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How a Blind Person Programs

blog.freecodecamp.com

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Re: How a Blind Person Programs

#91

Post by zersiax »

dsuth wrote: post #22
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…

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.

To be very honest with you, I never really think about the stack and the heap. I know the concepts, but I tend to zoom into my code far closer. I work with the current function only, its inputs and outputs. Someone on Twitter recommended TDD to me, which indeed is only a small logical step from what I am already mentally conceptualizing

Re: How a Blind Person Programs

#92

Post by zersiax »

qznc wrote: post #24
dsuth wrote: post #22

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/

come talk to me on IRC. your questions are too involved to answer in one comment

Re: How a Blind Person Programs

#93

Post by steveax »

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).

Good introduction to screen readers from Victor Tsaran of Yahoo [1] also shows his normal speed for browsing.

[1] http://yuiblog.com/blog/2007/05/14/video-intro-to-screenread...

Re: How a Blind Person Programs

#94

Post by zersiax »

murbard2 wrote: post #44
zersiax wrote: post #37

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

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 :(

Re: How a Blind Person Programs

#95

Post by ckuttruff »

Really curious about how a linux environment compares in terms of usability for the blind. zersiax, are you using windows primarily because of the toolchain you need for work / school, or did you find linux lacking in terms of its support for your needs?

Re: How a Blind Person Programs

#96

Post by zersiax »

yaddayadda wrote: post #67
zersiax wrote: post #37

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

@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 well regarding you can get your braille display hooked up to Linux, which is a little tricky for me in my current configuration. Also, there's Emacspeak which I am having a hard time getting to run because I don't speak Lisp :)

Re: How a Blind Person Programs

#97

Post by zersiax »

grego wrote: post #70
zersiax wrote: post #37

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

Btw. what braille do you use for reading code? 8-dot us-computer braille, or something else? (I'm the author of MBraille, now working on Vietnamese braille table for liblouis, so braille is in my mind...)

I tend to use 8-dots US braille, simply because I am used to it. Working with other tables would work just as well though if that's what you are used to, there's no 7 and 8 dot features that set it apart

Re: How a Blind Person Programs

#98

Post by steveax »

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…

Also, Bookshare [1] has 300k+ accessible titles.

[1] https://www.bookshare.org/

Re: How a Blind Person Programs

#99

Post by zersiax »

gcb0 wrote: post #85

> 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?

It might. You are putting your finger on a rather experimental way of browsing through code, something which Emacspeak currently does reliably as the only editor I am aware of. Rather than using sound fx, it uses difference in the TTSvoice to denote different syntax properties, kind of like audible syntax highlighting

Re: How a Blind Person Programs

#100

Post by walterbell »

zersiax wrote: post #89
Retra wrote: post #79

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

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.

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