How to program if you are blind | Hacker News Reader

How to program if you are blind

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110 pointsralphchurch33 comments

Locked. I honestly don't know why anyone would bother contributing to Stack Overflow at this point. It seems to basically be the hosting ground for answers to hard factual questions answered in most documentation/materials elsewhere, and a virtual wasteland of locked/deleted questions that are actually of use in the non-black and white world we live and work in. This real world ambiguity seems like it is completely intolerable to the mods at SO.

Not sure how the rest of you feel but in my mind if the answer is black and white, the question was probably bad.

It was locked fifteen months after the question was asked...I think its prudent to protect a significant discussion from the noise that it will inevitably generate as people discover it via long tail in years to come

There is another way to protect question on SO - http://meta.stackoverflow.com/questions/52764/what-is-a-prot...

This question exists because it has historical significance, but it is not considered a good, on-topic question for this site, so please do not use it as evidence that you can ask similar questions here.

Exactly. I've desperately needed answers to a handful of questions in the last 2 weeks alone that were all locked. I think unless you can quote an error message there's a good chance it will be locked. Didn't know server hard drive space came at such a premium. Honestly what good does it do to lock a question? I can see wikipedia wanting to groom their site to maintain some credibility and focus to achieve high overall quality with limited editing resources. But Stack Overflow? Give up the power trip already. How has Joel not created Subjective Overflow already?

Why not post to one of the other stackexchange.com sites like http://programmers.stackexchange.com, there is a wide variety now one probably fits the kind of questions you want to ask.

Locked means you can't add information, you can still read it. If you needed answers, ask a new question. You're not supposed to ask your own questions within someone elses question, and that is exactly why some of these questions are locked.

It is off-topic, though, for StackOverflow. By rights, the question should be on the Programmers StackExchange site, where it would actually have relevance. (On the other hand, ProgrammersSE isn't exactly a hospitable environment itself, so migration might not be such a great idea. Which may, in fact, explain the fact that it was locked rather than migrated when ProgrammersSE came out of beta. It was supposed, originally, to be more about the programmer than the programming, but it seems to have lost its way.)

From what I see, anything in SO that doesn't have code in it and that attracts attention will eventually get locked.

I sometimes notice this pattern on other Stack Exchange sites: non-technical questions, with some rare exceptions, tend to get closed/deleted.

Stackoverflow has always been that way, this kind of questions were just more tolerated at the beggining.

But I don't get why is this a problem? Stackoverflow is for pragmatic questions and is great a it. If you want discussion there are other communities in stackexchange, such as 'programmers'.

> "It seems to basically be the hosting ground for answers to hard factual questions answered in most documentation/materials elsewhere"

That's exactly what StackOverflow is meant to be.

I feel like I'm the only one who appreciates what StackOverflow is trying to achieve here - to be the place to document hard, solid facts - nothing more. If I wanted to read commentary and opinions on programming, there's always HN or Slashdot.

It seems like this type of question should fall in to http://programmers.stackexchange.com/ domain as well or at least much more so the StackOverflow.

My thoughts exactly. Is anyone aware of topics being moved from one stackexchange to another? This would be a fantastic feature, obviously.

There's a "vote to move" feature when you nominate a question for closing (or at least, there was when there was just StackOverflow and ServerFault)

Maybe you are the only one who appreciates it. I sure don't.

I'll have a question, I'll google it, be excited to when Google finds that someone else has asked the exact same thing, and then disappointed to find that it was asked on StackOverflow, where the Red Guards will inevitably have discovered an interesting question and taken steps to make sure it isn't answered. Hint to SO mods: it's not the question that is "unhelpful", it's you.

While Google manages to sort through the unbelievable chaos of the entire open Web to bring up the most relevant answer to any question on any topic in a fraction of a second using the latest 21st Century search algorithms, SO goes at it from the other direction, making sure so few questions are answered that what remains won't overwhelm its 1980s-era MS-DOS search technology.

I appreciate Joel's letting us use his vintage '486 to gather the world's biggest collection of code snippets, but I'm hoping someone with less primitive technology will replace SO with a system focused more on providing answers than on preventing questions.

I'm not sure what kind of questions you normally have, but I didn't really have much trouble getting answers from StackOverflow. It's no accident that when Google "sorts through the unbelievable chaos of the entire open Web to bring up the most relevant answer to any question on any topic in a fraction of a second using the latest 21st Century search algorithms", the first link is almost always StackOverflow ;)

Also I think it's pretty impressive that Joel managed to make the website run smoothly on a vintage 486.

The chief problem is that once you have a question going and are getting answers, if it's deemed "not suited for SO", you're SOL. That question can't be moved to some "off-topic" forum, because there is no off-topic forum, because the entire platform is not a forum. I feel this situation can be resolved simply by making an unsuitedfor.stackexchange.com, declaring it not part of the official model (i.e. basically a gimped forum) and moving all non-factual questions there.

I'd much rather those questions be documented in the documentation. I don't know how I'd have learned much of what I know now if StackOverflow had been the top 8 search results instead of various manpages and TLDP references that were deeply useful.

It's also very annoying when the top Google result for a query is a StackOverflow thread that has been closed as a duplicate. They should put up a <link rel="canonical"> or something so Google doesn't lead people to the dirty, dirty duplicate.

While the griping's good, let me throw a jab at discussion forums that lock old, unanswered threads. These old, unanswered threads are very frequently in the top 10 Google results for something I'm trying to learn. It's incredibly frustrating to read through a dozen "me too" posts to find that the last one says, "This thread has been closed. If you want to ask a question, start a new thread." AAAARRRGH! New rule: if you close an unanswered thread, delete it from Google. Better yet, understand the part your forum is playing in the information world and let someone who knows the answer to an ancient question post that answer.

It should be easier to mark a question as duplicate or incorrectly tagged with version of language or framework, but aside from that, I don't agree. Without that site, I'd be lost.

My experience with SO is this: Google for something, see a relevant SO link, click it. Page loads, question covers exactly what I'm looking for. First 3 comments on the question are about how the question doesn't belong on SO, or is too broad, or wrong, or whatever. The first answer contains the information I need.

I don't really contribute to SO for the same reason I don't really contribute to Wikipedia - the editors seem so hellbent on enforcing standards and rules that they throw the baby out with the bathwater.

Doesn't the fact that you actually found an answer that covers exactly what you're looking for indicate that SO didn't throw the baby out?

True enough, but I'm afraid that if the editors had the power, they would have nuked the question before the answers even got there.

Last year a young blind man who recently got a degree in computer science did an AMA on Reddit. It was one of the most inspirational things I've read on the Internet. Looking back at it now makes me feel ashamed that I'm not enjoying life (or programming) as much as this guy clearly was

http://www.reddit.com/r/IAmA/comments/fpxzk/blind_since_the_...

Here he answers someone how he can program while blind

http://www.reddit.com/r/IAmA/comments/fpxzk/blind_since_the_...

Anecdote: In college I earned a few bucks working as a tutor. One of my jobs was to assist a blind student. I think they were an EE major. I wasn't tutoring, though; I was dictating an engineering textbook onto cassette tapes.

The school was in a converted office building. I was given a portable tape recorder (this was back in the paleo-Eighties, when analog ruled the Earth) and I would go up to the top of the stairs by the fire exit and sit in the landing to do my recordings. It was a reliably quiet place. (Also a good place for a mid-day nap.)

The book was, of course, filled with equations. At first I tried to read them aloud and that's OK for some things but some were just complicated. That's when I was given a special drawing board. It was a clipboard with rubber padding and clear plastic sheets. I used a stylus to write on the plastic, pushing down into the rubber padding to leave an indentation.

I hope technology has a improved a bit since then.

As mentioned in the SO question, the head of Google's accessibility team, T. V. Raman [1], is blind. I feel like this speaks volumes about the opportunities for disabled programmers on its own, and, though a bit cliche, reinforces the thing I love most about engineering--in many ways, this line of work is as close to a pure meritocracy as one can get. I hope Mr. Raman would agree that it seems fitting that someone who is blind himself would be sensitive to the needs presented by blind and low-vision users of computer software, and I'm happy he's around to provide guidance for accessibility features for a company like Google.

[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/T._V._Raman

Is there a video of a blind person programming somewhere? Even though I see the description, I still don't understand how someone can possibly program without being able to see.

I've wondered about this too, since I can't really picture myself doing any sort of programming without my vision. My problem is juvenile arthritis which came on when I was 12 and will probably leave me with another 8-10 years or so before the pain will be too unbearable to continue. I'll be around 40 then.

I really don't wanna program "Captain's log, supplemental" style. Besides, how does one do CamelCase with speech-to-text?

It's because of that and because I'm getting tired of tech, I've started to wean off programming into something more artistic, but won't require as much dexterity.

> Besides, how does one do CamelCase with speech-to-text?

My guess would be tight integration with the IDE and knowledge of the language being used; most of the time, the editor should be able to figure out that chained, non-keyword or existing identifier words should be CamelCase. You'd need some manual way to disambiguate when it gets it wrong.

You need either an amazing memory (to remember all the code), or a Braille screen that supports all those annoying signs like { }. The downside is going to be no code overview ... to help with that the braile reader should support | like ribbins: this way you can set the space/tab symbol to | (in programs like Vim). This will allow you to more easily follow indentations.

After thinking and writing about it, I'm more concerned about other applications, cause to write code you just need a text-editor. Browsing, Office, ... is going to a far more painful experience...

it is not considered a good, on-topic question for this site

Stackoverflow feels like it's turning into wikipedia sometimes.

I thought it was an excellent question for SO's knowledge pool.

Does anyone know the productivity level of a blind programmer compared with an average programmers? I'm pretty curious about this for a while now. If my sight suddenly gone, can I actually retain my current productivity level with rigorous training and suitable development tools?

As a blind programmer I would say that I can be every bit as productive as my sited peers with comparable experience levels for back end development although not nearly as productive for user interface work. If you suddenly lost your site I’m not sure how well you could program, the way I use a computer is significantly different from how I understand sited people to use a computer. I also assume the way I generate a mental model varies from most programmers and don’t know whether you could adapt existing mental models for use with our site or would have to start from scratch. If you lost your site you would want to focus on things like basic independent living skills and the ability to use a computer for general internet browsing before you attempted to learn to use screen reading software well enough to continue programming. While you could probably obtain a similar level of efficiency after losing your site it would be a process that would take several years at the least.

I read his page years ago, and found it quite interesting: http://emacswiki.org/emacs/MarioLang

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