly $1.50 USD. When you include all the other stuff (electronics, 3D printed parts, etc.), it's at about $2/pin. A relatively small 10x20 display (minimum size for a Tetris board, for example) would cost $400 USD just in raw cost. At retail, that 10x20 board would…

If OP takes you up on this, DM me and I'll throw you some cash for doing this.

Re: Ask HN: Alternatives to Scratch for a blind child?

#39

Post by codesnik »

well, why not text?

Ruby should work well, it's pretty close to plain english, and is not too heavy on punctuation, and is (mostly) not whitespace sensitive. You'll need some screenreader setup, of course.

Making games is a major hook for kids to go into programming, but there're text games, like zork etc.

Re: Ask HN: Alternatives to Scratch for a blind child?

#40

Post by easrng »

zersiax wrote: post #24

Hoo boy, this is a fun one :) Disclaimer: Fully blind programmer, have been for several years,learned as a teenager, later went on to teach various blind individuals as a side hustle for a while, culminating in a 2 month course done for the folks who make CodeJumper. With all that out of the way, let's go. First, let me just comment on that comment by @conviencefee999. Kindly do your research before chiming into a di…

Blockly isn't really a Scratch competitor since it just provides a block editor and no runtime. Scratch actually uses a modified version of it.
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