How can you program if you're blind?
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How can you program if you're blind?
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Re: How can you program if you're blind?
#2One of the best programmers I've ever known was legally blind. He had progressive Miopia so he could see a few characters at a time on the screen if enlarged enough. I sometimes wonder if that actually forced a level of rigor in his approach to programming that the rest of us did not have to deal with that made him so good. He would envision a program in his mind almost completely before ever started entering the code. I learned a lot working with him.
Re: How can you program if you're blind?
#3None of the answers were about the questions I had about how to program when you're blind. While the tools they use are interesting. I'm more concerned with how you would browse the code.
Say you wanted to find a method, how do you scroll in a large file to locate it? I guess deft use of find & go to definition helps out here.
How do you locate a line of code in a large function? Do you have to listen for the screen reader to read the contents of an entire screen's worth of code? Or do you rely on previous knowledge of the code and remember where it was?
How do you deal with debugging / fixing errors. I imagine the screen reader trying to parse the output of a template error being a nightmare.
Re: How can you program if you're blind?
#4It's truly amazing people are doing this, very inspirational.
Re: How can you program if you're blind?
#5Re: How can you program if you're blind?
#6None of the answers were about the questions I had about how to program when you're blind. While the tools they use are interesting. I'm more concerned with how you would browse the code. Say you wanted to find a method, how do you scroll in a large file to locate it? I guess deft use of find & go to definition helps out here. How do you locate a line of code in a large function? Do you have to listen for the screen…
I suspect Braille displays help with those sort of problems.
Re: How can you program if you're blind?
#7It shouldn't be difficult to interact with the computer without the benefit of sight if you think about it. I/O is all binary. Like Morse code. How did modems work?
Read some phreaker stories.
There really isn't anything "visual" about the computer at its lowest level of abstraction.
Of course, the web is heavily visual. Ever wonder why? (Some people these days are even anti-plaintext.) But it does not have to be. It can be quite functional and effective using only text. If you want to view a photo or a video, you can download it and view it. If you want elaborate presentation, you can use UNIX typesetting utilities. Knuth did not spend all time making Tex for no reason. UNIX typesetting utilities are 1000x better than HTML, CSS, etc.
Being blind should really move you closer to the machine, not further away from it.
Re: How can you program if you're blind?
#8Just this morning my little brother pocked me in the eye, and my first thought was about how I wouldn't be able to program any more if he pocked it all the way out... Glad to know that there is still a way for blind people who have the passion and work ethic to continue coding
Re: How can you program if you're blind?
#9None of the answers were about the questions I had about how to program when you're blind. While the tools they use are interesting. I'm more concerned with how you would browse the code. Say you wanted to find a method, how do you scroll in a large file to locate it? I guess deft use of find & go to definition helps out here. How do you locate a line of code in a large function? Do you have to listen for the screen…
Search is a very fast method of navigation when your editors search doesn't suck. Watch an experienced emacs or vim user sometime. I can't say much about other systems but I did once spend a day working with only emacsspeak, the audio interface to emacs. With emacsspeak you use the normal emacs movement commands to move by char, word, sentence paragraph etc and it will read out the unit you've moved in, it kind of let's you scan through a document. Also, experienced users have the speech turned up really fast, if you google it you can probably find a recording...
Re: How can you program if you're blind?
#10I was part of the team that rebuilt Narrator (the built in screen reader for Windows) for Vista. A few days after we had a minimal version running I tried to use it with Visual Studio to make a small change with the monitor turned off. For me it was next to impossible.