9 ms·

How can you program if you're blind? (2013)

58 points by raoulj 9y ago

gtani 9y ago
I used to work in adaptive skiing, mostly with visually impaired kids and adults, and met a couple of blind develoeprs and people working on screen readers and other equipment. They lived in California which helped with a lot of expensive Braille and other equipment, but mostly they achieved at a high academic and industry level thru sheer determination. Academics: degrees from MIT, Berkeley, other top programs. One critical skill was to crank up their browser readers to unbelievable speeds, I couldnt understand anything at that speed. I think most of them used the emacs-speak interface from Cornell. There weren't any tools to make schematics and similar dense graphic representations approachable, tho.
js2 9y ago
There was a pretty good discussion here two years ago which included a screen reader example: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8965048 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8965048
2-4-Flinching 9y ago
" I use windows xp as my operating system"... WTH!! "Sep 29 '08" ohhh LOL
- mtve 9y ago
  I use winxp too, today.
SunShiranui 9y ago
I've seen blind CS students use a combination of braille displays and screen readers: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Refreshable_braille_display https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Refreshable_braille_display
zabi_rauf 9y ago
Saqib from Microsoft is blind and demoed using Visual Studio at Build this year https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=iWXebEeGwn0 https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=iWXebEeGwn0
- melling 9y ago
  At 2:22 he has to press F5 to build. Personally, I would like to say "Build", "Run", "Next Error", "insert line below", "rename function foo to bar", "Reformat file", "Reformat method", etc in my editor. Wouldn't we all benefit by having an editor that had some voice commands?
  - simias 9y ago
    I hope a blind person will be able to answer you but I can't really imagine how voice command would be more efficient than a simple keyboard shortcut. Admittedly the F keys are not the easiest to access though, I prefer emacs-style chording.
    - yorwba 9y ago
      I'm not blind, but personally I would find voice commands to be quite useful, since I can speak much faster than I can type. Keyboard shortcuts are similarly efficient, but they are somewhat hard to memorize when you only infrequently use them. Unfortunately, the state-of-the-art in speech recognition is not quite there yet, especially when you want to use arbitrary identifiers like strncmp that can't be found in any pronunciation dictionary.
      - vram22 9y ago
        >personally I would find voice commands to be quite useful, since I can speak much faster than I can type. Interesting. Wouldn't speech recognition be marginally to somewhat slower in response, than response to keyboard commands, though? More so, considering that a lot of processing has to be done to recognize speech, not to mention the time to receive the audio input via the mic, do analog-to-digital conversion (assuming that is needed, not sure these days), etc.
projectramo 9y ago
A lot of these solutions center on the entry part of programming. I don't know what it is like to program blind, but I imagine the big challenge is on reading and stepping through code. When I do that, I have multiple windows that step through the structure and then I pause the code and interrogate variables. When someone cannot see, do they load up a greater part of the code into their memory? Instead of relying on the editor to pull up the definition of a function in a window, do they just read it once and keep that in their head? For example, I am in a subroutine in a subroutine, and I notice that an array has an unexpected value. I look at the function that is assigning that value and I wonder what it does. That is 4 windows right there.
cafard 9y ago
A man I worked with used a combination of a magnifier--he could see a foot-high letter, I gather--and a screen reader.
vram22 9y ago
A blind person contacted me some time ago to check if I could give him training on Python. He was already using computers using some sort of open source software that helped with his disability, but it was rather inefficient. After discussions, we concluded that (at least given the tech we knew about and that he could afford), it would not work out. Sad for such people.

58 points by raoulj 9y ago

I used to work in adaptive skiing, mostly with visually impaired kids and adults, and met a couple of blind develoeprs and people working on screen readers and other equipment. They lived in California which helped with a lot of expensive Braille and other equipment, but mostly they achieved at a high academic and industry level thru sheer determination. Academics: degrees from MIT, Berkeley, other top programs. One critical skill was to crank up their browser readers to unbelievable speeds, I couldnt understand anything at that speed. I think most of them used the emacs-speak interface from Cornell. There weren't any tools to make schematics and similar dense graphic representations approachable, tho.

js2 9y ago

There was a pretty good discussion here two years ago which included a screen reader example: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8965048 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8965048

2-4-Flinching 9y ago

" I use windows xp as my operating system"... WTH!! "Sep 29 '08" ohhh LOL

mtve 9y ago
I use winxp too, today.

SunShiranui 9y ago

I've seen blind CS students use a combination of braille displays and screen readers: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Refreshable_braille_display https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Refreshable_braille_display

zabi_rauf 9y ago

Saqib from Microsoft is blind and demoed using Visual Studio at Build this year https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=iWXebEeGwn0 https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=iWXebEeGwn0

melling 9y ago
At 2:22 he has to press F5 to build. Personally, I would like to say "Build", "Run", "Next Error", "insert line below", "rename function foo to bar", "Reformat file", "Reformat method", etc in my editor. Wouldn't we all benefit by having an editor that had some voice commands?
- simias 9y ago
  I hope a blind person will be able to answer you but I can't really imagine how voice command would be more efficient than a simple keyboard shortcut. Admittedly the F keys are not the easiest to access though, I prefer emacs-style chording.
  - yorwba 9y ago
    I'm not blind, but personally I would find voice commands to be quite useful, since I can speak much faster than I can type. Keyboard shortcuts are similarly efficient, but they are somewhat hard to memorize when you only infrequently use them. Unfortunately, the state-of-the-art in speech recognition is not quite there yet, especially when you want to use arbitrary identifiers like strncmp that can't be found in any pronunciation dictionary.
    - vram22 9y ago
      >personally I would find voice commands to be quite useful, since I can speak much faster than I can type. Interesting. Wouldn't speech recognition be marginally to somewhat slower in response, than response to keyboard commands, though? More so, considering that a lot of processing has to be done to recognize speech, not to mention the time to receive the audio input via the mic, do analog-to-digital conversion (assuming that is needed, not sure these days), etc.

projectramo 9y ago

A lot of these solutions center on the entry part of programming. I don't know what it is like to program blind, but I imagine the big challenge is on reading and stepping through code. When I do that, I have multiple windows that step through the structure and then I pause the code and interrogate variables. When someone cannot see, do they load up a greater part of the code into their memory? Instead of relying on the editor to pull up the definition of a function in a window, do they just read it once and keep that in their head? For example, I am in a subroutine in a subroutine, and I notice that an array has an unexpected value. I look at the function that is assigning that value and I wonder what it does. That is 4 windows right there.

cafard 9y ago

A man I worked with used a combination of a magnifier--he could see a foot-high letter, I gather--and a screen reader.

vram22 9y ago

A blind person contacted me some time ago to check if I could give him training on Python. He was already using computers using some sort of open source software that helped with his disability, but it was rather inefficient. After discussions, we concluded that (at least given the tech we knew about and that he could afford), it would not work out. Sad for such people.