I always wondered how someone could use text-to-speech effectively, especially with a programming language full of symbols with long names such as 'semi-colon', 'underscore', 'left parenthesis' etc. The answer it seems is to speed up the voice tenfold! Honestly incredible he's fine-tuned his other senses well enough to be able to code at a reasonable speed again.
Here is a link to the Stack Overflow answer mentioned in the intro portion of the video:<p>"How can you program if you're blind?" | <a href="http://stackoverflow.com/a/453758" rel="nofollow">http://stackoverflow.com/a/453758</a>
I met two blind programmers. The process they used was exactly how it's described in this video.<p>What was odd was that:<p>1 - they were given the worst place in the room: no windows, literally facing a wall. Took some time to realize why they didn't complain.<p>2 - The computer had monitors. Then I learnt that Windows (don't know what version it was) wouldn't work it no monitor was attached.
I imagine many would benefit if we had a smart developer assistant where it could have a higher level understanding of programming.<p>"Jarvis import library foo" - could be said from anywhere in file<p>"Jarvis jump to file bar.c"<p>"Jarvis declare var current temperature equals zero" - var currentTemperature = 0<p>"Jarvis write for enumeration on var word over var name list"<p>"Jarvis build and run" or simply "Jarvis run"<p>By the way, I know many people don't like to talk to a computer, can't imagine how it could be faster than typing, etc. However, I believe that once an assistant is done right, more than a few people would be converts.
This is great. I always wondered how blind developers managed to navigate IDEs at a decent pace.<p>I can't help but wonder how Saqib Shaikh navigates through log files for large applications though. Log files usually generate a large amount of noise in the form of time stamps, thread names, log levels, stack traces, etc. that overtime I've learned to "scan" instead of read to find what I am looking for. I would love to see a video of him navigating through a log file to see how he does it. Maybe just lots of string searches?
Damn, he works faster than me... the only thing I could have done faster was removing the "<p>Edit: wrote semi colon instead of " double quote
In my first developer job, I worked with a blind developer. Back then it was green screens, ksh, vi, and a screen reader. That was over twenty years ago.<p>I'm surprised the process is very much the same today as it was then.
why can't we code like this "remove that comma on line 3" or "move line 4 inside the braces above"? surely it would benefit everyone?<p>you could even ask "which lines have if statements?"<p>for something like this wouldn't you be talking to an AST rather than a text editor?