Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

How a Blind Person Programs

blog.freecodecamp.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

41–50 of 136 posts

Re: How a Blind Person Programs

#41

Post by zersiax »

Rapzid wrote: post #12
Lrigikithumer wrote: post #4

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…

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…

Audibly browsing through lines of code is something I do all the time, yep :) Also checking it using braille helps, its a bit more ...hmm ...direct in some ways. As for calling out functions and such, a lot of IDE's can already do that. Have a look at the outline view in Eclipse, as well as the annotations you can skip between using hotkeys which is useful for finding errors in your code

Re: How a Blind Person Programs

#42

Post by LeonM »

4ad wrote: post #17

Related: 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...

That download link seems to be broken, can anyone upload that cast somewhere?

Re: How a Blind Person Programs

#43

Post by neverartful »

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 Eclipse part). Needless to say, Eclipse was not well suited for the blind.

Re: How a Blind Person Programs

#44

Post by murbard2 »

zersiax wrote: post #37
cturner wrote: post #6

I'd like to know: what is the most comfortable posture for coding once you no longer have to look at a screen? I've wondered whether a syntax-sparse language like iolanguage might allow you to code entirely by voice and ear, with no need for keyboard. For those of us with vision, imagine having a lounge with a large screen on the wall. You can talk into your headset as you pace around, or lie on the couch.

Technically I can already sort of do that in any language. Do keep in mind that all I need to interact with a computer is a keyboard and some way to hear audio ...so I can in fact lay back on the couch with a keyboard on my lap and code away. In fact ... I do that all the time ;) I can't check my work using braille that way though, which is kind of essential with very complex code

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's your experience like here? Does it make a difference?

Re: How a Blind Person Programs

#45

Post by blackRust »

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)?

Re: How a Blind Person Programs

#46

Post by andreasvc »

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.

While it makes sense that it would be unusable without proper treatment of the indentations, I don't think it would be hard to adapt the screen reader. Note that the Python parser itself converts indentations to begin / end tokens, which are exactly like braces, so those can be read out loud to make the indentations explicit.

Re: How a Blind Person Programs

#47

Post by 4ad »

LeonM wrote: post #42
4ad wrote: post #17

Related: 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...

That download link seems to be broken, can anyone upload that cast somewhere?

Mirror: https://archive.org/details/bsdtalk143

Re: How a Blind Person Programs

#48

Post by happimess »

zersiax wrote: post #40
Lrigikithumer wrote: post #4

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…

A large codebase is a pain if its not organized properly ...I like MVC a lot for that reason :) if people adhere to the conventions, its easy to find what's what

To be fair, I think a lot of sighted people would agree with you on both points.

Re: How a Blind Person Programs

#49

Post by jareds »

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)?

I think Emacspeak is close to what your talking about. http://emacspeak.sourceforge.net/ The reason I don't use it is because I could never get it to work quite right so just continued using Windows. It's a lot easier to use Windows, Eclipse, Outlook, Office, etc even if it is somewhat less productive then Emacspeak would be. The amount of time I'd have to spend working around how to integrate with my co-workers Windows based setups if I used Linux with no GUI makes it a non-starter.

Re: How a Blind Person Programs

#50

Post by fiatjaf »

This audio is the most unintelligible block of sound I've ever heard, but it made my day much happier to know you can understand it and use it nicely.

I will try to use the HTML5 accessibility tags and attributes whenever I can from now on (I currently don't even know what is there about accessibility to be implemented).

Post reply on HN