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

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.

Answer 2

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

Answer 3

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

Answer 4

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.

Answer 5

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...

Answer 6

NVDA is a good open source screen reader for win.