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Comment by alkonaut | Hacker News Reader

I 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.

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I'm a blind developer and I've found Windows 10 to be pretty good about not throwing up popups if you configure it well. This is because we have a good IT group who builds machines from scratch so there's no trial software. I build my personal computers from scratch so install the OS avoiding junk software. When Windows does have notifications it's pretty good about putting them in the notification center so I can look at them when I want instead of having to deal with an notification dialog right away. I had the IT group find me an old external monitor. Although I don't need it it's much easier to have the screen at eye height when a co-worker is standing then requiring them to hunch over and look at a 13 inch laptop screen.

I think the D programming language site is accessible to the blind, but I don't know what inadvertent accessibility problems there might be with it. If you could please have a look and let me know about any difficulties, I'll get them taken care of.

https://dlang.org/

The Khan Academy people wrote a JS script called tota11y that will let you inspect your site: http://khan.github.io/tota11y/

The site appears to generally be accessible with the exception of the interactive tutorial. I'm not a web accessibility expert so don't know the details. There are two major issues. The biggest one is my inability to arrow through the code in an edit field. I can read the text outside of the edit field, but it's difficult since line numbers are interspersed with the text. My assumption is that your using an open source editor which is inaccessible, but I have not had the time to look at the tutorial on Github. The second issue is that there are buttons that my screen reader reads as "button". While run, edit, and format are read properly several other buttons are not.

Thank you! This is just what I was looking for. I filed a bug report:

  https://issues.dlang.org/show_bug.cgi?id=17794

and we'll get it fixed.

I'm a little unsure what you mean by arrowing through the edit field. The cursor moves around as I press the arrow keys, as they would in a text editor.

> have a look

> > have a look

Please don't do this, on the Internet or anywhere else. Blind people don't need you to speak in ghetto terms or start self-moderating the things you say to any greater degree than you (probably) normally would.

I agree, but don't you think you are contradicting yourself by jumping in to defend all blind people?

I also "watch movies".

> 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.

I've always wondered, is performance an issue with your colleague? Does he need to put extra hours or effort to finish some jobs? Or maybe he can be faster than the average developer with other tasks?

No, they get the things done that they are assigned. Watching them work, yes, some things are clearly less efficient than for someone who can see the whole screen at once. But overall it works well for our particular setting.

If your screenreader is any good, it'll be a piece of proprietary software that knows how to OCR the framebuffer and doesn't give a shit about "standard" UI.

It's still very difficult to navigate it if I make a custom drawn UI, even if you can read what the text on the form says.

Typically these crap apps have custom drawn widgets and buttons with no tab-order, no way to click without using mouse etc. The screen reading bit is pretty easy (fallback to OCR, as you mentioned). But once the screen reader says "please click this button" and there are no (known) buttons on the form, you are stuck.

Synthetic mouse clicks.

These are pretty much solved problems. I know because Nuance solved them. Dragon Naturally Speaking both OCRs the screen and sends synthetic mouse clicks to windows that use custom UIs, such as Microsoft Office, when you say something like "click OK".

Implementing this in an accessibility suite for the blind is definitely doable. It would be tedious and take a lot of testing to get right, but that's why the best solutions are proprietary.

I'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.

As 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.

I 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?

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