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Comment by sterlind | Hacker News Reader

a good example of this is the disabled. any of those same brilliant tech workers could acquire a disability at any time - they come from the same group of people, but we seem quite under-represented. and the developer tools themselves tend not to be accessible (I can find literally nothing online, or even internally, about using Visual Studio with Dragon NaturallySpeaking.)

it's curious, right?

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> I can find literally nothing online, or even internally, about using Visual Studio with Dragon NaturallySpeaking

My Talon project is capable of voice controlling Visual Studio, both at the interface level and at the code insertion/editing level. It can use Dragon as a speech engine, or my own engine. It has an existing Visual Studio integration, and Talon makes it easy to write your own context specific app commands or integrations.

- https://talonvoice.com

Here's some Visual Studio support for it:

- https://github.com/knausj85/knausj_talon/tree/master/apps/vi...

As well as vscode:

- https://github.com/knausj85/knausj_talon/tree/master/apps/vs...

Here are a couple of public GitHub issues about dictation support in vscode:

- https://github.com/microsoft/vscode/issues/40976

- https://github.com/microsoft/vscode/issues/117980#issuecomme...

thank you so so much! you may have saved my career. I'll definitely be supporting you on Patreon.

It is, but honestly I don't think I could comprehend code that was read out to me. It's very much something I do with the visual parts of my brain in terms of following the logic, etc.

I'm not saying that it's impossible, and I don't know what kind of difference something like braille would make. Idk, are there any blind programmers that you know of ? Surely there must be some programmers who have gone blind, I wonder if they just decide to switch careers idk.

I know of blind programmers but don't know any personally. But I was actually talking about the reverse: dictation. I'm losing use of my arms, and even ergonomic keyboards aren't cutting it. Rehab set me up with a copy of Dragon so I can dictate, but even Microsoft Teams isn't really accessible with it, much less Visual Studio or any kind of terminal. I can see the code just fine, I just can't dictate it.

Can you dictate to plaintext (notepad?) and use an oral markup - if punctuation is the problem - like saying "bang" for "!". Then parse your input, cut-paste into the IDE.

It seems very niche, which is why I'm not surprised not to see mention of it in the docs?

Why did you see it as particularly curious that VS and Dragon weren't setup for interoperability?

I think my best option is to write Python scripts with Dragonfly [0] to make a Visual Studio or VS Code extension that gives me accessibility, and/or a neovim plugin to let me say vim commands efficiently.

Dictating plaintext and copy/pasting works for writing code, but navigating through VS menus and code files and e.g. running unit tests is still a nightmare. Maybe an accessible mouse would help.

It sounds niche, but Visual Studio is perhaps the most popular IDE, and Dragon is the only real option for voice access on PCs. Any programmer without use of her hands would need this. It suggests that none of the programmers on the Dragon team have really dogfooded their product, at least for accessibility.

What I find truly heinous though is the Chrome plugin. It has two stars and thousands of reviews, and either doesn't work at all or breaks minutes in. When it works it's great, but it almost never does.

0. https://github.com/dictation-toolbox/dragonfly

Maybe learn to use a large trackball with your feet?

Something like X-Keys L-Trac (Formerly CST2545-5w)

I've developed carpal tunnel, and to mitigate my problems I now use a mouse at work and trackball at home (strain different muscles). The clicking of the mouse bothered me for awhile, so for that I tried two mice. Right hand would control position and left hand would do the clicking. A foot pedal for the clicks would have been so much less awkward.

Back in time I switched completely to left-handed mouse. It took about a week to get to a workable speed.

I am sorry for your health problem. I don't know if anything like that exists, but could you use your legs/feet to drive a mouse-like device? When I was a child, a teacher told us of a woman who learned to type on a typewriter (it was before computers became popular) using her toes. I wish you luck with figuring out what works for you.

thanks. that's a good thought. unfortunately my condition affects my whole body (my joints constantly dislocate and I have various nerve problems), so my legs aren't much better.. but something like a foot pedal could work. honestly I'm hoping for something like Neuralink to succeed, and that voice typing will tide me over.

People who are deaf, legally (but not totally) blind, on dialysis, or with a slew of other disabilities are not visually distinguishable from people who do not have a disability.

People with disabilities are the most neglected of any demographic because they are not easily exploited for political gain.

And it really irks me that most diversity initiatives don't even mention persons with disabilities. One exception is Microsoft, which will always have my respect for considering disabilities in both product design and hiring.

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