How can you program if you re blind

Question

Sight is one of the senses most programmers take for granted  Most programmers would spend hours looking at a computer monitor  especially during times when they are in the zone   but I know there are blind programmers  such as T V  Raman who currently works for Google    If you were a blind person  or slowly becoming blind   how would you set up your development environment to assist you in programming    One suggestion per answer please  The purpose of this question is to bring the good ideas to the top  In addition  screen readers can read the good ideas earlier

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A group of students from Southern Illinois University Edwardsville and Washington State University are working on a programming language for the blind   http   www youtube com watch v lC1mOSdmzFc

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I am blind and have been a programmer for the last 12 years or so  Currently am a senior architect and work with Sapient Corporation  a cambridge-based consulting company creating both Web-based and thick client based enterprise solutions   I use several screen readers but mostly stick with Jaws for windows and NVDA   I have mostly worked on the Microsoft platform and visual studio as my environment  I also use tools like the MS Sql enterprise studio and others for DB access  network monitoring etc  I tried to spend some time with emacspeak but since my work was mostly based on the MS platform  never really spent a lot of time there  I have also spent a couple of years working on C   on linux - mostly used notepad or visual studio on windows for all the coding and then samba to share files with the linux environment  Also used borland C for some experimental stuff  Have recently been playing around with python  which as other people have noted above is particularly unfriendly for a blind user because it is written using indentation as the nesting mechanism  Having said that  NVDA  the most popular open source screen reader is written completely using python and some of the commiters on that project are themself blind  A particularly interesting question I get frequently asked as an architect is how do I deal with diagrams - UML and visio and rational rose etc  Visio is probably the most accessible diagraming tool out there  I was able to write jaws scripts to read rational rose diagrams for me  I ve used a tool called T-dub  technical diagram understanding for the blind  developed by some german university for accessing UML 2 0 diagrams  Have used a java-based ugly tool called magic draw for doing model-driven development and was a commiter on the androMDA project and helped develop the  Net code generator from a UML model   In general  I find that I thrive most in a team environment where I can work on my strengths  For example  while a diagram is extremely useful to communicate document a design  the actual design process involves a lot of thinking and brainstorming and when the design has been thought out  one of your team mates can help you quickly put together a neatly drawn picture out of it  People incorrectly mis-construe the above to be lack of independence or ability while I see this as pure inter-dependence -- as in I am sure that the team mate alone could never have come up with that design on his her own and in-turn  if I depend on him to document the design  so be it  Most hurdles I face are tool-based inaccessibility  For example all oracle products have been progressively declining in accessibility over the years  shame on them  and a team environment basically allows me an extra layer of defense against these over and above my screen readers and custom scripts

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I think that this would work well in extreme programming using the pair programming principle   If you re making software for blind people  who  better to make it then someone who would literally be in touch with the business requirements  so I don t think it s very far fetched at all   As for writing code  well unless there was some kind of feedback I think a person may struggle with syntax   Audio feedback may help to a point though

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I m blind  and have been programming for about 13 years on Windows  Mac  Linux and DOS  in languages from C C    Python  Java  C  and various smaller languages along the way  Though the original question was around configuring the environment  I think it s best answered by looking at how a blind person would use a computer   Some people use a talking environment  such as T  V  Raman and the Emacspeak environment mentioned in other answers  The more common solution by far is to have a screen reader which runs in the background monitoring OS activity and alerting the user via synthetic speech or a physical braille display  generally showing somewhere from 20 to 80 characters at a time   This then means a blind person can use any accessible application   So  I personally use Visual Studio 2008 these days  and run it with very few modifications  I turn off certain features like displaying errors as I type since I find this distracting  Prior to joining Microsoft all my development was done in a standard text editor like Notepad  so once again no customisations   It is possible to configure a screen reader to announce indentation  I personally don t use this  since Visual Studio takes care of this  and C  uses braces  But this would be very important in a language like Python where whitespace matters  Finally  Emacspeak does make use of different voices pitches to indicate different parts of syntax  keywords  comments  identifiers  etc

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I m blind and from some months I m using VINUX  a linux distro based on Ubuntu  with SODBEANS  a version of netbeans with a plug-in named SAPPY that add a TTS support   This solution works quite well but sometimes I prefer to launch Win XP and NVDA for launching many pages on FireFox because Vinux doesn t work very well when you try to open more than 3 windows of FireFox

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What in the world would a braille keyboard even be    There are such things as braille writers but you would never use one as an input device for a computer   If you re simply talking about a keyboard with the braille symbols on it this would also be a very bad idea   You re going to have a lot more keys to reach while typing and it would still be slower   Touch typing is NOT a visual skill  a blind person can do it just as well as a sighted person

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I worked for the Greater Detroit Society for the Blind for three years running a BBS tailored for blind access and worked with a number of blind users on how to better meet their needs  and with newly blind users to get them acclimated to the available hardware and software offerings that were available at the time  If nothing else  I at least learned to read Braille as a hedge against the case where I ever wound up in the same situation   The majority of blind computer users and programmers use a screen reader of some sort  Jaws in particular is popular  Fortunately  most major applications these days offer some form of handicapped access  You may have to tune your environment slightly to cut down on the chatter  e g  consider disabling Intellisense in Visual Studio   A Braille display is less common and is comparatively much more expensive and can show 40 or 80 columns of text  and can be used when exact positioning punctuation is important  While a screen reader can be configured to rattle off punctuation  a lot of people find it distracting  and it is easier in many cases to feel your way through it  Jaws can be configured to drive the display  so you re not juggling accessibility applications   Also  a lot of legally blind users still have some modicum of sight left to them  Using high contrast backgrounds and the magnification functionality can help a lot of these users   Using ToggleKeys in Windows will let you hear when you accidentally tap one of the modal  caps lock    num lock    scroll lock   etc  keys as well   I know at least one Haskell programmer who uses a screen reader and who explicitly programs without using Haskell s layout rules  and instead opts to use the rather non-idiomatic  but supported     s instead  because it is easier less distracting for him to get his screen reader to read off punctuation than for him to figure out exact indentation that complies with Haskell s layout rules   On that same note  I ve heard some grumbling from a couple of blind programmers about when they have to write Python    Ultimately  you learn to play on your strengths

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I am a totally blind college student who   s had several programming internships so my answer will be based off these  I use windows xp as my operating system and Jaws to read what appears on the screen to me in synthetic speech  For java programming I use eclipse  since it   s a fully featured IDE that is accessible    In my experience as a general rule java programs that use SWT as the GUI toolkit are more accessible then programs that use Swing which is why I stay away from netbeans  For any  net programming I use visual studio 2005 since it was the standard version used at my internship and is very accessible using Jaws and a set of scripts that were developed to make things such as the form designer more accessible    For C and C   programming I use cygwin with gcc as my compiler and emacs or vim as my editor depending on what I need to do  A lot of my internship involved programming for Z OS  I used an rlogin session through Cygwin to access the USS subsystem on the mainframe and C3270 as my 3270 emulator to access the ISPF portion of the mainframe    I usually rely on synthetic speech but do have a Braille display  I find I usually work faster with speech but use the Braille display in situations where punctuation matters and gets complicated  Examples of this are if statements with lots of nested parenthesis   s and JCL where punctuation is incredibly important   Update  I m playing with Emacspeak under cygwin http   emacspeak sourceforge net I m not sure if this will be usable as a programming editor since it appears to be somewhat unresponsive but I haven t looked at any of the configuration options yet

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NVDA is a good open source screen reader for win

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As many have pointed out  emacspeak has been the enduring solution cross platform for many of the older hackers out there  Since it supports Linux and Mac out of the box  it has become my prefered means of developing Windows egnostic projects   To the issue of actually getting down syntax through an auditory one as opposed to a visual one  I have found that there exists a variety of techniques to get one close if not on the same playing field   Auditory icons can stand in place for verbal descriptors for one example  You can  put tones for how far a line is indented  The longer the tone  the further the indent  Since tones can play in parallel with text to speech  the information comes through in the same timeframe and doesn t serialize the communication of something so basic   Braille can quickly and precisely decode to the user the exact syntax of a line  This is something more useful for people who use braille in daily life  the biggest advantage is random access to the contents of the display  Refreshable units typically have router keys above each character cell which can place the cursor to that cell  No fiddling with arrow keys O n  op vs O 1  access   Auditory dimensionality  pitch  rate  volume  inflection  richness  stress  etc  can convey a concept  keyword  class  variable  error  etc   For example  comments can be read in a monotone inflection   suiting  if I might say so      Emacs and other editors to lesser extents  Visual Studio  allow a coder to peruse a program symantically  next block  fold block  down defun  jump to def  walk up the parse tree  etc   You can very quickly get the  big  picture of the structure of an entire project doing this  with extensions like Cedet  you can get the goodness of VS Eclipse etc cross platform and in a textual editor   Could probably go on and on  but that in a nutshell  is the basis of why a few of us are out there hacking away in industry  adacdemia  or in our basements

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harald van Breederode is a well-known Dutch Oracle DBA expert  trainer and presenter who is blind   His blog contains some useful tips for visually impaired people

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One place to start is the Blinux project   http   leb net blinux   That project describes how to get Emacspeak  editor with text-to-speech  and has a lot of other resources     I worked with one person who s eye sight all but prevented them from using a monitor - they did well with Screen reader software and spent a lot of time using text based applications and the shell   Wikipedia s list of screen reader packages is another place to start  http   en wikipedia org wiki List of screen readers

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I m blind  and have been programming for about 13 years on Windows  Mac  Linux and DOS  in languages from C C    Python  Java  C  and various smaller languages along the way  Though the original question was around configuring the environment  I think it s best answered by looking at how a blind person would use a computer   Some people use a talking environment  such as T  V  Raman and the Emacspeak environment mentioned in other answers  The more common solution by far is to have a screen reader which runs in the background monitoring OS activity and alerting the user via synthetic speech or a physical braille display  generally showing somewhere from 20 to 80 characters at a time   This then means a blind person can use any accessible application   So  I personally use Visual Studio 2008 these days  and run it with very few modifications  I turn off certain features like displaying errors as I type since I find this distracting  Prior to joining Microsoft all my development was done in a standard text editor like Notepad  so once again no customisations   It is possible to configure a screen reader to announce indentation  I personally don t use this  since Visual Studio takes care of this  and C  uses braces  But this would be very important in a language like Python where whitespace matters  Finally  Emacspeak does make use of different voices pitches to indicate different parts of syntax  keywords  comments  identifiers  etc

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Emacs has a number of extensions to allow blind users to manipulate text files   You d have to consult an expert on the topic  but emacs has text-to-speech capabilities   And probably more   In addition  there s BLinux   http   leb net blinux   Linux for the blind   Been around for a very long time   More than ten years I think  and very mature

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Once I met Sam Hartman  he is a famous Debian developer since 2000  and blind  On this interview he talks about accessibility for a Linux user  He uses Debian  and gnome-orca as screen reader  it works with Gnome  and  does a relatively good job of speaking Iceweasel Firefox and Libreoffice    Specifically speaking about programming he says       While  gnome-orca  does speak gnome-terminal  it   s not really good enough at   speaking terminal programs that I am comfortable using it  So  I run   Emacs with the Emacspeak package  Within that  I run the Emacs   terminal emulator  and within that  I tend to run Screen  For added   fun  I often run additional instances of Emacs within the inner   screens

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I am a blind developer and I work under Windows  GNU Linux and MacOS X  Each of platform has different workflows for blind users  This depends on the screen reader that the blind developer uses  Development tools are not completely accessible for blind developers  I can type code and use compiling functions in all IDEs but there are many problems if I have to design an interface using designing tools as Interface Builder  XGlade or other  When I was developing with Borland Delphi I could add a control  a Button for example  and I could modify each visual attribute of the control using object inspector window  Many IDEs use object inspector windows to modify visual and non visual attributes but the problem for a blind developer is add new controls because the method to add a new control consists of dragging and dropping a control from the palette to the canvas  Visual studio 200x uses alternative methods to do this but the interface of the IDE changes in each new version and this is a big problem because screen readers for Windows need special support  using scripts  to identify each area of some non standar applications  A blind developer can use Visual studio 2008 with his screen reader but when a new version of this IDE appears he has to wait for a new version of scripts for this version of the IDE  Xcode with Interface builder has no alternative for dragging and dropping tasks yet  I asked it to Apple many times but they are working in other things  I published 3 apps in the App store  Accessible minesweeper  accessible fruitmachine and Programar a ciegas RSS  and I had to design all the interface by code  It s a hard work but I can manage all features of each control  Eclipse has an accessible code editor but other development tools as debug console plugins for designing or documentation area present problems for assistive tools for blind users   Documentations is a problem for blind developers too  Many samples and demonstrations use images to show the explanation  set the environment settings as you can in the picture   I think the question is not being blind  The question is the companies and development groups think accessibility affects final software but it doesn t affect development software  They think a blind user should be a client but a blind user can t be a development mate   Blind associations ask accessibility for products and services but they forgot blind developers  Blind people can work as lawyers  journalists  teachers but a blind developer is a strange concept even for the blind  Many times I feel alone because some blind friends of mine can t understand my work    You can read my opinion about this issue in this article  in Spanish  in my blog http   www programaraciegas net 2010 11 05 la-accesibilidad-en-crisis-para-los-desarrolladores-ciegos  there is a translation tool in the web page  Sorry but I didn t translate it

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This blog post has some information about how the Visual Studio team is making their product accessible   Visual Studio Core Team s Accessibility Lab Tour Activity  Many programmers use Emacspeak   Emacspeak --The Complete Audio Desktop

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I can t recall the source  but I ve heard read about a form of audible syntax  colouring  - so that instead of a string assignment being read as     foo equals quote this is a string quote   the string part would be read with a different pitch or voice to make the separation of elements clearer

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Back in New Zealand I knew someone who had macular degeneration  so was partially sighted   He s a very talented programmer and wound up using Delphi because he could work by recognizing word shapes  This was easier to do with a Pascal-like syntax than a C-ish squiggly bracket one   He has a web site  but doesn t seem to mention macular degeneration at all  so I won t name him

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When I was in grad school  we had a member of our research team who was blind  He was a bit older  maybe mid-40s  He told us about how he programmed his first computer  which was well before text-to-speech was common  to output the contents of the screen in Morse Code  To overcome the obvious chicken-and-egg problem  he had to completely rewrite the code each time through from scratch until it was working well enough for him to have it read back to him   Now he uses text-to-speech  though he plans the code very thoroughly before actually writing any of it  to minimize the debug loop   He was also pretty good at giving PowerPoint presentations that  despite his lack of sight  were just about as well formatted as any sighted presenter s

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Keep in mind that  blind  is a range of conditions - there are some who are legally blind that could read a really large monitor or with magnification help  and then there are those who have no vision at all   I remember a classmate in college who had a special device to magnify books  and special software she could use to magnify a part of the screen    She was working hard to finish college  because her eyesight was getting worse and was going to go away completely   Programming also has a spectrum of needs - some people are good at cranking out lots and lots of code  and some people are better at looking at the big picture and architecture   I would imagine that given the difficulty imposed by the screen interface  blindness may enhance your ability to get the big picture

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There are a variety of tools to aid blind people or partially sighted including speech feedback and braillie keyboards  http   www rnib org uk Pages Home aspx is a good site for help and advice over these issues

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What about inventing some kind of device that you plug in a usb port and that would be basically a  sheet of rubber  that would modify itself to show brail of your code  allowing blind people to read it instead to hear it

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Hanselman had a really interesting podcast with a blind developer recently

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I m a postgraduate student in Beijing China  I major in computer science and a lot of my work is programming  I am born with low sight  I need to use magnifying tools to see fonts on screen clearly  I use microsoft s  mgnify tools  on windows and use compiz s magnify plug in if on linux  I usally set the tool to magnify as three times many as the original font size  For me maginify tools is ok  the main problem is the speed I have to move mouse to keep cursors follow the text I m looking at  microsoft s magnify provides a option of  auto follow the text edit points  that set me from continuously mouse movement when editting or coding  But it doesn t always works because of the edit software or IDE may not support that   Magnifying tools on linux are hard to use  The KMag come with KDE has a terrible refresh rate which make my eyes unconfortable  compiz s magnifying plugs which I m using now is OK but has no function of auto focus focus auto following   iOS provides quite perfect solution for me with full screen magnifying  especially on ipad s 9 7 inches screen  there auto focus is not necessary because I hardly use them to code or do other edit stuff  Android provides very little accessibility functions  only like shake feedback  which is useless for me  there is no any kind of good magnifying tools on android   not to mention advance function like full screen magnify on iOS  I used to study Qt  want to build a useful magnify tools on linux  even on android  But hardly have some progress

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