Wow, the audio example... It's like a solid wall of pure data.
How a Blind Person Programs
11–20 of 136 posts
Re: How a Blind Person Programs
#12Holy shit, I admire that guy so much. Being able to program whilst lacking sight astounds me. I wonder how he got into it. Becoming blind is one of my biggest fears and I consider programming to be one of my favourite activities on the planet, I'm happy that if the worst were to ever happen to me, I wouldn't be completely screwed. However I gotta wonder how well he's able to hold all his code in his head just off hea…
I imagine to some extent, due to the speed of his reader, he can audibly browse his code. This is just a guess.. My mind is actually getting all sorts of accessibility ideas for coders. If you could have hot keys to call out the function your in, call out all the methods in the current file(structure/class view etc). Jump to files. I have no idea what the current state of the art is, but I bet it could be streamlined a ton.
LISP's might make an interesting language of choice to due to the simplicity of their syntax and the ease of navigation through forms. Hmmmm.
Re: How a Blind Person Programs
#13Holy shit, I admire that guy so much. Being able to program whilst lacking sight astounds me. I wonder how he got into it. Becoming blind is one of my biggest fears and I consider programming to be one of my favourite activities on the planet, I'm happy that if the worst were to ever happen to me, I wouldn't be completely screwed. However I gotta wonder how well he's able to hold all his code in his head just off hea…
I imagine to some extent, due to the speed of his reader, he can audibly browse his code. This is just a guess.. My mind is actually getting all sorts of accessibility ideas for coders. If you could have hot keys to call out the function your in, call out all the methods in the current file(structure/class view etc). Jump to files. I have no idea what the current state of the art is, but I bet it could be streamlined…
There was another post about this months ago, and the blind poster said that while C is usable (thanks to brackets), python is completely unusable or unreadable to them.
Re: How a Blind Person Programs
#14A friend of mine, a programmer, lost his sight. He was an Emacs user and could more or less continue programming thanks to Emacspeak, a package for Emacs that alters the voice depending on the syntactic construct of the word it is reading. It goes without saying that without Emacs and Emacspeak he would have had an uphill struggle returning to his job.
Re: How a Blind Person Programs
#15A decade ago, I got to visit one of the accessibility labs at Microsoft. I'm not terribly surprised that Visual Studio works well as there are ocularly impaired developers at the company. I had the opportunity to speak with those who ran the lab and observe how someone used these screen readers first hand.
Re: How a Blind Person Programs
#16Earlier quoted context omitted.
I imagine to some extent, due to the speed of his reader, he can audibly browse his code. This is just a guess.. My mind is actually getting all sorts of accessibility ideas for coders. If you could have hot keys to call out the function your in, call out all the methods in the current file(structure/class view etc). Jump to files. I have no idea what the current state of the art is, but I bet it could be streamlined…
There was another post about this months ago, and the blind poster said that while C is usable (thanks to brackets), python is completely unusable or unreadable to them.
I'm pretty sure a screen reader could be configured to understand significant whitespace, even if it's not a trivial task.
Re: How a Blind Person Programs
#17Related: BSDTalk episode with a blind BSD user[1]. It's about many things, not how blind people deal with computers, but it offers some great insights nevertheless. She finds VAXen much easier to deal with than PCs, and CLIs much more accessible than GUI screen readers.
http://bsdtalk.blogspot.co.at/2008/03/bsdtalk143-bsd-hobbies...
Re: How a Blind Person Programs
#18Holy shit, I admire that guy so much. Being able to program whilst lacking sight astounds me. I wonder how he got into it. Becoming blind is one of my biggest fears and I consider programming to be one of my favourite activities on the planet, I'm happy that if the worst were to ever happen to me, I wouldn't be completely screwed. However I gotta wonder how well he's able to hold all his code in his head just off hea…
Me too! I've always thought losing my legs would be nothing compared to losing my eyesight. Good to know even that doesn't prevent you coding.
Re: How a Blind Person Programs
#19Earlier quoted context omitted.
There was another post about this months ago, and the blind poster said that while C is usable (thanks to brackets), python is completely unusable or unreadable to them.
I'm pretty sure a screen reader could be configured to understand significant whitespace, even if it's not a trivial task.
It should basically read the token stream instead of the text. For Python that includes indent and dedent tokens, which are equivalent to open and close brackets.
Re: How a Blind Person Programs
#20Wow! Those screen readers are fast (his example https://soundcloud.com/freecodecamp)! I barely understood a word. I didn't know that.
It's a shame that so many programs don't follow the accessibility guidelines, but it's just too damn easy to forget about the disabled if you aren't. But this article was an eye-opener for me (no pun intended).