bramd

> With speech output instead of Braille devices? Interesting.

Both. The one doesn't exclude the other. I'm a heavy user of text-to-speech at high rates to digest content easily, but prefer braille when coding or doing some work on a shell/terminal.

You'll see much more braille displays in some European countries because they get subsidized by health insurance or a government entity that provides assistive technology for the workplace. This workstation has a 88 cell braille display, which means it can display 88 braille characters at a time. That unit costs $10k or so, depending on market and EUR/USD rate etc, but to give you an idea of the price tag. I also have a mobile unit with 40 cells, I guess that one is about $6k or so.

Just pressed left shift five times to enable sticky keys on my Macbook running Windows 8 (native, no virtualization) and got no beeps. does anyone know if this has changed since Windows 7? I'm sure this generated a beep sequence in older versions of Windows.

You mean making the IDE itself accessible? Eclipse is already quite accessible out of the box.

> At what speed do you replay text->audio (ie realtime, 1.5x,2x,...)?

Approximately the speed that the guy at the beginning of this video uses: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=92pM6hJG6Wo

> Lastly, if you disregard price is the braille 'refreshable display' a better experience?

It just what you're used to I guess, I know lots of people who can get by without one. I especially like it when doing coding and doing stuff in a terminal. Easier to see indentation, parenthesis, quotes etc.

> Have you ever tried something like the vOICe http://www.seeingwithsound.com/ ?

Yes, I have played with it. However, I'm not convinced yet if I should invest a lot of time learning it. Another useful and interesting skill is echolocation[0]. I have used that since Iwas a child to survey my environment.

0: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Human_echolocation

I'm not a native English speaker either.

> Is the technology so advanced today? Are you using a screen reader and a regular keyboard? (e.g. typing and than playing it via the reader) how do you know if you made a typo? (e.g. who's and whose sound the same)

Yes, I'm using a regular keyboard and a screenreader. Besides speech output I use a device called a refreshable braille display which can display up to 40 or 80 characters at a time depending on the model being used. I'm sure you will find some pictures if you Google it. However, those devices are quite expensive and many blind people just use speech output. Even with just speech there are options for reading letter by letter, word by word etc. However, I see some people make much spelling mistakes because they just listen and not rreally read how a word is spelled.

> Can you read and write code without seeing? Are there any blind programmers that you know of.

Sure you can. I make a living by programming and doing web accessibility consultancy. Another nice example is the free and open source NVDA screenreader[0], which is developed by two blind guys.

[0]: http://www.nvaccess.org/

First of all, be aware that the group that's actually totally blind is relatively small. Most people who are legally blind have some form of light perception, or can see something. I've been totally blind since birth.

Blind people can have a good or bad sense of direction, just like their sighted peers. I think the device described in the article might be more useful on short distances and less relevant for knowing where your home is while you're far away from it. This because blind people don't have the visual queues to determine if they're walking in a straight line for example. Getting immediate feedback could help with such skills and learn them how to verify the signals from the device with other senses.

Sensory substitution, aka how to replace input from one sense with input from another is a quite interesting topic.

I don't post often on HN, but today couldn't resist. Just tested Utox on Windows as well as Toxy, also on Windows. Both programs are totally inaccessible for people using a screenreader and I'm quite sure as well for people using things like speech recognition.

Utox seems to be C++ and a GUI framework I didn't look into. Toxy is .NET+WPF... two different stacks, but two inaccessible programs. I'm quite sure the developers didn't write inaccessible software deliberately, but this makes me wonder if we need either:

1. Inform developers better about accessibility 2. Fix tooling: warn/error if you don't label your elements etc 3. All of the above...

To give this post some more context, earlier this week I looked at Stellar... their web client is inaccessible. Earlier this week Wunderlist released a version 3... iOS app is nearly inaccessible. Earlier this week I finally wanted to give Foursquare's new Swarm app a shot... inaccessible. Do you see the pattern? I'm sorry for ranting about this, but imagine some random app update did stop the app from working and only displayed a black screen, you would be annoyed at least.

> I'd say 95% or more of the web is accessible if you are good with screen reading software.

True, however 80% or more of the blind users I've seen are not good with there screenreading software at all. Many people don't even know how to use navigation by heading for example... sad but true.

Interesting that some commenters here seem to have an attitude of "let's build an app for the blind", "there is no hope for the blind" etc. I'm born blind and build software and do some accessibility consulting for a living. Fortunately we've reached times where the blind community can build software themselves.

An excellent example is NVDA[0], an open source screenreader for the Windows platform, mainly build by two blind guys. With Firefox, I think it is the best combination for browsing the web these days, even outperforming commercial screenreaders.

Oh, and if you want to know why semantics are important, grab a screenreader and read a HN discussion. The lack of nested lists and/or headings to indicate the relationship between comments makes it just a stream of comments without any structure. If proper semantics was being used, I could for example skip an entire subtree of the discussion if the starting comment didn't interest me.

[0]: http://www.nvaccess.org/