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.)

Answer 1

Hanselman had a really interesting podcast with a blind developer recently.

Answer 2

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.

Answer 3

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.

Answer 4

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

Answer 5

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).

Answer 6

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.