The Tools of a Blind Programmer

Very cool. Thanks for the links!

The idea of a blind person investigating is one strong meta metaphor.

At least in the part of the demo I watched, I didn't hear his screen reader. But I know that it's difficult to make a screen reader's speech output audible over a VoIP program like Skype, without causing a nasty feedback loop. The last time I attempted it, several years ago, I had to use a USB audio device in addition to my computer's built-in audio output, with an analog audio cable between the two.

By the way, what version of Windows do you use, Parham? I ask because it looks like you're using the Windows Classic theme, which isn't available in versions after Windows 7 as far as I know. I know that using this theme used to improve compatibility with screen readers like JAWS and Window-Eyes, but as far as I know, it doesn't matter with NVDA, though I suppose using the simpler theme would still reduce CPU and memory usage.

I wonder what is stopping accessibility from being as popular as backwards compatibility... none of the resources I used when I started learning web development ever mentioned it (aside from alt text in the image tag). You really have to seek out information about it purposely.

Just remember that WCAG isn't the be-all-and-end-all [1]

[1]: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0ijIzUUXdTM

>What I think stinks is that companies seldom thinks of accessibility.

that's because there aren't as many blind people as seeing people.

>e.g. hollowing out a function body into two smaller functions and adding a tail call.

Actually theres's a direct analogy there. The reason you do that is to make it easier to comprehend. It looks messy. To much info. Now imagine you have to listen to your screen reader speaking all of it. Same deal. To much, time to refactor to something more navigable.

I'd like to believe, given that the largest part of the brain is devoted to visual processing, that it gets freed up for memory\creativity etc.

Given the right kind of guidance and development people with "disabilities" could bring a very unique perspective and new ways of thinking to problems and algorithms.

Deaf people for example think visually from birth as they have never heard sound. And we still don't even have a good way of representing sign language on paper or digitally.

Yes, I also have the fear of losing my sight when I'm getting older. I hope I could code even I'm 70 or 80 years old. It's not just for make living, also for dignity.

Actually, a lot of things you may perceive as visual are not visual, at least if you imagine "visual" as something I (a blind person) cannot understand.

I do a lot of refactoring, maybe even more than you do, simply because I can't understand functions that have two indentation levels (like two if statements inside each other), or functions that go above 15 lines. I'm saying that I may do it more than you because, unlike sighted people, we can't glance at 6 lines at once; we have to look at the code one line at a time. So, the smaller each section (whether it's an if statement, a loop, or a function, depending on the language itself), the better for me.

I imagine that if we tried to make programming by voice more practical, that would help solve part of the problem. A few developers have made it work but it requires a lot of setup.

http://ergoemacs.org/emacs/using_voice_to_code.html

More resources here:

https://github.com/melling/ErgonomicNotes/blob/master/progra...

Part of the problem is that most accessibility software has a hell of a learning curve, that the blind have implicitly overcome already to use the thing at all. (e.g. emacspeak) It can be very daunting to try to use it as a sighted person with a blindfold over their eyes.

Do you have the professor's homepage or name?

From my personal experience, it's useful if the editor has at least some basic support for this kind of blocks, e. g. enter key opens a line with same indent level etc. And editor scripting also helps, then you can write a script toreport the indent level on demand. Of course, many screen readers can report the number of spaces/tabs (e. g. the raw value), but you usually want only the level with respect to the current codebase and most likely only sometimes e. g. not on every line movement, you can infer the blocks sometimes from context and recheck only if needed/things go wrong.

This was a problem years ago. however, nowadays almost all screen readers have a setting to report the indentation of the current line. This was popularized when NVDA (a Windows screen reader) and Orca (a screen reader for Linux) were written, since they are both in Python.

I'm genuinely curious how you would think of three dimensional objects without ever being able to see them...

I guess you would have to describe them. As a suggestion - and not an attack in any way because I'm not sure how I'd do it! - without reference to anything you can see with your eyes, how would you describe space?

Blind people likely understand space far better than sighted individuals. But computer desktop geometry is something entirely different, and not something that's easy to describe.

In any case, it's never a good idea to question someone with a different set of abilities than you have with a "is it really that hard?" Their experience far outweighs your naive intuition about what's easy and hard for them.

http://www.newyorker.com/tech/elements/people-cured-blindnes... might be of interest.

One particular point that seems obvious after reading, but would not have occurred to me: If you ask a sighted person to imagine a nearby and distant object (say, a car), the distant object is imagined as smaller than the nearby one. But that distance / visual size relationship is a totally visual thing because you're imagining seeing the objects; a blind person's mental model of the object would be built from touch and is the same regardless of distance. They don't have the visual perspective cues. (If the object make sounds, I suppose it's imagined as quieter?)

To take that a bit further, I'd guess that blind people's metal models of geometry, whether it's a small object or navigating within a building, is purely orthographic in nature. They wouldn't have any use for our ideas of visual perspective, field of view, lines of sight, or any of that. Artists didn't work out how to replicate it properly until the renaissance, so it's not as though people have an innate conscious grasp of how it works; we just understand perspective as an innate part of our sight.

And on the other hand, the blind probably have a much more developed model of spatial acoustics: changes in reverberation as you pass an open doorway, move from a corridor into a larger space, etc., which our brains for the most part don't learn to build.