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How a Blind Person Programs

blog.freecodecamp.com

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Re: How a Blind Person Programs

#71

Post by DennisP »

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.

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 to magnetic north was always active. After a couple months, subjects weren't really conscious of the buzzing, but got a really good mental map of their environment and their position in it. They could navigate unfamiliar environments much better than before...and then much worse, when the experiment ended.

There are also some well-known cases of blind people using echolocation pretty effectively, without any special hardware.

Don't have links handy, unfortunately.

Re: How a Blind Person Programs

#72

Post by steveax »

20kleagues wrote: post #61

Are there frameworks to automatically analyse html for accessibility and perhaps provide a certain rating based on set guidelines? I think that might be a very interesting project to work on if such a thing does not exist.

There are automated tools, but in my experience they mostly pick up the easy things (missing alt attributes, etc.) The harder bits are focus and notification in SPAs. Read the WCAG docs [1] and the and WAI ARIA docs [2] stick to them. Then test with a screenreader.

[1] http://www.w3.org/TR/WCAG20/

[2] http://www.w3.org/WAI/intro/aria.php

Re: How a Blind Person Programs

#73

Post by ghurtado »

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

Thank you so much for writing this amazingly inspirational article. You have so much to offer to sighted coders. Reading about your experience almost makes me wonder how much better all software would be if by some fluke of history we would have never invented visual representations of code, and we were all required to write code just like you do. It seems to me that like all the important abstractions of software engineering take on a much higher priority when you can't rely on your sight to make sense of the mess. "Less is more" indeed!

Please keep sharing your experience with the community, I think your input can bring about more benefits to sighted developers than you may have realized.

Re: How a Blind Person Programs

#74

Post by steverb »

yaddayadda wrote: post #63

>Fortunately, some fellow campers at the Free Code Camp were sympathetic towards my plight and volunteered to transcribe all these slides for me. This offer left me 'flabbergasted', as our dear western neighbors across the sea would say. Many ions ago, I volunteered for an organization called "Recordings for the Blind and Dyslexic" (now known as Learning Ally - http://www.learningally.org/ ). Groups of individuals (m…

Thank you so much for the link to learning ally. That is going to solve so many problems for my wife. We've been searching for audio versions of some of the text books they have listed there for months.

Re: How a Blind Person Programs

#75

Post by evincarofautumn »

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)?

The only command-line screenreader-compatible browser I know of that also supports JavaScript is edbrowse, which is not so bad to use if you’re already familiar with ed.

Re: How a Blind Person Programs

#77

Post by azatris »

arb99 wrote: post #60
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 actually thought it was a corrupt file or something - it doesn't sound like anything I'd be able to pick out and understand. If someone can understand at that speed, listening to audiobooks must be a very quick activity...

That's a very interesting point! I would consider that a superpower. Would this also imply that humans are capabable of way more than one would normally think, given proper training?

Re: How a Blind Person Programs

#78

Post by samatman »

socksy wrote: post #31
danielbarla wrote: post #16

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.

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.

Use pentatonics! Most other choices will sound poor.

How would you render (do (blah bler) (bip bop)) to make it different from (do (blah bler bip bop))? Emphasis?

Re: How a Blind Person Programs

#79

Post by Retra »

azatris wrote: post #77
arb99 wrote: post #60

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I actually thought it was a corrupt file or something - it doesn't sound like anything I'd be able to pick out and understand. If someone can understand at that speed, listening to audiobooks must be a very quick activity...

That's a very interesting point! I would consider that a superpower. Would this also imply that humans are capabable of way more than one would normally think, given proper training?

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.
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