How a Blind Person Programs • Hacker News Board

Re: How a Blind Person Programs

#111

Post by dbbolton » Fri, Jan 30, 2015, 12:17 AM UTC

malnourish wrote: post #64

superobserver wrote: post #56

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Since he has a whole occipital lobe to devote to parsing that, I don't feel so bad that my auditory processing isn't quite up to snuff. Reminds me of speed reading, though. What is the wpm on that? Maybe I'll ask him on freenode.

Is there evidence to suggest that a brain is that plastic? Genuinely curious. I feel like the "blind people have super-powered other senses" is an urban legend, like the 10% of your brain misconception.

"Neuropsychologists compared the brain activity of people who can see and people who were born blind, discovering that the part of the brain that normally works with our eyes to process vision and space perception can actually rewire itself to process sound information instead."

http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2011/03/110316104123.ht...

Re: How a Blind Person Programs

#112

Post by FreeFull » Fri, Jan 30, 2015, 12:24 AM UTC

fiatjaf wrote: post #51

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).

SoundCloud is evil and started playing bad songs right after this audio stopped.

I have no idea if there is a way to stop it from doing that either

Re: How a Blind Person Programs

#113

Post by mattmurdog » Fri, Jan 30, 2015, 12:26 AM UTC

Really cool. Thank you for sharing.

Re: How a Blind Person Programs

#114

Post by krick » Fri, Jan 30, 2015, 2:12 AM UTC

I never had a chance to talk to somebody who was blind all his life and I've always been curious about that. It seems pretty obvious, that blind person can be dreaming, because hearing or smell are senses as much as eyesight is. I cannot comprehend the opposite: does person, blind all his life actually understand what "seeing" means? Of course he knows from the communicating with the others, that he lacks some ability, which most people have, but does he "feel" it somehow? Especially it is interesting with well-read people: writers often spend quite a large portion of the book describing how something looks. So, literate blind person must be well aware of words like "color", "beauty" (addressing the look of something), "bright", "dark", "dull", "picture" and such. But if he never ever saw — do all these words mean anything to him? Does he have idea of what it is like "to see"?

Re: How a Blind Person Programs

#115

Post by jareds » Fri, Jan 30, 2015, 2:32 AM UTC

krick wrote: post #114

I never had a chance to talk to somebody who was blind all his life and I've always been curious about that. It seems pretty obvious, that blind person can be dreaming, because hearing or smell are senses as much as eyesight is. I cannot comprehend the opposite: does person, blind all his life actually understand what "seeing" means? Of course he knows from the communicating with the others, that he lacks some abilit…

I have been almost totally blind all my life. I have some light perception and from talking to people the nearest I can come up with for colors is that black is when it is totally dark, gray is a normal room with lights turned on, and white is looking directly at the son. I associate colors with objects such as grass being green, brown being dirt, blue being the ocean etc but this isn't actually useful information.

Re: How a Blind Person Programs

#116

Post by Sanddancer » Fri, Jan 30, 2015, 2:38 AM UTC

k__ wrote: post #28

I knew a blind programmer back in the days. We always joked he did our UI.

A housemate of mine works with a blind web dev. The only real problem she has with is making sure certain css divs appear correctly on the screen, which she overcomes by asking friends, etc if it looks correct.

Re: How a Blind Person Programs

#117

Post by darkmighty » Fri, Jan 30, 2015, 2:42 AM UTC

krick wrote: post #114

I never had a chance to talk to somebody who was blind all his life and I've always been curious about that. It seems pretty obvious, that blind person can be dreaming, because hearing or smell are senses as much as eyesight is. I cannot comprehend the opposite: does person, blind all his life actually understand what "seeing" means? Of course he knows from the communicating with the others, that he lacks some abilit…

Maybe it's like picturing 4D objects is for us? I mean, you can study a lot 4D geometry etc, you can answer questions about it, but none is able to (afaik) "see" 4D objects. We just don't have a 3D matrix of receptors that would be the analogue of 3D vision, nor the processing region for that.

The questions you asked are answerable in this framework I guess, although even adding a new dimension is less than getting a full new sense.

Re: How a Blind Person Programs

#118

Post by krick » Fri, Jan 30, 2015, 3:02 AM UTC

jareds wrote: post #115

krick wrote: post #114

I never had a chance to talk to somebody who was blind all his life and I've always been curious about that. It seems pretty obvious, that blind person can be dreaming, because hearing or smell are senses as much as eyesight is. I cannot comprehend the opposite: does person, blind all his life actually understand what "seeing" means? Of course he knows from the communicating with the others, that he lacks some abilit…

I have been almost totally blind all my life. I have some light perception and from talking to people the nearest I can come up with for colors is that black is when it is totally dark, gray is a normal room with lights turned on, and white is looking directly at the son. I associate colors with objects such as grass being green, brown being dirt, blue being the ocean etc but this isn't actually useful information.

Thank you for the response. I don't know if having some light perception can be called "totally blind", because the sense of seeing isn't totally unfamiliar to you, probably it's more like "very-very bad eyesight", am I right?

But still, as I understand you somewhat have a grasp of what color actually is, it isn't just "some word other people use", is it?

But what of notion of visual beauty? Does it mean something to you, when somebody says that this picture, or woman, or sculpture is beautiful? Can you tell if sculpture is "beautiful" or not after touching it with your fingers? If so, would it be meaningful to discuss something like that with your seeing friends or you would be more likely addressing something completely different from what they do?

And a couple more questions, if you don't mind. Are you completely functional in well-known environment? For example, how hard cooking in your own kitchen is for you? And how much of a problem it is if somebody was working in the kitchen before you and left some items, like knife, in the wrong places? How hard it is to you to move in completely unfamiliar environment? Like, say, can you travel to some distant new location completely on your own, without a dog or another human? How long would it take to being accustomed to the new environment, like when being guests at somebody's place? Could you take a walk in the forest or a big park on your own? Would you feel insecure being there for the first time?

I'm sorry if I'm bothering you, it's just I really, really wanted to ask all these questions and more for quite a long time.

Re: How a Blind Person Programs

#119

Post by franklinho » Fri, Jan 30, 2015, 3:37 AM UTC

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).

No kidding. The speed of that is incredible.

Re: How a Blind Person Programs

#120

Post by SwellJoe » Fri, Jan 30, 2015, 8:37 AM UTC

A friend of mine is a blind developer. He built his own screenreader for Android ( https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=info.spielproj... ), because he was unhappy with the existing options. I haven't yet gotten over being amazed, but I always knew he was really bright, so I should just get over assuming not having sight would prevent him from being an effective developer.

He has ambitions to do hardware hacking, but has been thwarted by difficulties with identifying parts (i.e. resistors are color-coded), among other things. I've been meaning to sit down with him sometime and work on something.