4 ms·

I imagine to some extent, due to the speed of his reader, he can audibly browse his code. This is just a guess.. My mind is actually getting all sorts of acces

by Rapzid 12y ago

I imagine to some extent, due to the speed of his reader, he can audibly browse his code. This is just a guess.. My mind is actually getting all sorts of accessibility ideas for coders. If you could have hot keys to call out the function your in, call out all the methods in the current file(structure/class view etc). Jump to files. I have no idea what the current state of the art is, but I bet it could be streamlined a ton. LISP's might make an interesting language of choice to due to the simplicity of their syntax and the ease of navigation through forms. Hmmmm.

kuschku 12y ago
There was another post about this months ago, and the blind poster said that while C is usable (thanks to brackets), python is completely unusable or unreadable to them.
- danielbarla 12y ago
  I'm pretty sure a screen reader could be configured to understand significant whitespace, even if it's not a trivial task.
  - qznc 12y ago
    It should basically read the token stream instead of the text. For Python that includes indent and dedent tokens, which are equivalent to open and close brackets.
    - kryptiskt 12y ago
      Maybe it suffices to just say "end if/for/def/class/etc" at the end of each block.
  - socksy 12y ago
    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.
    - samatman 12y ago
      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?
      - socksy 12y ago
        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?
      - zersiax 12y ago
        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
    - zhengyi13 12y ago
      I've personally helped TV Raman (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/T._V._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)
      - mturmon 12y ago
        TV Raman was in a numerical optimization class with me in grad school. He kept up with blackboard lectures, which were densely mathematical, along with everyone else, just by listening to what the professor was saying. He was one of the outstanding students in the class. An amazing person.
- andreasvc 12y ago
  While it makes sense that it would be unusable without proper treatment of the indentations, I don't think it would be hard to adapt the screen reader. Note that the Python parser itself converts indentations to begin / end tokens, which are exactly like braces, so those can be read out loud to make the indentations explicit.
- zersiax 12y ago
  There is absolutely nothing preventing blind coders from using Python. Indentation can easily be reported by any screenreader I am aware of and it is a very clean, screenreader-friendly language for the rest. I really enjoy working with that language
zersiax 12y ago
Audibly browsing through lines of code is something I do all the time, yep :) Also checking it using braille helps, its a bit more ...hmm ...direct in some ways. As for calling out functions and such, a lot of IDE's can already do that. Have a look at the outline view in Eclipse, as well as the annotations you can skip between using hotkeys which is useful for finding errors in your code

by Rapzid 12y ago

kuschku 12y ago

There was another post about this months ago, and the blind poster said that while C is usable (thanks to brackets), python is completely unusable or unreadable to them.

danielbarla 12y ago
I'm pretty sure a screen reader could be configured to understand significant whitespace, even if it's not a trivial task.
- qznc 12y ago
  It should basically read the token stream instead of the text. For Python that includes indent and dedent tokens, which are equivalent to open and close brackets.
  - kryptiskt 12y ago
    Maybe it suffices to just say "end if/for/def/class/etc" at the end of each block.
- socksy 12y ago
  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.
  - samatman 12y ago
    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?
    - socksy 12y ago
      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?
    - zersiax 12y ago
      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
  - zhengyi13 12y ago
    I've personally helped TV Raman (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/T._V._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)
    - mturmon 12y ago
      TV Raman was in a numerical optimization class with me in grad school. He kept up with blackboard lectures, which were densely mathematical, along with everyone else, just by listening to what the professor was saying. He was one of the outstanding students in the class. An amazing person.
andreasvc 12y ago
While it makes sense that it would be unusable without proper treatment of the indentations, I don't think it would be hard to adapt the screen reader. Note that the Python parser itself converts indentations to begin / end tokens, which are exactly like braces, so those can be read out loud to make the indentations explicit.
zersiax 12y ago
There is absolutely nothing preventing blind coders from using Python. Indentation can easily be reported by any screenreader I am aware of and it is a very clean, screenreader-friendly language for the rest. I really enjoy working with that language

zersiax 12y ago

Audibly browsing through lines of code is something I do all the time, yep :) Also checking it using braille helps, its a bit more ...hmm ...direct in some ways. As for calling out functions and such, a lot of IDE's can already do that. Have a look at the outline view in Eclipse, as well as the annotations you can skip between using hotkeys which is useful for finding errors in your code