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How a Blind Person Programs

blog.freecodecamp.com

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Re: How a Blind Person Programs

#121

Post by jcr »

zersiax wrote: post #96
yaddayadda wrote: post #67

Earlier quoted context omitted.

@zersiax - Thank you so much for sharing! - You mention, >Premier tools that coders use every day, like the IntelliJ editor, as well as all its offshoots (PHPStorm, WebStorm, PyCharm), are completely inaccessible, due simply to the fact that the developers of these programs have not adhered to the accessibility guidelines. They've failed to give screen readers textual labels or accessibility descriptions to work with…

No, I have to read through all the comments over and over and quickly arrow along when I notice its a comment I've already seen. As for your editor questions: Brackets is sort of usable, but too much of a pain to actually be useful. Vim ...I really have no idea how to use it, and I think thats not a 'being blind' thing :P I should look into it more Sublime is, like the IntelliJ, completely inaccessible Emacs works we…

Do you have trouble with voting up either comments or stories on HN?

If you check out the HN page source you'll notice the HTML anchors for voting are essentially empty save for an empty HTML DIV element with it's background image set to the arrow icon. Needless to say, the way it's designed is dead wrong and highly problematic for systems like terminal text browsers.

Re: How a Blind Person Programs

#122

Post by zersiax »

jcr wrote: post #121
zersiax wrote: post #96

Earlier quoted context omitted.

No, I have to read through all the comments over and over and quickly arrow along when I notice its a comment I've already seen. As for your editor questions: Brackets is sort of usable, but too much of a pain to actually be useful. Vim ...I really have no idea how to use it, and I think thats not a 'being blind' thing :P I should look into it more Sublime is, like the IntelliJ, completely inaccessible Emacs works we…

Do you have trouble with voting up either comments or stories on HN? If you check out the HN page source you'll notice the HTML anchors for voting are essentially empty save for an empty HTML DIV element with it's background image set to the arrow icon. Needless to say, the way it's designed is dead wrong and highly problematic for systems like terminal text browsers.

Oddly enough no, I can read the vote up buttons just fine and should in fact use them more :) maybe some JS behind the scenes that is taking care of it

Re: How a Blind Person Programs

#123

Post by zersiax »

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…

The sort answer to your question is no. Just like dreams being unable to use any visual imagery, the same goes for concepts like bright, dull, color, etc. are abstract concepts that I really can't put any particular image to. Rule of thumb is that if you can't fully describe it in words that don't involve referring to visual cues, I don't know what it is :) As for feeling it ...it depends. I myself can still see differences between light and dark, as long as they are different enough. Think lightning at night, a lamp turning on in a dark room etc There's no color, shape or anything like that when I see that though. I therefore kind of know what seeing is, but only a very small portions of it. For people who are even more blind than I am, meaning ...no vision at all ... they wouldn't really 'feel' it, its oftencompared to imagining you have a sense that you actually don't have, like a dolphin's ability to always know where north is ...at least ...it was dolphins that coulddo that, no?

Re: How a Blind Person Programs

#124

Post by zersiax »

krick wrote: post #118
jareds wrote: post #115

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Number of questions :) I'll see if I can answer them, at least how I think about it. :) For me, color is abstract enough for me to be unable to imagine it. Asociating colors with objects is something a lot of blind people do, but it turns into parameters on an object that way. Color = blue; there's no description ... blue = null pointer exception; As for visual beauty, this is incredibly difficult at least for me to fully comprehend, because you sighties have the annoying habit of changing what you think is beautiful every so many years :P Beauty might be the smoothness of the sculpture, its simetry, its proportions being exactly right. That is the only, somewhat clinical, description of beauty I can think of, at least visual beauty. I must say that when it comes to beauty in humans I tend to disregard it completely. People look like what they look like and that is subject to change anyway as time goes on, no use worrying about it if I can't see it myself anyway. I myself live on my own, therefore I am forced to cook, clean, do my own laundry etc. if I like it or not. This, like a lot of other things, is something you learn to live with. I can safely say that yes, I am fully functional in my own home :) Changes in the kitchen area can be a little annoying, but would never severely throw me off. There's only a finite amount of place the knives could've gone, to use your example. I tend to lay out everything I need before starting to cook though, to avoid ...less than ideal situations when such a thing happens. Unfamiliar environments are a bit of a tricky thing. You are right in assuming a dog is an incredible help in such situations,I am hopefully receiving my first dog some time this year but I see time and time again how this affects the confidence and independence of blind people I know. To answer your question though, it really depends on the person. Some people have a very good sense of direction and wouldn't have a problem in a forest or would get used to another's house quickly enough. I myself have a bit more trouble with that, but I do hop onto a train to an unfamiliar city if I know someone will be at the final station to pick me up and take me where I need to go, thats not something every blind person would do. It depends on a huge number of factors.

Re: How a Blind Person Programs

#125

Post by erikano »

walterbell wrote: post #100
zersiax wrote: post #89

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

In speed reading, you can read sentences backwards and the brain will reorder them in real time. You can learn to decouple image (symbol/word) acquisition from comprehension. Step one om this path is to stop subvocalization, saying words out loud in your head. It's the same difference between Sync (O_DIRECT) and Async disk writes.

>Step one om this path is to stop subvocalization, saying words out loud in your head.

I've heard people say that before but I still don't understand how to do it.

Re: How a Blind Person Programs

#126

Post by tormeh »

DennisP wrote: post #71
malnourish wrote: post #64

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

The brain seems to be pretty darn plastic. There have been experiments with giving people whole new sensory inputs, and finding that the brain adapted to them quite well. Two examples: - A grid of electrodes on the tongue, activating with a pattern fed from a camera. After a while, blind experimental subjects reported actually seeing what the grid displayed. - A belt of buzzers hooked to a compass. The buzzer closest…

This. Make any prediction of how advanced the brain is, then double that, at the very very least. It is barely short of magical. Even single neurons can do processing way more advanced than the artificial ones we use in machine learning. The rest of the body is honestly quite disappointing in comparison. Even the immune system and DNA/RNA mechanisms seem trivial and those are pretty dope compared to most other things.

Re: How a Blind Person Programs

#127

Post by sfilipov »

tormeh wrote: post #126
DennisP wrote: post #71

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The brain seems to be pretty darn plastic. There have been experiments with giving people whole new sensory inputs, and finding that the brain adapted to them quite well. Two examples: - A grid of electrodes on the tongue, activating with a pattern fed from a camera. After a while, blind experimental subjects reported actually seeing what the grid displayed. - A belt of buzzers hooked to a compass. The buzzer closest…

This. Make any prediction of how advanced the brain is, then double that, at the very very least. It is barely short of magical. Even single neurons can do processing way more advanced than the artificial ones we use in machine learning. The rest of the body is honestly quite disappointing in comparison. Even the immune system and DNA/RNA mechanisms seem trivial and those are pretty dope compared to most other things…

Even single neurons can do processing way more advanced than the artificial ones we use in machine learning.

How does that work? A single neuron is a single neuron. My understanding is that the brain has lots of neurons and also they are assembled in certain "NN architectures" that are far more advanced than what we currently have. But I think that if you go the the single neuron level then they are pretty similar in terms of problem solving capabilities.

Re: How a Blind Person Programs

#128

Post by tormeh »

sfilipov wrote: post #127
tormeh wrote: post #126

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This. Make any prediction of how advanced the brain is, then double that, at the very very least. It is barely short of magical. Even single neurons can do processing way more advanced than the artificial ones we use in machine learning. The rest of the body is honestly quite disappointing in comparison. Even the immune system and DNA/RNA mechanisms seem trivial and those are pretty dope compared to most other things…

Even single neurons can do processing way more advanced than the artificial ones we use in machine learning. How does that work? A single neuron is a single neuron. My understanding is that the brain has lots of neurons and also they are assembled in certain "NN architectures" that are far more advanced than what we currently have. But I think that if you go the the single neuron level then they are pretty similar in…

Well, a neuron can either fire or not fire; 0 or 1. For a neuron to fire, enough of its' synapses need to fire. How likely a single neuron is to do so based on an incoming action potential varies over time according to Hebbian learning. Once x synapses fire, the input is linearly summed to determine if the neuron as a whole fires. That's a neat abstraction and it is pretty descriptive. But it's also a little too neat to be true. The summation is, of course, not linear and neurons react to incoming signals even if they don't fire. How likely a neuron is to fire also depends on how much it has fired recently, as the synapses "get tired" (the concentration of certain molecules are temporarily exhausted), but for some neurons, likelihood increases as a result of previous firings before it decreases. Hebbian learning increases the strength of the connection to neurons that participates in successfully firing the neuron, but connections under a certain strength threshold decay with time, while those over it are stable (inability to create these stable connections is connected to alzheimers).

That's what I remember and I just took some neuroscience courses. There are multiple books out there attempting only to describe behaviour mathematically, let alone describing the underlying mechanisms, which is true "here be dragons" territory.

Re: How a Blind Person Programs

#129

Post by murbard2 »

zersiax wrote: post #94
murbard2 wrote: post #44

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Thanks for writing this article. I've often wondered if I could still program if I lost my eyesight; this is reassuring. When I consider at expressions with infix notations, I visually scan then from left to right and right to left. Visually matching parenthesis is also important. I get the impression that if one were to listen to an expression in one pass, reverse polish notation would be the most intelligible. What…

I am afraid I didn't understand most of the sentence. I am not familiar with the notation you are referring to, not the type of expression you mean :(

Infix notation is when the operators goes in the middle. For instance, the expression: x * (y-z) uses infix notation. When I look at it, I can see at a glance that x is multiplied by the difference between y and z. However, were I to listen to it, I wouldn't know when to expect the parenthesis to close. I would have to remember that I am within a parenthesis.

Postfix notation, or reverse polish notation places operators after the operands. So that same expression would read " x y z - * ". The idea is that you push x on a stack, then y, then z. Then comes the minus sign, you pop the top two elements, y and z, and push their difference on the stack. Finally you pop the two elements, x and y-z, and replace them with their product.

In reverse polish notation, you still need to remember something, the state of the stack, but there are no parenthesis. I get the impression it would easier to parse if listening to the expression, but I may be wrong.

So which parses most easily for you? x * (y-z), or x y z - * ?

Re: How a Blind Person Programs

#130

Post by walterbell »

erikano wrote: post #125
walterbell wrote: post #100

Earlier quoted context omitted.

In speed reading, you can read sentences backwards and the brain will reorder them in real time. You can learn to decouple image (symbol/word) acquisition from comprehension. Step one om this path is to stop subvocalization, saying words out loud in your head. It's the same difference between Sync (O_DIRECT) and Async disk writes.

>Step one om this path is to stop subvocalization, saying words out loud in your head. I've heard people say that before but I still don't understand how to do it.

Does this help?

http://www.irisreading.com/speed-reading/speed-reading-tips-...

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