Legally blind programming help

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7650505

by befacey • 12 years ago

7 7 12 years ago

news.ycombinator.com

Hey! So I've been learning how to code and being legally blind is probably one of the hardest things I have to deal with. Vision is 20/200 and I also have a disease that causes extreme light sensitivity. I usually have dimmed displays and zoomed in as well.

Can anyone give me some suggestions on how I can find a way to not zoom in all the time. A lot of platforms don't support increasing text sizes therefore I end up two inches from the screen - straining my vision as usual. Can someone help me out? Don't want this to get in the way of my abilities any longer. Thanks again!

datashovel2• 12 years ago

I've done research on this before. Though I'm not blind or visually impaired, my research would tell me that a good place to start would be emacspeak

http://emacspeak.sourceforge.net/

datashovel2• 12 years ago

Another tip, I have read into efforts of some of the large technology companies. In my opinion, Google is making the greatest strides in terms of comprehensive accessibility for visually impaired and blind users / developers:

http://www.google.com/accessibility/products/

jankins• 12 years ago

Screen readers or Braille displays are options - window-eyes is free on windows now (with purchase of an office bundle) and VoiceOver is free on OS X. After the learning curve you may find it faster than navigating visually if it's painful or slow to look at the screen. If you're in California you may want to look into the Department of Rehabilitation (or find the comparable department in your state/country) which provides free equipment and training for visually impaired users entering the job market or school.

lukeck• 12 years ago

I'm visually impaired, not legally blind although not far off it. I'm also pretty photo-sensitive. Some things that have helped me in no particular order:

- Get a large (27" in my case) monitor so I can have the text large without having to constantly zoom in. High resolution + higher DPI is easier on the eyes than getting big text by lowering the resolution.

- Learn a terminal based text editor (Vim or EMacs) and get good at using the terminal. Many GUI based applications, particularly IDEs have limited options or don't work well with larger text sizes. Working within a terminal makes developing less "visual" while maximising the amount of information on screen. Now I spend 80% plus of my day in a terminal and my eyes are significantly less tired at the end of the day.

- Use a tiling window manager. On OSX I use Slate (https://github.com/jigish/slate), or on Nix you could use something like XMonad. The screen-snapping stuff in recent versions of Windows is helpful too. The idea here is to rely on the mouse as little as possible.

- use a dark color scheme. I like Solarized-dark but there are several other good options.

- pick an easy to read font. I use Menlo and have the size up around 32pt.

- use a terminal prompt that makes it very clear where the prompt is when scrolling back through history. I use this one https://gist.github.com/agnoster/3712874

- get an adjustable monitor arm so you can bring the screen closer to you without craning your neck. I've had the same one for 15+ years but am planning on buying one of the Ergotron ones in the next few weeks

- use f.lux to take the bright blue tint out of screen colors https://justgetflux.com/

- work in a room lit by lamps positioned so that they don't add any glare.

- if you often find yourself working at the same screen as other people, set up a second monitor in mirror-mode or investigate using TMux if you're both in terminal editors so that you can have your terminal configured so it's comfortable for you, and so can your partner.

I'm happy to provide more info on any of this.

befacey2• 12 years ago

Thanks for all of this. I wasn't expecting someone to give me a detailed response like this. Really appreciate it. Can you shoot me an email at josejllorens@gmail.com so I have your contact info in case I have a question. Keep in touch! Thanks.

throwbl2014• 12 years ago

Start using screen reader such as NVDA/Jaws on Windows, VoiceOver on Mac or Vinux (a ubuntu fork with Orca screen reader). I have a little vision left but I do dev with only TTS. It's not that hard (considering I've been doing it for over 9 years) but GUI tools (IDEs and texteditors) are your biggest pane points.

Visual studio is quite accessible and I use it a lot.

That said, I've been programming for nix as well though Sublime/etc are completely inaccessible (at least on Windows).

Managing *nix servers with SSH is by far the most accessible and rewarding experience I've had. VIM is my personal choice for editing. text-based terminals are ridiculously powerful and accessible and they level the playing field IMO.

befacey2• 12 years ago

I have a lot of research to do thanks to you guys. Honestly, can't thank you all enough for the suggestions! You are all awesome.

Legally blind programming help

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