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How a Blind Person Programs

blog.freecodecamp.com

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Re: How a Blind Person Programs

#101

Post by zersiax »

queryly wrote: post #83

Thank you so much for your insightful post and prospective. I have a question on how you imagine/think. People with eye sigh often think with pictures. Even thinking about abstract things like programming. I often visualize how a data structure looks and how it interacts with other code. I have found it tremendous useful as I can replay/test such scenario in my head. Do you have similar experience when you think? Do…

that question is both very easy and incredibly difficult to answer. Yes, I visualize code the way you guys do, but not with pictures. Let us take a 2-dimentional array as an example. I tend to visualize this as a table. A table, for me, is a construct with columns and rows. Naturally, I do not have a spacial picture of this, the closest I can get is a tactile representation of either a chess board or a scrabble board. In both cases, a single array index becomes a tile, which makes me able to visualize it. But just like dreams, I would not use a visual frame of reference here because that simply isn't an option, it is a tactile representation that I somehow translate into a mental ...'picture' for lack of a better word. If you think that is tough, think of how incredibly tough it is for me to visualize CSS ;)

Re: How a Blind Person Programs

#102

Post by zersiax »

Raphmedia wrote: post #53
zersiax wrote: post #36

Wow ...so many questions ...I'm not sure where to begin answering all of these :) HN is throttling me, so please come find me on #zersiax on freenode to discuss this if you have more questions :) I hope this goes through ...

As a web developper, I would LOVE if you could compile a list of things I should do to make your life easier. I have read the best practices. However, I would love to have a list that comes from you. What are some websites that are doing it well?

Please come find me on IRC or twitter for this :) any list I could draw up will leave you with a lot of questions, and asking those would just get frustrating in a medium like this. If you rather use another form of communication, please let me know and I'll see what I can do

Re: How a Blind Person Programs

#103

Post by zersiax »

js2 wrote: post #38

I turned on OS X's built-in screen reader, then set the rate to 100 (the fastest it goes). It's still not as fast NVDA. It's interesting that he's using Windows 8 and I'd have liked if he'd talked about that briefly. I'd always thought that Apple was way ahead of the other vendors on this accessibility, but perhaps with third-party software available on the desktop for screen reading that's not the case.

Even though the built-in screenreader mac OS X uses blows Narrator out of the water currently, it has a long way to go to compete with 3rd-party screenreaders on the Windows platform, especially when it comes to productivity and actually getting work done. The advantage of VoiceOver is that it is baked into the OS and therefore also the recovery media, making it far easier to reinstall the entire OS from scratch. Thiscan be done in Windows as well, but only recently were the tools created to actually allow this semi-reliably. On the mobile front, Apple does outperform the competition by a rather broad margin.

Re: How a Blind Person Programs

#104

Post by zersiax »

neverartful wrote: post #43

Several years back I worked with a team that had a blind developer. The team was transitioning to Java. The blind developer told me in a meeting that she was having trouble doing something in Eclipse. I told her that I would go with her to her desk to help diagnose the problem. Watching a blind person use Eclipse with a screen reader was simultaneously awe-inspiring (the screen reader part) and horrifying (the Eclips…

Please, elaborate on this. I tend to use Eclipse as my primary IDE and am wondering what the blind person had trouble with, what screenreader they were using and how long ago this happened.

Re: How a Blind Person Programs

#105

Post by zersiax »

r00nk wrote: post #68

I actually had an idea for this. What if blind users could wear little braille terminals? Like, braile is constructed of a series of dots, so why not have like a bracer that has a array of dots that poke the skin?

it might work, but the nerves found in the fingertips are far more sensitive than anywhere else on the body. This might be trainable though, I don't know

Re: How a Blind Person Programs

#106

Post by zersiax »

blackRust wrote: post #45

I imagine a purely text-based terminal set up running on a specially crafted host OS/VM that does the text-to-speech would be a fantastic solution. You can browse the web, email, twitter! I'm not sure how CLI browsers handle JS? If this existed would there any good reason to be using a GUI at all (for a Visually Impaired Person)?

Mainly if you are working with others, this approach would fall on its face rather quickly. People actually do this, doing all their work using emacs modes and Emacspeak. It can be done, but in this day and age it is not the most elegant solution especially with web 2.0-based websites

Re: How a Blind Person Programs

#107

Post by Retra »

zersiax wrote: post #89
Retra wrote: post #79

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's just skimming. If you were reading a book, you would just scan across it to find what you want. You don't have to read everything on the page to know what it is talking about.

I would not say that. When you are skimming, you actually skip parts of the text. Since an audible text is a constant stream of data, just skipping parts would make it incomprehensible

You still see the text, even if you don't understand it. Your eyes are collecting a constant stream of data, too.

Re: How a Blind Person Programs

#108

Post by mturmon »

zhengyi13 wrote: post #86
socksy wrote: post #31

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This article had me thinking — what if the different levels of scope were represented by reading the text at different pitches? Kind of like rainbow parentheses with lisp for sighted people. It'd be really interesting to try out a technique like that with a lisp, I think.

I've personally helped TV Raman ( http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/T._V._Raman ) re-setup his screenreader and Emacs stuff multiple times when his local PC required re-installation. He hacks on emacs code pretty effectively when he's not doing other things. IIRC different emacs fonts/faces are rendered via the reader as slightly different tones to the voice. (I also helped introduce him to stumpwm when he absolutely had…

TV Raman was in a numerical optimization class with me in grad school. He kept up with blackboard lectures, which were densely mathematical, along with everyone else, just by listening to what the professor was saying. He was one of the outstanding students in the class. An amazing person.

Re: How a Blind Person Programs

#109

Post by zersiax »

kuschku wrote: post #13
Rapzid wrote: post #12

Earlier 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.

There is absolutely nothing preventing blind coders from using Python. Indentation can easily be reported by any screenreader I am aware of and it is a very clean, screenreader-friendly language for the rest. I really enjoy working with that language

Re: How a Blind Person Programs

#110

Post by bphogan »

smoyer wrote: post #26
Kenji wrote: post #20

Wow! 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).

I'm installing a screen-reader today ... and I'm going to listen to everything I create on it (at a slower speed - at least to start). We have stringent accessibility guidelines, tools to help find accessibility problems and a person in charge of making sure we adhere to those principles, but wouldn't it be more real to close your eyes and experience your creation yourself?

Thank you for doing this. And for saying this.
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