How can you program if you're blind?

by rayvega • 16 years ago

185 67 16 years ago

gaius3• 16 years ago

I've sailed the open oceans with a blind man at the helm. Which sounds like a line from PoTC but really: he used an audio compass that played a tone at different points of the compass, higher or lower so he knew how to correct. The rest was done by feeling the way the boat handled through the deck and the wheel.

binarymax• 16 years ago

The compass tones are ingenius, but aside from that I'm not surprised he was able to do this as sailing is one of those things where feeling plays a much larger role than one would expect. There are many forces at play that have nothing to do with sight. Having helmed in night storms of 20 foot seas where I could basically see nothing, the motion of the vessel and feedback force exerted on the wheel, I quickly got a sense of how the boat was moving. In fact in those situations I probably would have been much better off with your friends compass than the soaked one at the wheel. And dont even get me started on trying to read the windex in such conditions!

Coding blind would be much different. The input is physical but there is nothing tangible coming back. It is more or less all visual. Come to think of it, if I ever lost my vision I would probably become a full time sailor :)

Retric2• 16 years ago

I went to school with a blind CS student. He had no problem using a computer by himself but the normal classroom setting was vary difficult for him. Based on how he operated meetings would be far more difficult than actually writing code.

PS: Ok, his is not going to be building a GUI but text to speech works well. And a keyboard only interface works fine for both VI and visual studio.

masklinn• 16 years ago

> The input is physical but there is nothing tangible coming back. It is more or less all visual.

Not really. At the end of the day it's just data, text, how you encode it is not very important as long as it can be understood.

Because humans very strongly rely on sight, it makes sense that the default serialization format for text output be print/visual, but there are a number of non-visual interfaces to text. And if none fits, build a new paradigm.

I think samlittlewood below makes a good point: even with a fairly slow (e.g. braille) output, it's at worst similar to coding using a line-oriented editor (e.g. ed). Except you're used to it because you see pretty much everything via a line-editor so you're probably proficient at it.

eney7• 16 years ago

I'm a blind programmer. I use a 80-character braille display which shows one line of text at a time. My preferred language is Python although some blind programmers dislike it for its syntactic use of indentation. I find that scrolling with the braille display and feeling for the indentations on left gives me a good feel for the shape of a program. I know another programmer who prefers Perl because of its rich use of sigils, although he uses speech synthesis. I prefer to use vim for all types of editing (I hate IDEs although many blind programmers like Eclipse or Visual Studio). Why do you reckon the feedback blind programmers use as non-tangible BTW?

gaius3• 16 years ago

What do you think about languages like J or APL or even Haskell, where you can do an awful lot in very few characters?

random42• 16 years ago

I was just thinking, before reading your response, that python would suck for the blind, because of its strong preference of "beautification" of the code. So your response actually surprises me.

Do you think having braces over indentation would have helped for accessibility. Any other issues with the language syntax?

saurabh• 16 years ago

Have you ever tried PostScript, Forth or Factor?

jkent• 16 years ago

How did he handle other users of the ocean?

gaius3• 16 years ago

No worse than any other helmsman :-)

Which is to say with the boat heeled over or the jib up, the helm is reliant on the bowman and the rest of the crew keeping watch anyway, you can't see much forward.

jms• 16 years ago

It's interesting how quickly the text to speech setup can be made to run. My dad's computer talks so quickly I can't understand without slowing it down.

samlittlewood• 16 years ago

How similar is this to using a line editor (ed/edlin/edit/teco) on a slow terminal? You have a model in your head, code in a buffer, and you use the edit commands to update both - with occasional listing sanity checks to check you are keeping the two in sync, or move to a new region.

I hear some guys wrote a pretty cool operating system like that!

Someone3• 16 years ago

It is somewhat similar, but to get the real 'feel', you should also limit your line width to one to two characters. Braille reading typically is done with both hands (with one looking ahead, and one doing the actual reading), so it does 'show' slightly more than that, but you will still be faster at reading those characters than a blind person would be.

Also, you would have to give up syntax coloring and style and font variations.

Finally, chances are that some characters (braces, asterisk, plus sign) from your programming language take up more than one braille character. Real nerds would hack their character-to-braille pattern translator to optimize that translation table, but the price you pay for that is that you will have to cope with multiple mappings. Actually, you would have to do that anyways, as there is disagreement about the encoding to use, even for digits, and because the U.S. frequently uses a contracted braille system (where, for example, the single-letter word 't' must be read as 'the' where appropriate; that 'where appropriate' is for the reader to guess at)

Avshalom• 16 years ago

Also, you would have to give up syntax coloring and style and font variations.

I'm pretty sure ed was dead by the time those were invented, the wiki claims the "one of the first" syntax highlighting editors was in 85.

dingle_thunk• 16 years ago

I think the biggest thing for me would be living without intellisense/autosuggest - I mean it'd be OK to code ifs and fors and whatnots without them, but I can't imagine how I'd quickly navigate the large, enterprise software libraries I deal with regularly...

silentbicycle• 16 years ago

There's a guy on the Lua mailing list who has mentioned (e.g. http://lua-users.org/lists/lua-l/2008-09/msg00513.html) that he appreciates how its relatively small and keyword based syntax (http://www.lua.org/manual/5.1/manual.html#8), makes it easy to program in with a screen reader.

There's also Emacspeak (http://emacspeak.sourceforge.net/). I haven't used it, but there's a chapter about it in _Beautiful Code_.

lancebailey• 16 years ago

with so much crappy apps out there I figured blind people where already programing. :)

arnemart• 16 years ago

Amazing. It's really hard to imagine programming blind and jumping between methods/files/debuggers/browsers effectively, but it seems some people do pull it off.

I was struggling with tendonitis in my right arm a year back and had to do all my coding left-handed, and that made me feel crippled and annoyingly slow. It's really impressive what people can overcome.

smackfu2• 16 years ago

The answers seem to reflect the technical "how", but I still don't get how you can efficiently program if it takes minutes to read a page of existing code.

rosejn• 16 years ago

We had a blind classmate all through my undergraduate program in CS, and he was a very capable hacker. He lived inside emacs using emacspeak with a high speed synthesized reader voice, and you could often hear his terminal talking to him in the front row if you listened carefully during class.

Blind people develop good memories because they are constantly building detailed mental models of spaces they need to navigate, and I think this might give them a leg up programming because they are used to working with mental models rather than referring to maps, diagrams and documentation. Their are obvious drawbacks, but I think programming is probably a pretty good choice of profession for blind people.

balding_n_tired• 16 years ago

I worked with a programmer who was legally blind. He used speech-recognition software plus some sort of display software that blew each character up to about 10" x 6".

dugmartin• 16 years ago

The key is to use a good screenreader like JAWS. As I posted here its next to impossible using Window's built in screenreader, Narrator.

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1799588

lukev3• 16 years ago

There's a lot of talk about line editors in this thread. From a quick scan of Wikipedia, it seems that 40 cells is about the biggest braille display you can buy.

WTF? Why has nobody invented a full-screen braille display? Is there some reason it's massively more complicated than it seems?

eney7• 16 years ago

I'd love to have a 80x25 braille display. I believe they've been made in the labs. The blocker is the expense.

lukev3• 16 years ago

Hm. I smell a really good startup opportunity, if one could build a reproducible design.

I know there's a ton of blind people out there... do most of them know or rely upon braille, and would be interested in such a product?

runjake• 16 years ago

Then why not go for an alternative approach?

Perhaps a capacitive touch screen with certain subtle audio and haptic feedback?

It seems like the mechanical approach current Braille devices use might've jumped the shark, and I wonder if the blind world doesn't need a system that's more easy to do in today's world.

smackfu2• 16 years ago

40 cells is 240 individually actuated pins.

10 lines is 2400.

80 x 25 is 12,000.

Someone3• 16 years ago

Most refreshable Braille displays have 8 pins per character. That fits neatly in a byte, and allows for some more characters to show. That is quite a gain, as standard Braille (64 different patterns) doesn't even have separate code points for capitals.

hugs4• 16 years ago

Well, I'm working on a full-screen display. :-)

Software demo: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4qnL7479fbU

Source: http://github.com/hugs/pinmachine

Hardware demo: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AUgbu0cE2-Q

Biggest issues are cost and size. I'm currently at "1977 Apple" stage - a big, expensive, hand-made prototype. But the biggest issue is cost per pin. Also, resolution is an issue... I'm going for "big and expensive" first, then will work on making it small and cheap overtime. I'm working with small dc motors first, but there are plenty of electromechanical tricks to get this down to braille-worthy stuff.

gsivil• 16 years ago

This seems like a project that the MIT media lab would like to put its hands on. Why do not you seek a collaboration.

wazoox2• 16 years ago

I had a thought about it, ideally it would be a pin board (like these http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ikkjT7ACJME ) with solenoids or similar motors on each pin... somewhat similar to core memory too, with a different geometry.

marze• 16 years ago

Utility vs cost not there. You still need to scan it one line at a time, not like a visual screen where you can see it all at once and focus on what you think will be relevant.

Someone3• 16 years ago

In the USA, that typically is what people can afford. At about 3 character an inch, it also nicely fits below a laptop. In parts of Wesrern Europe, 70 or 80 characters are common, too. I have even seen two-line displays with two times 80 characters. Those are huge, though.

Fills-screen is a bit of a holy grail. What prevents it from happening is technology and price. The only reliable technology uses space next to each character for a piezzo-electric actuator. That makes it impossible to make displays that stretch far in two dimensions (that two line display was over an inch high)

Also, those actuators are fairly expensive, say $40 per character. production volume is low, so any manufacturer will need 100% or so of margin. Result: 40 characters for a couple of grand.

AFAIk, any other technology still suffers from reliability problems. It turns out to be quite hard to make a small reliable actuator with the required force, travel, and resilience to dirt.

staktrace• 16 years ago

Has anybody out there who's not blind tried doing a "blind for a day" thing? Just wear a blindfold for 24 hours and see how much of your life it affects. I haven't tried it but after reading all this I kind of want to.

kellishaver• 16 years ago

I'm legally blind and have been since birth. I only have vision on my right eye. My visual acuity is low (around 20/180) and my field of vision very narrow (less than 20deg). Still, it doesn't really stop me from doing much. I program-and I also design.

A couple of years ago I developed narrow-angle glaucoma, in addition to my other problems. After several laser surgeries failed to resolve the problem, I had a more invasive surgical procedure done. Afterwards, I was completely blind for 48hrs. Aside from the fact that it was terrifying, because at that point we didn't know how much of my vision would come back, I found that I was able to adjust fairly quickly. In just a few hours, I was able to get around the house, get dressed, shower, brush teeth, etc. unassisted. Eating was a little more difficult. It's hard to fork food you can't see. I stuck to sandwiches. I didn't attempt reading (I don't know Braille) or using the computer.

I'm sure this was made easier by the fact that I'm very familiar with my house and by the fact that my vision was already poor, so I'm more used to doing more things by feel/sound/memory, especially at night.

Which, I guess, answers your question, but to finish off the story:

After a couple of days, my vision started to slowly come back, though it was very blurry for a long time. I was able to start using the computer, via a combination of the screen reader, enlarging, and inverting the colors on the display. All I could see at that point were shapes, and, after about a week, in order to read text, it had to be about 128pt and high contrast.

Fortunately, most of my vision returned. The first couple of months were slow going, but after that, it got to the point where I could pretty much function as I did before. It took around 6 months to recover completely, though. I did end up losing some contrast sensitivity and as a result, I can no longer read printed text. There's just not enough contrast. I mean, I can see the words, reading for more than just a few minutes gives me a headache. So now I read books on an iPad and with the backlit screen (a backlit display helps a ton) and zoom capabilities, I can read without headaches.

pavel_lishin2• 16 years ago

I've thought about doing this. I think the biggest problem - aside from setting up the computer for text to speech - would be getting to work, and to other places. I'm familiar enough with my current route that I could walk there with a cane, I think, but crossing the street would be really hard. Especially since none of our walk signals are equipped with audio indicators.

bphogan• 16 years ago

I routinely test web applications with screen reading software; I am partially sighted so I have an interest in developing things that work well with screenreaders. I highly recommend "being blind" when you test the things you build, and the idea of blindfolding yourself for a day just to see what it's like is a good idea. It gives you a little more empathy. However, please keep in mind that it's also not as bad for the blind, as they have a lot of practice using assistive devices, technology, etc. The human body and mind are incredible, adaptable, wonderful things.

P.S. I did a video of a screenreader and twitter a few days ago - you can see the thread for that at http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1799246

cbo• 16 years ago

A better question would be how can you program graphics if you're blind?

That's something I would love to find out and/or solve.

eney7• 16 years ago

I've used Graphviz to make relationship diagrams to aid my communication with sighted people. There's an interesting Google Developer Podcast with T.V. Raman where he mentions programming directly in Postscript while he worked at Adobe. I've used LaTeX for my personal documents (CV etc.) and sighted people have asked me how on earth I managed to produce such a nice document. I wonder how feasible it would be to use Metafont for more intense graphical expressions.

kyleslattery• 16 years ago

A group of students from Southern Illinois University Edwardsville and Washington State University is working on a programming language for the blind:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lC1mOSdmzFc

skbohra123• 16 years ago

I know a blind python programmer Krishna kant Mane[0], who works with pylon, is a FOSS evangelist, leads a foss project GNU Khata[1] and an awesome speaker[2]. I loved the way he uses all free and open source tools to work on his laptop, program and deliver. Hats off.

[0]http://www.blogger.com/profile/07891377863557367515 [1]http://gnukhata.gnulinux.in [2]http://gnunify.in/speaker/profile/108

raquo• 16 years ago

I wonder how useful would be a VoiceOver-optimized editor for iPad.

jim_h• 16 years ago

There are plenty of 'impossible' things you can do blind.

For example, there are blind golf players. They have their own golf associations and tournaments. One of my old co-workers used to assist blind golfers by describing the location, distance, etc. The golfer does the rest.

learner4life• 16 years ago

One of the lead programmers of JAWS is Glen Gordon. He is blind is one of the smartest programmers I have known.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/JAWS_%28screen_reader%29

http://www.afb.org/afbpress/pub.asp?DocID=aw070204

bch• 16 years ago

I read this headline as if Agent Smith were asking Mr. Anderson...

jbronn• 16 years ago

I suggest the person asking this question to watch "Sneakers."

dekayed• 16 years ago

Are there any other HNers out there with other disabilities that cause you to modify how you interact with your computer or how you program?

Dramatize• 16 years ago

I always wanted to learn braille as a kid so I could read in the dark.

signa11• 16 years ago

http://emacspeak.sourceforge.net/raman/resume.html

How can you program if you're blind?

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