21–30 of 136 posts
apologies for the horrible pun
Holy 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…
Holy 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…
Holy 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…
This brings up a really interesting point - how do blind people visualise code, conceptually? When people talk about stacks, heaps, lists etc, there's generally a visual representation that goes along with it. I wonder what kind of abstractions blind people use.
So many questions ...
That blog post is very interesting. I really enjoyed the reading and must admit that I should spend more time on accessibility. The speed of the screen reader Zersiax uses is unbelievable fast. I can't understand a single word: https://soundcloud.com/freecodecamp/zersiaxs-screen-reader
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).
Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
We always joked he did our UI.
Holy 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…
This brings up a really interesting point - how do blind people visualise code, conceptually? When people talk about stacks, heaps, lists etc, there's generally a visual representation that goes along with it. I wonder what kind of abstractions blind people use.
When I was younger and being taught how to get around a new area, I had a hell of a time trying to get my instructors to draw me a map. Not sure if I wasn't explaining myself well or if those instructors just decided to play stupid, but I had to fight to get even a simple drawn tactile map, and once I had one everything more or less clicked into place. Now that we have accessible touchscreens on just about every modern mainstream OS, I'd love a shared whiteboard app that could accessibly render UML diagrams or whatever else drawn on one tablet to a roomful of connected phones, laptops and tablets. You couldn't necessarily convey shapes and such exactly, but if you could position a shape meaningfully and add some sort of access hint metadata (I.e. "downward-pointing arrow") I could spatially explore a UI or system diagram and everyone else can have their pretty pictures.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
This brings up a really interesting point - how do blind people visualise code, conceptually? When people talk about stacks, heaps, lists etc, there's generally a visual representation that goes along with it. I wonder what kind of abstractions blind people use.
Are there any blind compiler/interpreter hackers? A programming language optimized for the blind would make an interesting esolang [0]. I guess a REPL works great. Does Forth or Lisp read better to the blind? Can you do syntax "coloring" in sound? Are static types helpful or is type inference prefered? Would they like an editor like ed? So many questions ... [0] http://esolangs.org/
I can't for the life of me code in any Lisp-like language. Too much nesting, and whereas speech synthesis inserts pauses at commas and other punctuation marks, Lisp's lack of them makes it hard to parse a heavily-nested function call by ear. This is true to a lesser extent with Haskell and its emphasis on ., $ and other operators that change how a function call is structured.
As always, opinions expressed are my own, and shouldn't be taken as a statement of how collective blind people do X. I'm one of many, so please don't walk away from this thinking Lisps are hard for blind folks. They're tough for me, and above are my particular reasons why.