6 ms·

Are you sighted?

ddevault 7y ago
Not perfectly, and not for long. I wear glasses, but they only do so much, and my vision worsens every year. I use some light assistive technologies on the daily - higher contrast, large fonts, zooming in on things. To test the tools I linked to, I spend the occasional workday with all of my monitors turned off, relying on these tools to get work done. I also have a braille reader that I occasionally pull out. I have a different philosophy and approach to using computers than most, and that affects my views on accessibility. Stapling a screenreader onto a graphical application, for example, to me seems like the wrong approach. Text-based applications are much more accessible, and these are my bread and butter. To this end, my work on accessibility involves making more information available as text, organized logically rather than spatially, and making it easier to access and manipulate that information with vision impairments (and other sorts of impairments, too).
- gopaz 7y ago
  I would love to read more about this in your blog! Sway is my daily driver and I love it!
- matt_the_bass 7y ago
  It seems like this level of organization would be beneficial to the sighted community as well. Is this a value that you use to market to customers?
  - deleted 7y ago
    [deleted]
  - ddevault 7y ago
    Yes.
- mwcampbell 7y ago
  On the days that you turn your monitor off, how do you do email? Do you also have a speech synthesis plugin for your aerc email client? Or do you use it with a generic screen reader for terminals? If the latter, which screen reader? I've found that, counter-intuitively, a fully accessible GUI program with a good GUI screen reader is easier to use than a screen-oriented terminal program with a screen reader. The trouble with the latter is that the user has to understand visual concepts like highlighting, the meaning of special characters, etc. Of course, an application or plugin that's tailor-made for doing a particular task with speech output is better than either of those other choices -- as long as you don't have to use an application that's overall inferior (e.g. using the Emacs/W3 web browser with Emacspeak as opposed to a mainstream browser).
  - ddevault 7y ago
    >On the days that you turn your monitor off, how do you do email? Poorly. I want to improve aerc in this respect. For the time being, I use a mix of my braille reader (brltty) and piping emails into vipe so I can use my vim plugin to read them.
    - mwcampbell 7y ago
      Have you ever used a conventional GUI screen reader? Something like NVDA for Windows, VoiceOver for Mac or iOS, Talkback for Android, or Orca for GNOME? Reading a web page or an HTML email with one of those might give you a different perspective on what's possible, and specifically, how much better the experience of reading a hypertext document with a screen reader can be, compared to something like BRLTTY.
      - ddevault 7y ago
        I have used Orca, and I can't stand it. The main advantage is a global place to route text for speech synthesis, but I simply hate using screenreaders to use applications which are not designed with accessibility in mind. There are few better solutions for browsing the web, though. I've been meaning to try lynx with brltty.
- innocentoldguy 7y ago
  Which do you prefer, screen-readers or braille readers? Also, how long did it take you to be able to feel the braille effectively?
  - ddevault 7y ago
    I don't like screen readers, but I liked teaching applications to speak themselves based on text commands. I like to combine this with a braille reader and use both in different contexts. For example, a braille reader is more unambiguous with punctuation, capitalization, etc, but speech synthesis is necessary to catch my attention for a notification from a non-active application, and is more comfortable for reading natural language. It's worth reiterating, though, that I don't need these tools (yet), so people who depend on them daily may have a different opinion. Braille is easy, I could read it reasonably well with just a couple of days of study.
    - deleted 7y ago
      [deleted]
- cookiengineer 7y ago
  As someone preparing for this, too, I still have no clue on how to rasterize the code quickly. Voice always feels inefficient and braille feels like a joke when it comes to the amount of information being displayed. Do you have suggestions? Do you transpile code? I also use VIM because it feels like the best case of voice integration or braille integration...but I have no source for how to actually do this properly. Are there good reading materials on this? Currently I am trying to build a semantic web browser, also with the intention to filter out all legacy crap CSS that prevents interaction with the content [1] and the idea of being able to train CNNs with the content... but when it comes to code, my memory of it seems to suck so hard that I always have no clue of what I wrote the day before. [1] still alpha as hell: https://github.com/cookiengineer/stealth https://github.com/cookiengineer/stealth (Also a long time observer of your work here. You are one of the good guys. Stay awesome!)
  - zeveb 7y ago
    > I also use VIM because it feels like the best case of voice integration or braille integration Check out Emacsspeak: http://emacspeak.sourceforge.net/ http://emacspeak.sourceforge.net/ It’s written by T.V. Raman, a blind engineer at Google by way of Cornell. Among other things, with it you can just use the built-in Emacs browser!
  - ddevault 7y ago
    Even with the aid of sight, I don't read an entire codebase at once. I follow the logic, a few lines at a time, as it moves through the parts I'm interested in. I use grep to find the things I ought to read. With this approach, I build a mental model of the codebase quickly, with lots of blanks - but with detail in the areas I'm focusing on. As for how to actually rig up braille readers on Linux, check out BRLTTY. It's pretty straightforward. I was working on an Alpine Linux spin which was more accessible out of the box, but I got discouraged by various circumstances and shelved it.
    - mwcampbell 7y ago
      I think your use of the term "braille reader" might be causing some confusion. I know you use brltty. But do you use its text-to-speech output, or do you use a refreshable braille device that moves little pins up and down to form braille cells? If the former, I'd suggest referring to brltty as a screen reader. Also, do you run brltty on a Linux text console, or in a terminal window in your Sway session?
- blzaugg 7y ago
  Would you be willing to chat privately with a colleague of mine going through a similar lost of sight transition?

Are you sighted?

Not perfectly, and not for long. I wear glasses, but they only do so much, and my vision worsens every year. I use some light assistive technologies on the daily - higher contrast, large fonts, zooming in on things. To test the tools I linked to, I spend the occasional workday with all of my monitors turned off, relying on these tools to get work done. I also have a braille reader that I occasionally pull out. I have a different philosophy and approach to using computers than most, and that affects my views on accessibility. Stapling a screenreader onto a graphical application, for example, to me seems like the wrong approach. Text-based applications are much more accessible, and these are my bread and butter. To this end, my work on accessibility involves making more information available as text, organized logically rather than spatially, and making it easier to access and manipulate that information with vision impairments (and other sorts of impairments, too).

gopaz 7y ago
I would love to read more about this in your blog! Sway is my daily driver and I love it!
matt_the_bass 7y ago
It seems like this level of organization would be beneficial to the sighted community as well. Is this a value that you use to market to customers?
- deleted 7y ago
  [deleted]
- ddevault 7y ago
  Yes.
mwcampbell 7y ago
On the days that you turn your monitor off, how do you do email? Do you also have a speech synthesis plugin for your aerc email client? Or do you use it with a generic screen reader for terminals? If the latter, which screen reader? I've found that, counter-intuitively, a fully accessible GUI program with a good GUI screen reader is easier to use than a screen-oriented terminal program with a screen reader. The trouble with the latter is that the user has to understand visual concepts like highlighting, the meaning of special characters, etc. Of course, an application or plugin that's tailor-made for doing a particular task with speech output is better than either of those other choices -- as long as you don't have to use an application that's overall inferior (e.g. using the Emacs/W3 web browser with Emacspeak as opposed to a mainstream browser).
- ddevault 7y ago
  >On the days that you turn your monitor off, how do you do email? Poorly. I want to improve aerc in this respect. For the time being, I use a mix of my braille reader (brltty) and piping emails into vipe so I can use my vim plugin to read them.
  - mwcampbell 7y ago
    Have you ever used a conventional GUI screen reader? Something like NVDA for Windows, VoiceOver for Mac or iOS, Talkback for Android, or Orca for GNOME? Reading a web page or an HTML email with one of those might give you a different perspective on what's possible, and specifically, how much better the experience of reading a hypertext document with a screen reader can be, compared to something like BRLTTY.
    - ddevault 7y ago
      I have used Orca, and I can't stand it. The main advantage is a global place to route text for speech synthesis, but I simply hate using screenreaders to use applications which are not designed with accessibility in mind. There are few better solutions for browsing the web, though. I've been meaning to try lynx with brltty.
innocentoldguy 7y ago
Which do you prefer, screen-readers or braille readers? Also, how long did it take you to be able to feel the braille effectively?
- ddevault 7y ago
  I don't like screen readers, but I liked teaching applications to speak themselves based on text commands. I like to combine this with a braille reader and use both in different contexts. For example, a braille reader is more unambiguous with punctuation, capitalization, etc, but speech synthesis is necessary to catch my attention for a notification from a non-active application, and is more comfortable for reading natural language. It's worth reiterating, though, that I don't need these tools (yet), so people who depend on them daily may have a different opinion. Braille is easy, I could read it reasonably well with just a couple of days of study.
  - deleted 7y ago
    [deleted]
cookiengineer 7y ago
As someone preparing for this, too, I still have no clue on how to rasterize the code quickly. Voice always feels inefficient and braille feels like a joke when it comes to the amount of information being displayed. Do you have suggestions? Do you transpile code? I also use VIM because it feels like the best case of voice integration or braille integration...but I have no source for how to actually do this properly. Are there good reading materials on this? Currently I am trying to build a semantic web browser, also with the intention to filter out all legacy crap CSS that prevents interaction with the content [1] and the idea of being able to train CNNs with the content... but when it comes to code, my memory of it seems to suck so hard that I always have no clue of what I wrote the day before. [1] still alpha as hell: https://github.com/cookiengineer/stealth https://github.com/cookiengineer/stealth (Also a long time observer of your work here. You are one of the good guys. Stay awesome!)
- zeveb 7y ago
  > I also use VIM because it feels like the best case of voice integration or braille integration Check out Emacsspeak: http://emacspeak.sourceforge.net/ http://emacspeak.sourceforge.net/ It’s written by T.V. Raman, a blind engineer at Google by way of Cornell. Among other things, with it you can just use the built-in Emacs browser!
- ddevault 7y ago
  Even with the aid of sight, I don't read an entire codebase at once. I follow the logic, a few lines at a time, as it moves through the parts I'm interested in. I use grep to find the things I ought to read. With this approach, I build a mental model of the codebase quickly, with lots of blanks - but with detail in the areas I'm focusing on. As for how to actually rig up braille readers on Linux, check out BRLTTY. It's pretty straightforward. I was working on an Alpine Linux spin which was more accessible out of the box, but I got discouraged by various circumstances and shelved it.
  - mwcampbell 7y ago
    I think your use of the term "braille reader" might be causing some confusion. I know you use brltty. But do you use its text-to-speech output, or do you use a refreshable braille device that moves little pins up and down to form braille cells? If the former, I'd suggest referring to brltty as a screen reader. Also, do you run brltty on a Linux text console, or in a terminal window in your Sway session?
blzaugg 7y ago
Would you be willing to chat privately with a colleague of mine going through a similar lost of sight transition?