How can you program if you're blind?

http://stackoverflow.com/questions/118984/how-can-you-program-if-youre-blind

by bad_alloc • 14 years ago

117 43 14 years ago

zxoq2• 14 years ago

None of the answers were about the questions I had about how to program when you're blind. While the tools they use are interesting. I'm more concerned with how you would browse the code.

Say you wanted to find a method, how do you scroll in a large file to locate it? I guess deft use of find & go to definition helps out here.

How do you locate a line of code in a large function? Do you have to listen for the screen reader to read the contents of an entire screen's worth of code? Or do you rely on previous knowledge of the code and remember where it was?

How do you deal with debugging / fixing errors. I imagine the screen reader trying to parse the output of a template error being a nightmare.

lucian1900• 14 years ago

I suspect Braille displays help with those sort of problems.

cannona6• 14 years ago

They certainly do, if you can afford one. They start at $3,500 for a small one (20 characters wide) and swiftly increase in price from there.

almost• 14 years ago

Search is a very fast method of navigation when your editors search doesn't suck. Watch an experienced emacs or vim user sometime. I can't say much about other systems but I did once spend a day working with only emacsspeak, the audio interface to emacs. With emacsspeak you use the normal emacs movement commands to move by char, word, sentence paragraph etc and it will read out the unit you've moved in, it kind of let's you scan through a document. Also, experienced users have the speech turned up really fast, if you google it you can probably find a recording...

zxoq2• 14 years ago

I do use vim on a daily basis for all my remote editing needs. Just did not think of how useful all short-hands are for blind people. Thanks for mentioning it.

saqibs• 14 years ago

This is certainly one of the harder aspects of programming blind - particularly tackling a large, unfamiliar, codebase. In the case of a new project, I build up a mental map of how the program works - and memorise the conceptual organisation. With an existing codebase go-to-definition is invaluable, and stepping through in a debugger is just as useful for a blind person as for anyone - you get to see the lines in the order of execution.

This does influence my personal coding style - I always have the entry point at the top, which makes use of meaningful named methods - so it looks like the table of contents of a book. Next come the second level methods - and so forth, until the small auxiliary methods are way at the bottom. This lets me read it top-to-bottom, like a story. Much of this is just good coding practice - but, for example, I find it really frustrating to read code where functions must be defined before they are used - this results in details first, outline last - which makes it hard to build up that mental model (remember, I'm listening to the code line by line - no spinning the mousewheel).

Finally, I'm going to use this comment to express my dislike for underlines (yes, I'm looking at you, Ruby). Every underline adds three syllables to my audio stream - whereas screen readers read cammalCaseCode as separate words.

Feel to ping me @SaqibS on Twitter.

mmagin• 14 years ago

It seems unfortunate that you can't configure screen readers to say "_" as "under" or some such thing. Also, I think it would be very useful if punctuation was pronounced in a different voice or tone.

socksy• 14 years ago

That sounds like an issue with the screen reader, surely? CamelCase is arguably somewhat less readable for the seeing than underscore_separated_words, as the underscore can be read practically as a space. Presumably, you'd need a syllable to distinguish between CamelCased and underscore_text, but I don't see why you can't have Python or Ruby style underscores as a convention?

pavel_lishin• 14 years ago

You would have hated some of the projects I've worked on - spaghetti code, full of variables like hold_value or temp_num and function names like doThing and doThingNow. As a fully sighted person, I mostly had no idea of the overarching organization of the problem. If I were blind and faced with the same project, I'd probably quit and take on something easier, like juggling chainsaws or trying out for major league baseball.

jdf• 14 years ago

I had a TA at school who was blind and was excellent at helping CS students debug and fix their class projects. He helped me a number of times and was generally able to find bugs very quickly.

While I don't know the name of the program of he used, my vague recollection is that it read aloud the contents of whatever line he had the cursor on, a good deal faster than a human would speak it (I actually found the text to be read too quickly for me to follow by listening - I needed to read it myself).

I actually found this article about him on the Internet:

http://www.dimenet.com/disnews/archive.php?mode=P&id=276

derefr• 14 years ago

You can ask anyone who has been programming for 40 years or so this same question. Before we had visual editors [but after we stopped using punch-cards], we had line editors, which worked under fundamentally the same constraints as programming blind has: only a little bit of content at a time, streamed, selected before "display", and requiring a "replay" after any edits to see if the edits were correct. A description of a working day for a grizzled ed(1) veteran would probably have a lot in common with an optimal blind-programming experience.

richardw2• 14 years ago

I suspect coding blind with an audio interface is closer to a word-editor than a line-editor. Imagine your monitor showed only one word on it, or one punctuation mark, and you had to remember everything else!

(Edit: I see below there are Braille editors, which I imagine mirror line editors! Expensive though.)

TomGullen• 14 years ago

It's truly amazing people are doing this, very inspirational.

kaushiks• 14 years ago

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/T._V._Raman http://emacspeak.sourceforge.net/

DillonHess• 14 years ago

Just this morning my little brother pocked me in the eye, and my first thought was about how I wouldn't be able to program any more if he pocked it all the way out... Glad to know that there is still a way for blind people who have the passion and work ethic to continue coding

neurostimulant3• 14 years ago

Me too. I used to think that being blind is a death sentence for programmer career.

dugmartin• 14 years ago

I was part of the team that rebuilt Narrator (the built in screen reader for Windows) for Vista. A few days after we had a minimal version running I tried to use it with Visual Studio to make a small change with the monitor turned off. For me it was next to impossible.

cannona6• 14 years ago

Don't feel too bad. I'm an experienced screen reader user, and even I find it almost impossible to do anything with narrator. Well, to be honest, I've only tried the one from XP. Hopefully the newer versions are better.

danso• 14 years ago

Here's a reddit thread with that same question, about three years later

http://www.reddit.com/r/programming/comments/ke5ao/how_can_y...

yuchi2• 14 years ago

I was developing a Liferay portal for a client which needed (in my idea) complete accessibility. I used my iPad to move in the page and was a big experience, most of my initial design was not tested over visual appearance but semantic accessibility.

If you own an iOS device do activate VoiceOver and try to surf YOUR applications (and more important, your WEB applications). Even better, let someone else do it for you.

You'll discover how hard and difficult can be to READ a page not designed to be read but scanned with eyes.

Please, do it. Blind people have the same right to access your content and features.

tosseraccount• 14 years ago

They have "a right to access your content"? Is there a law specifying this? What are the penalties for breaking the law?

azelfrath• 14 years ago

I see what you're getting at, but I think you're being a bit douchey about it.

Of course blind people do not have a "right" to access his content. Neither does anyone else. There is no law anywhere that says "X person or group has an inalienable right to view Google". That doesn't mean we shouldn't be considerate of disabilities.

ADD: He says blind people have "the same right" and not "a right", the implication here being that they have "the same right" as any sighted person.

jtheory• 14 years ago

So, you're being sarcastic, but aside from the fact that you're scorning blind people for crying out loud, there are laws that might well apply to you.

Do you do any work building government websites or sites that serve other large public services? Do you sell services to schools or universities? Do you run a site that people might be obligated to use for some reason (i.e., website for a utility)?

Think of it like this: "I know it's kind of a shitty thing to block disabled folks from my site -- but given that I'm an X (offering X, hosting X, etc.), is it ILLEGAL for Xs to discriminate against disabled people?"

Laws are progressively covering more ground as time goes on, so while I doubt there will ever be much enforcement for teensy hobby sites (like the guy at the side of the highway selling strawberries probably won't be building any handicapped ramps), it's pretty reasonable to expect gradually more requirements from all serious sites. In the UK (for example) the Equality Act 2010 gets a bit more explicit that all sites should at least makes reasonable efforts for accessibility: http://www.shoosmiths.co.uk/news/3441.asp

Some info for many countries here: http://www.w3.org/WAI/Policy/

(Caveat: I'm not an accessibility legal expert by any means, but have been doing a bit of reading on the subject over the past year, as I'm developing a site we intend to be fully accessible).

stevenbedrick• 14 years ago

I recognize that you're posing a (presumably rhetorical) philosophical question, but it seems worth pointing out that there are certain contexts where accessibility is a matter of law.

If your content is intended for use or distribution by a US federal agency, or was created using federal dollars or as part of a federal contract, you are responsible for ensuring that it is compliant with section 508 of the Rehabilitation Act of 1973, which specifies that your content be accessible to individuals with disabilities.

Leaving aside for a moment the larger question of whether specific blind and/or deaf individuals consider their sight/hearing status to be a disability or not, section 508 is generally interpreted to mean that your content needs to be as accessible as you can make it. That means (among other things) working to make sure that screen readers and other such software are able to make full use of your site's functionality.

In my experience, the process of getting a project compliant with section 508 is generally very valuable- it makes you think a lot about how your content is organized, and rewards use of semantic markup. It can be frustrating at times, but the end result is definitely worth it for a wide range of reasons.

Here are a couple of places to get started learning about 508 issues:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Section_508_Amendment_to_the_Re...

http://www.section508.gov/

yuchi2• 14 years ago

Probably my use of "right" in that context could be not correct.

I think it's our duty to be as inclusive as possible when talking about the target audience of our applications/content.

Even more if you're designing an infrastructure used by someone else (or more the one) to build their communication channels.

And talking about a specific law and legal rights for accessibility, here in Italy every public/governative web-site/application MUST meet the required standards for accessibility. Less or more a triple A (and more given the additional strictness of our local law).

MartinCron• 14 years ago

I'm reminded of an interesting story from a great podcast (99% invisible) about a blind architect.

http://podbean.99percentinvisible.org/2010/11/19/99-invisibl...

varikin• 14 years ago

I have a coworker who is blind that gave a presentation a couple months ago about creating accessible websites. This isn't really about how to code; instead it is more about how to make websites accessible. He has a couple demos of using JAWS.

http://blog.nerdery.com/2012/01/developing-accessible-websit...

Also, I recognize the irony of a video presentation about browsing the web blind.

astrofinch• 14 years ago

Anyone know how people without hands can program?

fallous• 14 years ago

I'd try a chordic keyboard used by toes or foot positions.

chewxy• 14 years ago

Interesting. This post has inspired me to actually improve the usability of my sites. Anyone have any good guides? Strangers for Dinner and edgeyo are pretty much text-driven, but what about CSS layout etc? Will screenreaders parse those?

cannona6• 14 years ago

For the most part, CSS is ignored by screen readers. However, it can of course make a huge difference for people who are browsing your site with screen magnification or who have color blindness.

ars2• 14 years ago

Does anyone know a service that will review your website for accessibility?

I don't have a budget to pay them, but I'd be willing to put in reasonable recommendations.

I do already use alt attributes and label tags on everything.

cannona6• 14 years ago

Ping me on Twitter and I can take a quick look. @cannona

ars2• 14 years ago

The site is not public yet, but I'll save your message for when it is.

k4st• 14 years ago

I am curious about what blind programmers consider to be aesthetically appealing code.

cannona6• 14 years ago

As a blind developer, I don't think my opinions on what makes nice code differ wildly from my coworkers, with the exception of indenting, equal-sign alignment, and other such white space issues. Those are the sorts of things I only do because I have to. They rarely provide me any benefit.

neurostimulant3• 14 years ago

I imagine it would be hard for a blind programmer to program using Python, Coffeescript and other language where white space plays important part. Can anyone give more insight about this?

cannona6• 14 years ago

Python is one of my favorite languages to program in, but the white space thing was an issue for a while. Fortunately, I found an editor that will work well with my screen reader and will tell me what level of indenting I'm at, so it's now just a mild annoyance. However, when browsing on the web or elsewhere outside my editor, I do find myself occasionally counting spaces if it's not obvious from the context what indentation level a particular line is at.

neurostimulant3• 14 years ago

Can you elaborate on the tools you use? What IDE and screen reader do you use? Also, what tool do you use to type code with? Braille keyboard? I really interested to learn about what kind of setup that works best for blind developer.

richardw2• 14 years ago

What improvements can you think of for this? For example, parallel sound hints of other aspects of the context, like a note at a certain frequency to indicate indentation, or using stereo to indicate the position of a word?

tferris• 14 years ago

Incredible read made all my problems vanish away.

How can you program if you're blind?

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