Blind programmer checking-in, here are a few thoughts sparked by the comments that I’ve read…

Disclaimer: these are my thoughts, and should not be generalized to all blind programmers.

First, let’s start with the supporting technologies, mainly screen readers. The most popular screen reader is Jaws for Windows (expensive product), followed by Non Visual Desktop Access (opensource product), distantly followed by VoiceOver (your only choice for Apple products). My main day-to-day driver is NVDA, but I also use Jaws for my job. I do not use a braille display. The IDEs that I use are Visual Studio (C# development) and Visual Studio Code (Python and Javascript development).

Indentation-sensitive languages such as Python really aren’t that difficult to use, once you figure out how to get your screen reader to announce indentation levels. Typically, the screen reader only announces indentation changes when there is a difference from the line that you are coming from. A sample Python function would read as follows as I press the down-arrow to read line-by-line (note that I’m purposely not putting in line breaks, since an audio-based screen reader is inherently serial):

“def foo left paren right paren colon, four spaces number say hello world, print left paren quote hello world quote right paren, zero spaces blank”

Interestingly, I find lisp one of the most difficult languages, since there are so many parentheses, and it’s difficult to keep track of what nesting you are in.

Screen readers are not programming language aware. It’s all text to them.

Using pitch to communicate information is more distracting than anything. Imagine that you were having a conversation with someone, and every few words, their voice completely changed. It makes understanding the meaning of what they are saying more difficult, since your brain is too busy going “hey, something changed!”

Some additional reading that I recommend is “An Exploratory Study of Blind Software Developers”, which can be found at https://ciigar.csc.ncsu.edu/files/bib//Mealin2012-BlindDevel.... That identifies some programming challenges that participants face, as well as some of the areas that blind programmers self-report as excelling in. Full disclosure, I was the primary researcher on that study.

Finally, a mini soapbox rant: something that I see quite often is people doing blindness “simulations” for a short period of time. They then write up their experience, which isn’t a bad thing, but then present their work as “I found this hard, so all blind people must find this hard.” Identifying when a task has a large learning curve is important, but also do keep in mind that people who are blind have significant experience in identifying ways to overcome potential accessibility problems.

user:	spmealin
created:	November 9, 2018
karma:	24