How can you program if you're blind?

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.

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.<p>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.

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.<p>I hear some guys wrote a pretty cool operating system like that!

There's a guy on the Lua mailing list who has mentioned (e.g. <a href="http://lua-users.org/lists/lua-l/2008-09/msg00513.html" rel="nofollow">http://lua-users.org/lists/lua-l/2008-09/msg00513.html</a>) that he appreciates how its relatively small and keyword based syntax (<a href="http://www.lua.org/manual/5.1/manual.html#8" rel="nofollow">http://www.lua.org/manual/5.1/manual.html#8</a>), makes it easy to program in with a screen reader.<p>There's also Emacspeak (<a href="http://emacspeak.sourceforge.net/" rel="nofollow">http://emacspeak.sourceforge.net/</a>). I haven't used it, but there's a chapter about it in _Beautiful Code_.

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.

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

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.<p>[0]<a href="http://www.blogger.com/profile/07891377863557367515" rel="nofollow">http://www.blogger.com/profile/07891377863557367515</a> [1]<a href="http://gnukhata.gnulinux.in" rel="nofollow">http://gnukhata.gnulinux.in</a> [2]<a href="http://gnunify.in/speaker/profile/108" rel="nofollow">http://gnunify.in/speaker/profile/108</a>

A group of students from Southern Illinois University Edwardsville and Washington State University is working on a programming language for the blind:<p><a href="http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lC1mOSdmzFc" rel="nofollow">http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lC1mOSdmzFc</a>

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.

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.

One of the lead programmers of JAWS is Glen Gordon. He is blind is one of the smartest programmers I have known.<p><a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/JAWS_%28screen_reader%29" rel="nofollow">http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/JAWS_%28screen_reader%29</a><p><a href="http://www.afb.org/afbpress/pub.asp?DocID=aw070204" rel="nofollow">http://www.afb.org/afbpress/pub.asp?DocID=aw070204</a>

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

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...

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.<p><a href="http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1799588" rel="nofollow">http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1799588</a>

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.<p>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.

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

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".

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?

<a href="http://emacspeak.sourceforge.net/raman/resume.html" rel="nofollow">http://emacspeak.sourceforge.net/raman/resume.html</a>

A better question would be how can you program graphics if you're blind?<p>That's something I would love to find out and/or solve.

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

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

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

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