Comment by tuukkao | Hacker News Reader

Comment by tuukkao | Hacker News Reader

Parent Full thread

I am the author of "Software development 450 words per minute". As it's been 2 and a half years since I wrote this post, I thought I'd give a little update as to the tools I use since my preferences have changed slightly. (I know this comment would be more useful as an addendum to the original post, but since I'm currently on holiday it's just quicker to type everything out here for now.)

I switched to using Eclipse as my Java IDE about a year ago. The reason for this is that Eclipse is much nicer to use with a keyboard and a screen reader. The state of Java GUI accessibility is a little convoluted and I won't go into that here (look up Java Access Bridge if you're interested), but basically Eclipse works better and faster because its UI toolkit uses the platform's native accessibility API's directly. I guess the reason why I picked up IntelliJ in the first place was that literally every Java developer I knew at the time was using it, so naturally I thought it couldn't be a bad choice. Also, I had used Eclipse briefly in 2013, and let's just say it was nowhere as nice as it is today.

I have also ditched Notepad++ for daily development work. I do use it for notetaking and other similar things, but for non-Java based coding Visual Studio Code is all I use these days. I had experimented with VS Code when I wrote this post, but back then it still had some accessibility-related bugs that had to be ironed out. However, they were fixed a long time ago and I've been very happy with my experience so far. VS Code's team has been incredibly committed to ensuring their work is accessible, and these days I just expect things to work right out of the box. And this is something I usually never, ever do.

Other than that things have stayed pretty much the same. I'm still on Windows 10 and am using NVDA as my screen reader, neither of which is likely to change anytime soon. I've been slowly migrating to WSL from Git Bash but it hasn't really been a priority; for now I'm using both side by side.

I recognized the company name. Almost two years ago during occupational/workspace safety and health training (outside the Finland, where Vincit is) it was brought in as a good example of corporate culture:

https://bestworkplaceineurope.com/CultureAuditEn.pdf

This document seems to be from 2016. I am really interested in how has this evolved since then. Would you mind sharing your thoughts?

All I’ve heard is they have a misogynistic culture.

As an example:

https://caterina.net/2019/03/29/appalled-by-sexism-in-the-va...

It gets worse. Vincit is known for putting sexist jokes into their press releases, external communications–even in their financial statements. These have been reported by the press: Their jokes are juvenile. ”Kympin pitäjä” which means “great village” turns into “pimpin kytäjä” or “pussy place”. The Finnish Stock Exchange criticized them for this, but their response was to tell them to “lighten up a little”. On their quarterly results video they again made some appalling puns: ”surkea töihinottaja” became “obscene blowjob” and refers to the only woman on the management team–the head of HR!–as “cunt babbles”. People in Silicon Valley know that a CEO would be fired for that, but weirdly, nothing happened.

Yes, excellent culture. Sounds real pleasant. Pass.

Thanks a lot for that blog post (and the update)! That was super insightful and interesting to me.

Setting up a screen reader and actually experiencing the way a blind person views the web has been on my list of things to do for the longest time, but ditched time and again in favor of the latest hotness in our industry.

Reading bits like “crime against humanity” in relation to improperly used form elements are a good reminder of the responsibility we have when it comes to the semantic output of our work, which makes me wonder:

How usable are interface-heavy reactive UIs to you? How - if at all - are screen readers picking up on changing parts of an interface?

Which brings me back to setting up a screen reader myself... Is there a guide you know of to set up a VM to experience the web like a blind person does, or is installing a screen reader in combination with a regularly set up browser fine for accessibility testing?

Cheers and... I wish you all the best for your dev-career! I am super impressed.

> How usable are interface-heavy reactive UIs to you? How - if at all - are screen readers picking up on changing parts of an interface?

In general, screen readers don't automatically announce changes in a web page or other UI. For web pages, if something should be automatically read when it's changed or added, it should be marked as an ARIA live region, using the aria-live attribute. Some native GUI toolkits have a similar feature, e.g. the LiveSetting property in Windows UI Automation.

I strongly discourage using a VM to test with a screen reader, because audio in a VM is often annoyingly laggy. Just do it on your main machine. On macOS, you can turn VoiceOver on and off with Command+F5. On Windows 10 version 1703 (Creators Update) or later, you can turn Narrator on or off with Control+Windows+Enter. Another popular screen reader for Windows is the open-source NVDA (https://www.nvaccess.org/). For Unix-based desktops, GNOME has the Orca screen reader; other desktop environments have nothing AFAIK. iOS has VoiceOver, Android has TalkBack, and Chrome OS has ChromeVox.

Disclosure: I work for Microsoft on the Narrator team.

I see, thanks for the ARIA-hint and the quick tips regarding screen readers!

Welcome and thank you for the small inside view into your world. I hope to read more about those challenges and what we can do about it to make your life easier.

Enjoy your holidays!

Thanks for writing both the post and your follow up. I found both to be very learning.

do you have a github? I'd like to read code written by a blind person.

I can't speak for the OP. And while I'm visually impaired, I'm not totally blind, and I do my programming visually (though I often use a screen reader for other tasks). Still, I can point you at some projects by blind programmers.

The largest project I know of that's written primarily by blind people is the open-source NVDA screen reader, written primarily in Python with some C++. It's on GitHub here: https://github.com/nvaccess/nvda

For a fairly large, and long-running, project developed primarily by a single blind programmer, check out Emacspeak, written in Emacs Lisp with some Tcl, available on GitHub here: https://github.com/tvraman/emacspeak

Edit: I almost forgot about brltty, a Linux console screen reader designed primarily for braille rather than speech output, written in C: https://github.com/brltty/brltty

Now for a few small projects written by blind friends of mine:

tdsr (screen reader for Unix terminals, written in Python): https://github.com/tspivey/tdsr

libaudioverse (C++ 3D audio library, now sadly abandoned): https://github.com/libaudioverse/libaudioverse

tma (tmux automator, written in Rust): https://github.com/ndarilek/tma

Reply on news.ycombinator.com