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How a Blind Person Programs

blog.freecodecamp.com

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Re: How a Blind Person Programs

#81

Post by iamthepieman »

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 American Life did an episode recently on Daniel Kish, one of the most famous echo location practitioners[0] and here's a short youtube video of the same guy.[1]

[0]http://www.thisamericanlife.org/radio-archives/episode/544/b...

[1]https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=A8lztr1tu4o

Re: How a Blind Person Programs

#82

Post by socksy »

samatman wrote: post #78
socksy wrote: post #31

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

Pentatonics is a good idea. Maybe to distinguish in this case you might have a 'blip' type noise go down to the sound of the do block's tone?

Re: How a Blind Person Programs

#83

Post by queryly »

Thank you so much for your insightful post and prospective.

I have a question on how you imagine/think. People with eye sigh often think with pictures. Even thinking about abstract things like programming. I often visualize how a data structure looks and how it interacts with other code. I have found it tremendous useful as I can replay/test such scenario in my head.

Do you have similar experience when you think? Do you construct mental picture (such as circle, a binary tree) in your head? What is it like?

Re: How a Blind Person Programs

#84

Post by jacinda »

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 would compare this to using something like Spritz (http://www.spritzinc.com/) for a sighted person. At first the higher speeds feel too fast but your brain quickly adapts, especially with daily practice. Given that he's used a screen-reader his entire life when dealing with computers, I'm sure his brain has deeply entrenched pathways for parsing audio like this.

I found that it was easier to catch a few words from that file when I closed my eyes to shut out other distractions. I still couldn't understand much, but I could see how there would be a progression to build to that level.

Re: How a Blind Person Programs

#85

Post by gcb0 »

> If left paren x equals five

you have a bug there :)

also, why not use different sounds for ( [ { etc?

would a different beep for each instead of "left paren" make life easier?

Re: How a Blind Person Programs

#86

Post by zhengyi13 »

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.

I've personally helped TV Raman (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/T._V._Raman) re-setup his screenreader and Emacs stuff multiple times when his local PC required re-installation. He hacks on emacs code pretty effectively when he's not doing other things. IIRC different emacs fonts/faces are rendered via the reader as slightly different tones to the voice.

(I also helped introduce him to stumpwm when he absolutely had to have a GUI to do some specific testing; he was shocked and pleased that such a thing existed)

Re: How a Blind Person Programs

#87

Post by zersiax »

superobserver wrote: post #56
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).

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.

the WPM on that is aproximatley 525

Re: How a Blind Person Programs

#88

Post by zersiax »

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…

Echolocation is a skill that basically translates clicky sounds that bounce back into structural details of the obstruction the sound waves encounter. be it height, weight, distance and if you get good at it even material composition. Look at Dan Kish to see an example

Re: How a Blind Person Programs

#89

Post by zersiax »

Retra wrote: post #79
azatris wrote: post #77

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

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

Re: How a Blind Person Programs

#90

Post by zersiax »

samatman wrote: post #78
socksy wrote: post #31

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

I actually had to go through that line by line to even see the difference since as I said I tend to ignore braces, brackets and parens unless I need them. For this, working with audio only would just be a bad idea and braille display would make this a lot easier
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