9 ms·
Software development and screen readers at 450 words per minute
- adambrian 9y agoThis is truly remarkable, what an intersting perspective on the craft
- wildpeaks 9y agoOn a related note, I wish Youtube had an option to play a video faster than 2X (other then downloading the video to play in a local viewer like VLC). Even as a sighted individual, listening to conference talks at high speed is convenient (and you can still pause if you want to look deeper into something).
- chrisa 9y agoThere's a chrome plugin called video speed controller that can speed up any html5 video (including YouTube, vimeo, etc) to whatever speed you want. It's great!
- phonon 9y agoYup! Shortcuts in it are super handy. https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/video-speed-controller/nffaoalbilbmmfgbnbgppjihopabppdk?hl=en https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/video-speed-contro...
- 4lun 9y agoI have the same wish. Though not ideal, you can work around it in the console quite easily: document.querySelector('video').playbackRate = 3
- icebraining 9y agoJust create a bookmark with that code prefixed by "javascript:", then it becomes 1-click to activate: javascript:(function(){document.querySelector('video').playbackRate = 3;})();
- SwellJoe 9y agoYeah, I love the speed option on Youtube, but it often could go faster. Though I usually end up watching at 1.5x because when I'm watching coding tutorial videos, I can't type fast enough and also process what I'm hearing/seeing to be able to keep up at 2x. I tried understanding the reader in the article and found I could only catch about every third or fourth word, even though I do often watch videos at 2x (and I did actually used to use VLC for speeding up videos in the pre-YouTube speed option days). I'd need a lot more practice to grok speech at that speed.
- jondubois 9y agoI'm not blind but I also hate side by side diffs. When resolving conflicts, I prefer opening the raw text file with the conflict segments and manually delete and copy paste stuff; it's so much faster and more flexible.
- yjftsjthsd-h 9y agoThere is a fairly popular thought that software which is accessible tends to be better for "normal" users as well.
- k__ 9y agoI worked with a blind dev for years and he mostly used the command line. He said, this is the only real accessible interface where you get 100% control.
- pvdebbe 9y agoThis holds true for everyone
- nerdponx 9y agoWhat about Notepad++ makes it work with screen readers while Sublime and Atom don't?
- yorwba 9y agoFrom https://notepad-plus-plus.org/ https://notepad-plus-plus.org/ ..., Notepad++ is written in C++ and uses pure Win32 API and STL which ensures a higher execution speed and smaller program size. And which lets it piggy-back on Windows' accessibility features, which seem to be quite good. I guess Sublime Text and Atom draw their own GUIs to get more control over the look-and-feel, but don't add the necessary hints to make screen readers work.
- jhgb 9y agoWouldn't a proper structured editor be more suitable for blind coding? The market isn't large but I can't imagine blindly navigating through a sea of characters. Sounds terrifying.
- Klockan 9y agoPeople once coded in ed and it is kinda like coding blind. You don't have a display, instead you can move to specific line numbers and print or replace them. It sounds impossible at first but you get used to it if you only use ed.
- zokier 9y agoI've been thinking that doing a "30 day command-line challenge" might be cool, idea being that you'd be limited to command-line based tools only. No fancy visual editors or ncurses browsers. Just pure line-oriented bliss (or more likely, hell). ex would be likely candidate for text editor in such experiment.
- nerdponx 9y agoWhat options even exist outside of ex in that case?
- ringaroundthetx 9y agoits about coding for a blind person but under what circumstance would typing speed really matter? most of my coding is a creative process with tons of autocomplete via the IDE, as well as copy and paste for boilerplate that can't be inherited
- kovek 9y agoCheck out the audio he presents in the article. His screen reader reads him text at 450words per minute. I wonder how quickly he can finish reading non-technical books.
- Majestic121 9y agoThe 450 words is not about the typing speed, but about the speed of his screen readers (reading to him 450 words a minute) Check out the samples he gave, it's pretty impressive that he is able to understand anything
- akuji1993 9y agoHow to spot the guy that didn't read the article.
- ringaroundthetx 9y agoI skimmed Skimmed really fast looking for something related to the title
- lsc 9y agoIt's interesting; none of the 'speed reading' wisdom has worked for me. When I 'skim' I seem to be way slower than most people who 'skim' - even though I'm quite competitive when 'reading' - but I also seem to usually have some idea of what the text was about, while I find it is quite common for people skimming to not have absorbed much at all from the text. That's interesting too, because I find that in 'reading' my reading comprehension is not better if you compare me to others who have the level of education implied by my profession. When I skim, my focus is on reading faster, pushing myself through the document, and I let my unconscious deal with what information is dropped. It does move things along much faster than 'reading' at regular speed, and it does lower comprehension, but it does these things in a sort of incremental way. Most of the time when I've read about 'speed reading' it talks a lot about consciously managing that information drop, and managing where your eyes go, which for me, slows me down quite a lot, and usually ends up making my retention all but useless.
- seanwilson 9y ago> A screen reader intercepts what's happening on the screen and presents that information via braille (through a separate braille display) or synthetic speech. And it's not the kind of synthetic speech you hear in today's smart assistants. I use a robotic-sounding voice which speaks at around 450 words per minute. After listening to the English sample....maybe I'm being naive but is it typical to be able to understand computer speech at that rate? I could barely make out a handful of words and probably wouldn't have believed there was a text to understand in there if the words weren't above it.
- dreta 9y agoThe speech becomes surprisingly clear if you listen to it and read the paragraph at the same time.
- Kiro 9y agoSure but that's obviously not how it's used. Also, for the first one which is the one he's actually using I couldn't make out a single word even when reading at the same time.
- yorwba 9y agoIt's like learning a foreign language. At first, native speakers seem to speak so fast that all words flow into each other without distinction. As you improve, you begin noticing words you already know, and when someone speaks deliberately slow, you can puzzle together sentences. Eventually, you can understand speech at a normal conversational speed. Most people probably stop at that level, because they don't need more. But e.g. when watching recorded lectures, I tend to crank up the speed to 1.5x or even 2x until I need to think more about something. The sped-up speech is mostly still quite understandable. There is no reason to suppose you can't improve your hearing beyond the limits on humans' ability to form coherent thoughts from scratch and move their mouth in the right pattern. Just keep increasing the speed, attune yourself to the artificial voice and then increase it even more until you're at a level that makes untrained people feel like non-native speakers.
- 9y ago
- dreta 9y agoI'd be interested in learning more about how a blind person does software development. I already do most of my coding work in the terminal with keyboard only where possible, and it'd be an interesting exercise to try and get rid of the monitor altogether.
- yorwba 9y agohttps://stackoverflow.com/questions/118984/how-can-you-program-if-youre-blind https://stackoverflow.com/questions/118984/how-can-you-progr... Most recent discussion on HN: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14702287 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14702287 This video from the comments is worth a watch: https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=iWXebEeGwn0 https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=iWXebEeGwn0
- vimy 9y ago> Windows is the most accessible operating system there is I was under the impression macOS and iOS are the preferred platforms for people with disabilities?
- AlphaWeaver 9y agoThere's a note in the article about the author's distaste for macOS and iOS because of VoiceOver's slow release schedule and how it doesn't work for his style of interacting.
- jareds 9y agoI’m totally blind and bought a Mac several years ago hoping to learn iOS programming. As far as I can tell it’s impossible to create a simple app without using drag and drop in XCode. While it’s technically possible to do drag and drop with Voiceover I can never get it to work correctly. Apple has not put out any documentation on how to use XCode when blind that I’ve been able to find. This is disappointing since I find iOS to be much easier to use then Android. I also find Voiceover on the mac does not have quite as many shortcut keys as my Windows screen reader when reading the web, for example I cannot jump to a heading at a specific level or move by region. While Mac OS did have easy availability of Unix tools as a plus that no longer is a point in its favor. I find WSL to be quite good and accessible. Luckily the 11 inch MacBook Air was the best ultra-book I could get at the time so I don’t feel like I wasted my money even though I boot into Windows 95% of the time. For general use Mac OSX is pretty good. I find the screen reader to be quite intuitive and there is a good tutorial to help you learn it. Voiceover just doesn’t have the breadth of shortcut keys or customizability of Jaws for Windows which is my preferred screen reader despite its cost.
- hellcow 9y agoIf you're discussing storyboards in XCode (given you mentioned drag and drop), you actually don't need that feature and can lay out both iOS screens and the flows between them programmatically. I actually prefer writing views programmatically for iOS--it gives you readable diffs, which is especially helpful for code reviews.
- atroll 9y agoIt would be fun to try his setup and try to get used to programming without a screen
- altotrees 9y agoThis is amazing and a scenario I had never really considered before. I know it has been said that the best programmers carry around small programs in their heads and map things out mentally — this is kind of the same idea taken to the extreme. I thought the portion on frontend development was really interesting. Something I had never considered, but to think of it from the angle in which it is presented just kind of blew my mind. This piece made my morning. edit: I guess this post also just shows that if you want to learn to program and be an engineer, there are certainly ways to make that happen, regardless of specific elements of your situation (to a point, obviously). Really, really neat.
- pacaro 9y agoI worked with an engineer who was partially sighted and could only see a tiny fraction of the screen at a time, he had essentially memorized most of the code base. What struck me was that when I started working, while not the same, that was how you got anything done, API docs were on paper, we had stacks of books on our desks, code navigation tools were laughable, no intellisence, and screen were small (14" 640x480). When I was regularly writing win16/32 code I would rarely need to look anything up, the cost of doing so naturally trains you to remember. I don't miss it tbh
- alkonaut 9y agoI wonder how many times in a regular day a blind person nearly throws thew computer out the window because some application randomly does something inaccessible and they get stuck. Some tray app from dell popping up a dialog about your trial backup subscription expiring, with no standard/accessible UI? Things like that. This is what surprises me most about not having a screen. I get that a blind person doesn't NEED the screen but when you want to ask someone about some code, or need help by a seeing person, the screen might help... I admit it does look cool though.
- freehunter 9y agoI'm wondering if they use screen sharing. It'd be dead simple to share your screen to someone and have them look at it, you don't even need your own monitor.
- mfoy_ 9y agoAs some sort of comparison, imagine having to call an IT support guy to come restart your computer every 15-30 minutes... I'd lose my sanity before a single day was out. I imagine you very quickly identify software / features that cause such interruptions and ruthlessly prune them from your environment.
- cuckcuckspruce 9y agoI wonder what the pair-programming experience is like when you have one vision impaired programmer and one sighted developer. Anyone here have experience with this?
- tom_mellior 9y ago> This is what surprises me most about not having a screen. That thing on the right of the photo is a closed laptop. This person does have a screen, it's just not constantly in use. (Not "in sight", as the article puts it.) They can open up the laptop to show stuff to others when needed. This is how my blind colleague does it.
- 9y ago
- tyingq 9y agoI was curious about the braille display mentioned, so I had a look: https://www.google.com/search?q=braille+display&source=lnms&tbm=shop https://www.google.com/search?q=braille+display&source=lnms&... These things are priced from $1k up to $12k. I understand it's complicated since there are tons of actuated pins needed, but wow.
- adisinom 9y agoThey're actuated by piezoelectric strips. The PZT ceramic is low power and robust, but heavy-ish (lead), large-ish, and shockingly expensive. History: https://nfb.org/images/nfb/publications/bm/bm00/bm0001/bm000110.htm https://nfb.org/images/nfb/publications/bm/bm00/bm0001/bm000...
- mstade 9y agoI'd love to read more specifically how coding style makes things easier or harder. It'd be really interesting to know if there are some general rules in this space, and if so how they may or may not help sighted programmers read code. Really interesting perspective on a topic which is usually just a mosh pit of opinions.
- trishume 9y agoI'm not blind, but I found this comment by a blind programmer really interesting. Block comments are way more important when using a screen reader: https://github.com/rust-lang-nursery/fmt-rfcs/issues/17#issuecomment-250933230 https://github.com/rust-lang-nursery/fmt-rfcs/issues/17#issu...
- tyingq 9y agoThat would be interesting. I wonder, for example, if underscores are better or worse than camelcase. Or if screen readers know when to say "dot" vs "period". Or if screen readers are reasonable for odd stuff like regex syntax and multi character constructs like ->.
- czechdeveloper 9y agoI was thinking what I need for programming and assumed that no hands (or hand) and no vision would be complete deal breaker. But by now I've seen people programming using voice and now this guy without seeing. It's amazing what they can do just by being dedicated enough.
- ender89 9y agoI would totally put a screen on his desk hooked up to a separate computer that just displays nonsense so that people who don't know that he's blind think he's just hanging out in the office watching the entirety of strawberry shortcake or something.
- dawilster 9y agoTotally should have The Matrix screensaver playing at all times.
- 0xdeadbeefbabe 9y agoYeah or the front page of HN.
- Justsignedup 9y ago450 wpm. I can't even descipher 2 words out of that. It is amazing if he can understand that fast. Did his brain just rewire the visual cortex to process audio? Makes me wonder what a human would be with double the neurons in the brain.
- thethirdone 9y agoI was able to understand it reasonably well. I could understand it about as well as normal Spanish speaking (I took a few years of Spanish in high school); I can pick out the verbs, some nouns and guess the rest. With practice, I think I could understand it perfectly.
- tyingq 9y agoThe use of the visual cortex for audio is a theory: https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/why-can-some-blind-people-process/ https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/why-can-some-blin...
- kzisme 9y agoI read the article without listening to the provided clips and WOW. I'm not sure how people manage that. For anyone interested in UI/UX design for blind people Kevin Jones did a talk on it https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lHBuQLNIs1c https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lHBuQLNIs1c https://twitter.com/kevinrj?ref_src=twsrc%5Egoogle%7Ctwcamp%5Eserp%7Ctwgr%5Eauthor https://twitter.com/kevinrj?ref_src=twsrc%5Egoogle%7Ctwcamp%... He also has done some really cool stuff with the BrainPort: http://www.channel3000.com/news/local-news/madison-made-device-gives-the-blind-more-independence_20161114083330510/156395230 http://www.channel3000.com/news/local-news/madison-made-devi...
- christiangenco 9y agoI've been making a habit of listening to audiobooks, podcasts, and YouTube videos at increasingly faster speeds, and after listening to the clip two or three times can understand about 80% of it. My comprehension problem with it right now is the style of the voice, not the speed it's talking. Like anything, I think understanding this computer voice at 450 wpm is a skill anyone could learn with practice.
- Mz 9y agoFYI for anyone interested: There is a google group called Blind Dev Works. It is run by a blind developer. (I am co-admin, but it is his group.) https://groups.google.com/forum/#!forum/blind-dev-works https://groups.google.com/forum/#!forum/blind-dev-works