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Comment by hacker_9 | Hacker News Reader

I always wondered how someone could use text-to-speech effectively, especially with a programming language full of symbols with long names such as 'semi-colon', 'underscore', 'left parenthesis' etc. The answer it seems is to speed up the voice tenfold! Honestly incredible he's fine-tuned his other senses well enough to be able to code at a reasonable speed again.

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I was at a web design conference once with a talk by a heavily vision-impaired guy. I was amazed at the speed when he went to his IDE to fix a bug. I couldn't make out a word it was saying and he didn't seem slower working with it than I would be.

I'm glad you mentioned that. After watching this it made me wonder if this is normal, or if this guy is some sort of auditory wizard. It seems like an awful lot of work to master, but maybe not if it's a skill you're using everyday.

> After watching this it made me wonder if this is normal, or if this guy is some sort of auditory wizard.

The "visual cortex" area is not deactivated but gets re-tasked with non-visual processing tasks, even in "late blind" people (people who lost their sight after age 12): https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3667661/

Considering the amount of visual information the sighted process more or less effortlessly, that's a pretty significant amount of processing capabilities which can get retasked with e.g. auditory processing.

I wonder if any of it is also being directed at just being better at programming.

> The answer it seems is to speed up the voice tenfold!

That seems very common for systematic text-to-speech users, I saw a video a few months back of a lawyer (?) demonstrating ios's accessibility (rotor, voiceover, blind curtain, …) and the TTS speech was so fast it sounded like white noise to me.

That would be interesting to watch. Do you have a link for that?

I believe this article from David Pogue is the one:

https://finance.yahoo.com/news/david-pogue-on-iphone-voiceov...

That's exactly the one, thank you! The relevant bit is at 4:10

Sadly no, I tried looking for it but I haven't managed to dig it back up.

I watched the video twice, and I picked up a lot more the second time. At first, it seemed like he had the speech set to "incomprehensible chirping".

I'm still impressed at how he found the syntax error, though.

One of the company I worked with had to design an audio interface for blind people. I proposed something relying on several stereo located sounds of different pitches and intensity. I was told this would be too hard to use for a normal user. I wish I had such a video at the time to show the kind of bandwidth a blind person is able to get from audio alone.

It's not only sped up, it's using a lot of abbreviations.

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