How a Blind Person Programs

Starting today, every time I feel like ignoring accessibility in my applications because "no blind person is likely to use them", I'll remember this blog and punch myself in the face.

Holy shit, I admire that guy so much. Being able to program whilst lacking sight astounds me. I wonder how he got into it.<p>Becoming blind is one of my biggest fears and I consider programming to be one of my favourite activities on the planet, I&#x27;m happy that if the worst were to ever happen to me, I wouldn&#x27;t be completely screwed. However I gotta wonder how well he&#x27;s able to hold all his code in his head just off hearing it, whenever I program I often go back and read and re-read parts I&#x27;ve already written, I imagine having to hear it over just glancing over it would slow the whole process down a lot. I know he mentioned that he&#x27;s gotten very good at mentally conceptualising his code which no doubt takes a lot of training but damn, a really large codebase would throw me for a tizz.

&gt;Fortunately, some fellow campers at the Free Code Camp were sympathetic towards my plight and volunteered to transcribe all these slides for me. This offer left me &#x27;flabbergasted&#x27;, as our dear western neighbors across the sea would say.<p>Many ions ago, I volunteered for an organization called &quot;Recordings for the Blind and Dyslexic&quot; (now known as Learning Ally - <a href="http://www.learningally.org/" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.learningally.org&#x2F;</a>). Groups of individuals (mostly retired professors and other students) would record textbooks for college students. It was all volunteer and donation based. It would typically take days to weeks from starting a book until the recording was ready.<p>I loved almost all of it. The one thing I didn&#x27;t like was that we would read a book in shifts and you wouldn&#x27;t always be working on the same book from shift to shift, so you might read scene three of a play one shift, then the next day read chapter seven of a calculus 2 textbook. Regardless, it was always interesting and we always knew that there were students benefiting from our effort. As an extremely nearsighted child, one of my fears growing up was that I would grow to be so nearsighted I would be functionally blind, so it was a little personal for me.<p>Since then, I&#x27;ve been in charge of 508 conformance on many different websights [1]. I have always appreciated the sensory-challenged sharing how they are, or are not, able to use websites. I never cease to be amazed at the human ability to adapt and overcome such challenges!<p>[1] Freudian slip that I noticed but decided was worth sharing ;-)

I&#x27;d like to know: what is the most comfortable posture for coding once you no longer have to look at a screen? I&#x27;ve wondered whether a syntax-sparse language like iolanguage might allow you to code entirely by voice and ear, with no need for keyboard. For those of us with vision, imagine having a lounge with a large screen on the wall. You can talk into your headset as you pace around, or lie on the couch.

That blog post is very interesting. I really enjoyed the reading and must admit that I should spend more time on accessibility.<p>The speed of the screen reader Zersiax uses is unbelievable fast. I can&#x27;t understand a single word:<p><a href="https://soundcloud.com/freecodecamp/zersiaxs-screen-reader" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;soundcloud.com&#x2F;freecodecamp&#x2F;zersiaxs-screen-reader</a>

Hey guys a note from the author on Twitter:<p>Florian ‏@zersiax 2 hours ago<p>mate, could you comment on there that I created a channel on freenode called #zersiax if peeps have questions?<p>Florian ‏@zersiax 2 hours ago<p>seems I posted too many comments on HN , its blocking me from sending more :) and I do want to reply o all these<p><a href="https://twitter.com/zersiax/status/560810466789044224" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;twitter.com&#x2F;zersiax&#x2F;status&#x2F;560810466789044224</a> <a href="https://twitter.com/zersiax/status/560810548263407617" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;twitter.com&#x2F;zersiax&#x2F;status&#x2F;560810548263407617</a><p>---<p>There&#x27;s something beautiful about a typo from a visually impaired person :)

A friend of mine, a programmer, lost his sight. He was an Emacs user and could more or less continue programming thanks to Emacspeak, a package for Emacs that alters the voice depending on the syntactic construct of the word it is reading. It goes without saying that without Emacs and Emacspeak he would have had an uphill struggle returning to his job.

Wow ...so many questions ...I&#x27;m not sure where to begin answering all of these :) HN is throttling me, so please come find me on #zersiax on freenode to discuss this if you have more questions :) I hope this goes through ...

I never had a chance to talk to somebody who was blind all his life and I&#x27;ve always been curious about that. It seems pretty obvious, that blind person can be dreaming, because hearing or smell are senses as much as eyesight is. I cannot comprehend the opposite: does person, blind all his life actually understand what &quot;seeing&quot; means? Of course he knows from the communicating with the others, that he lacks some ability, which most people have, but does he &quot;feel&quot; it somehow? Especially it is interesting with well-read people: writers often spend quite a large portion of the book describing how something <i>looks</i>. So, literate blind person must be well aware of words like &quot;color&quot;, &quot;beauty&quot; (addressing the look of something), &quot;bright&quot;, &quot;dark&quot;, &quot;dull&quot;, &quot;picture&quot; and such. But if he never ever <i>saw</i> — do all these words mean anything to him? Does he have idea of what it is like &quot;to see&quot;?

This audio is the most unintelligible block of sound I&#x27;ve ever heard, but it made my day much happier to know you can understand it and use it nicely.<p>I will try to use the HTML5 accessibility tags and attributes whenever I can from now on (I currently don&#x27;t even know what is there about accessibility to be implemented).

What a nice chap. I like and adhere to the opinion prevalent in this thread that we should pay more attention to Accessibility. I personally find I&#x27;m conditioned to ignore people with different needs than me when I design products, and this is an eye-opening example.<p><i>apologies for the horrible pun</i>

&gt; I therefore have to keep looking for tutorials, programs and tools that are accessible, and cannot simply pick up any off-the-shelf IDE.<p>Another advantage of the ruby community&#x27;s general commitment to produce a language that <i>can</i> be written in any old text editor. I think Java long past that point, you really <i>need</i> an effective IDE with certain features that it knows about Java to be effective in Java.<p>Making sure things are still doable with a plain text editor gives developers a lot more options (including for developing new editing environment improvements), instead of locking them in to certain IDEs. A lot more options for accessibility reasons or any reasons.

I helped rewrite Narrator, the Windows built in screen reader, for Vista. After we had a basic version working I tried turning off my monitor and using it to write code. I gave up quickly.

Several years back I worked with a team that had a blind developer. The team was transitioning to Java. The blind developer told me in a meeting that she was having trouble doing something in Eclipse. I told her that I would go with her to her desk to help diagnose the problem. Watching a blind person use Eclipse with a screen reader was simultaneously awe-inspiring (the screen reader part) and horrifying (the Eclipse part). Needless to say, Eclipse was not well suited for the blind.

I turned on OS X&#x27;s built-in screen reader, then set the rate to 100 (the fastest it goes). It&#x27;s still not as fast NVDA.<p>It&#x27;s interesting that he&#x27;s using Windows 8 and I&#x27;d have liked if he&#x27;d talked about that briefly. I&#x27;d always thought that Apple was way ahead of the other vendors on this accessibility, but perhaps with third-party software available on the desktop for screen reading that&#x27;s not the case.

A blind student took my programming tools course last spring and together we wrote an accessible sudoku app for the Mac:<p><a href="https://github.com/wcochran/accessiblesudoku" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;github.com&#x2F;wcochran&#x2F;accessiblesudoku</a><p>Apple usually has fantastic documentation, but we had to experiment a lot to figure out the accessibility API.

A decade ago, I got to visit one of the accessibility labs at Microsoft. I&#x27;m not terribly surprised that Visual Studio works well as there are ocularly impaired developers at the company. I had the opportunity to speak with those who ran the lab and observe how someone used these screen readers first hand.

A friend of mine is a blind developer. He built his own screenreader for Android ( <a href="https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=info.spielproject.spiel" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;play.google.com&#x2F;store&#x2F;apps&#x2F;details?id=info.spielproj...</a> ), because he was unhappy with the existing options. I haven&#x27;t yet gotten over being amazed, but I always knew he was really bright, so I should just get over assuming not having sight would prevent him from being an effective developer.<p>He has ambitions to do hardware hacking, but has been thwarted by difficulties with identifying parts (i.e. resistors are color-coded), among other things. I&#x27;ve been meaning to sit down with him sometime and work on <i>something</i>.

Nice one! I can recommend this thread on StackOverflow as well: <a href="http://stackoverflow.com/questions/118984/how-can-you-program-if-youre-blind" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;stackoverflow.com&#x2F;questions&#x2F;118984&#x2F;how-can-you-progra...</a>

The absolute limit of comprehension for sighted people is 10 syllables per second. Blind people, however, can comprehend speech sped up to 25 syllables per second.<p>This sample is playing at 16 syllables per second and it already sounds like COMPLETE gibberish to me: <a href="https://rdouglasfields.files.wordpress.com/2010/12/speech16-syllables-a-sec.wav" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;rdouglasfields.files.wordpress.com&#x2F;2010&#x2F;12&#x2F;speech16-...</a><p>(<a href="http://www.scientificamerican.com/article/why-can-some-blind-people-process/" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.scientificamerican.com&#x2F;article&#x2F;why-can-some-blind...</a>)<p>Makes you wonder who the &quot;impaired&quot; ones are.

Thank you so much for your insightful post and prospective.<p>I have a question on how you imagine&#x2F;think. People with eye sigh often think with pictures. Even thinking about abstract things like programming. I often visualize how a data structure looks and how it interacts with other code. I have found it tremendous useful as I can replay&#x2F;test such scenario in my head.<p>Do you have similar experience when you think? Do you construct mental picture (such as circle, a binary tree) in your head? What is it like?

Related: BSDTalk episode with a blind BSD user[1]. It&#x27;s about many things, not how blind people deal with computers, but it offers some great insights nevertheless. She finds VAXen much easier to deal with than PCs, and CLIs much more accessible than GUI screen readers.<p><a href="http://bsdtalk.blogspot.co.at/2008/03/bsdtalk143-bsd-hobbiest-deborah-norling.html" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;bsdtalk.blogspot.co.at&#x2F;2008&#x2F;03&#x2F;bsdtalk143-bsd-hobbies...</a>

I imagine a purely text-based terminal set up running on a specially crafted host OS&#x2F;VM that does the text-to-speech would be a fantastic solution. You can browse the web, email, twitter! I&#x27;m not sure how CLI browsers handle JS?<p>If this existed would there any good reason to be using a GUI at all (for a Visually Impaired Person)?

Really curious about how a linux environment compares in terms of usability for the blind. zersiax, are you using windows primarily because of the toolchain you need for work &#x2F; school, or did you find linux lacking in terms of its support for your needs?

Are there frameworks to automatically analyse html for accessibility and perhaps provide a certain rating based on set guidelines? I think that might be a very interesting project to work on if such a thing does not exist.

I actually had an idea for this. What if blind users could wear little braille terminals? Like, braile is constructed of a series of dots, so why not have like a bracer that has a array of dots that poke the skin?

Wow, the audio example... It&#x27;s like a solid wall of pure data.

I knew a blind programmer back in the days.<p>We always joked he did our UI.

Log of the Q&amp;A session at #zersiax channel: <a href="http://pastebin.com/FUQUnXVR" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;pastebin.com&#x2F;FUQUnXVR</a>

I was in an ACM programming competition in 2004(?) where one of the competitors was blind. It was hosted by LSU.<p>I always wondered what happened to that dude.

Thanks for sharing, learned something valuable today

Really interesting, specially the audio. I can&#x27;t understand a single word. In fact, im far from it!

Yeah, I will definitely try to do more to implement screen reader accessibility in web apps I build.

Really cool. Thank you for sharing.

wow, respect.

Wow! Those screen readers are fast (his example <a href="https://soundcloud.com/freecodecamp" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;soundcloud.com&#x2F;freecodecamp</a>)! I barely understood a word. I didn&#x27;t know that.<p>It&#x27;s a shame that so many programs don&#x27;t follow the accessibility guidelines, but it&#x27;s just too damn easy to forget about the disabled if you aren&#x27;t. But this article was an eye-opener for me (no pun intended).

&gt; If left paren x equals five<p>you have a bug there :)<p>also, why not use different sounds for ( [ { etc?<p>would a different beep for each instead of &quot;left paren&quot; make life easier?