41–48 of 48 posts
Just 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
None 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…
You can ask anyone who has been programming for 40 years or so this same question. Before we had visual editors [but after we stopped using punch-cards], we had line editors , which worked under fundamentally the same constraints as programming blind has: only a little bit of content at a time, streamed, selected before "display", and requiring a "replay" after any edits to see if the edits were correct. A descriptio…
(Edit: I see below there are Braille editors, which I imagine mirror line editors! Expensive though.)
I imagine it would be hard for a blind programmer to program using Python, Coffeescript and other language where white space plays important part. Can anyone give more insight about this?
Python is one of my favorite languages to program in, but the white space thing was an issue for a while. Fortunately, I found an editor that will work well with my screen reader and will tell me what level of indenting I'm at, so it's now just a mild annoyance. However, when browsing on the web or elsewhere outside my editor, I do find myself occasionally counting spaces if it's not obvious from the context what ind…
Earlier quoted context omitted.
I suspect Braille displays help with those sort of problems.
They certainly do, if you can afford one. They start at $3,500 for a small one (20 characters wide) and swiftly increase in price from there.
And no, they do not really compare to a 20-character LCD display. Reason is that blind user have to rescan the line with their hands whenever something changes, and that takes longer than visually scanning it. Effectively, blind users only 'see' two or three characters simultaneously.
I was developing a Liferay portal for a client which needed (in my idea) complete accessibility. I used my iPad to move in the page and was a big experience, most of my initial design was not tested over visual appearance but semantic accessibility. If you own an iOS device do activate VoiceOver and try to surf YOUR applications (and more important, your WEB applications). Even better, let someone else do it for you.…
They have "a right to access your content"? Is there a law specifying this? What are the penalties for breaking the law?
I think it's our duty to be as inclusive as possible when talking about the target audience of our applications/content.
Even more if you're designing an infrastructure used by someone else (or more the one) to build their communication channels.
And talking about a specific law and legal rights for accessibility, here in Italy every public/governative web-site/application MUST meet the required standards for accessibility. Less or more a triple A (and more given the additional strictness of our local law).
None 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…
This is certainly one of the harder aspects of programming blind - particularly tackling a large, unfamiliar, codebase. In the case of a new project, I build up a mental map of how the program works - and memorise the conceptual organisation. With an existing codebase go-to-definition is invaluable, and stepping through in a debugger is just as useful for a blind person as for anyone - you get to see the lines in the…
None 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 le…