How Blind Programmers Write Code

theodp writes: Yes, folks, there are blind programmers. There's Ed Summers, for one, who lost his vision at age 30 and now ghostblogs for Willie the Seeing Eye Dog. And if you've ever wondered how the blind can code, Florian Beijers, who has been blind since birth, explains that all he needs is a normal Dell Inspiron 15r SE notebook and his trusty open source NVDA screen reader software, and he's good-to-go. "This is really all the adaptation a blind computer user needs," Beijers adds, but he does ask one small favor: "If you're writing the next big application, with a stunning UI and a great workflow, I humbly ask you to consider accessibility as part of the equation. In this day and age, there's really no reason not to use the UI toolkits available."

Programming with disabilities

[layabout]

I feel his pain because I've been living for over 20 years with nerve damage in my hands and it basically ended my programming career. I've been trying to build a programming by speech environment that matches the capabilities speech recognition versus the current efforts of trying to make speech recognition replicate the capabilities of one's hands.

Much of the accessibility problems can be summed up as not being able to truly understand what it means to live with a disability, the steadfast belief that it will never happen to them, and the inability to accept any other application/user interface combination other than the all in one bundle we use today.Age will make us all disabled it's only a question of how much, how fast. The lack of understanding about disabilities and how they affect people has created generation after generation programmers writing software that they will never be able to use once their hands or eyes stop working..

The biggest technical issue with accessibility is the fixation on the all-in-one user interface and application model. If you separate the user interface from the application then you can swap out the UI for another one. I could remove the GUI and put in a speech or an interface with graphical augmentation for feedback. Or use text-to-speech for feedback. Splitting off the UI from the application makes it possible to make an application accessible without having to go through the effort of writing an accessibility interface and it reduces the cost of accessibility on the developers making it possible to make more applications accessible.

There is a secondary, less obvious reason for splitting off the UI from the application. We all know how messed up many GUIs are. These interfaces were written by people who've use the same interface for years but they still mess it up. You will not be surprised if I tell you that in the speech recognition world, the speech interfaces we are given are messed up even more than the GUI interfaces are and I believe that is directly due to the lack of empathy or experience with being disabled. So with the split I propose, I can do or other disability activists can build UIs based on the actual needs of disabled people versus forcing them to live with the interface you think they need.

Learn from what blind people show us

[gwolf]

Back in 2009, I was at the Debian Conference (DebConf) in Cáceres, Spain. We had the presence of two blind Debian Developers, Sam Hartman and Mario Lang, both of which have continued to attend the conference at later editions, and are today very active project members.

They gave this talk on how they use their computer — Completely different ways, both very interesting to appreciate:

Accessibility and Debian (OGV video) [acc.umu.se]

Accessibility is still a sad joke!

[n1hilist]

Very few developers give a shit about accessibility. It's still largely a joke. I run Windows 8 and use High Contrast themes, but so many apps still don't comply with the HC colour schemes.

Applications often have hard coded font colours/sizes - so you end up with black on black text (oh my goth!) or apps that don't render properly with a non-standard DPI.

Microsoft still insists on locking down Windows so that you need to resort to replacing system files to enable custom themes.

The web is horrible in High Contrast mode using IE or Firefox.

Linux is better in some regards but there are still apps that have hard coded font colours, I haven't used a Linux desktop in a while (I use Debian and just ssh for my needs) but last time I used Gnome/KDE and others there were still issues.

Google Chrome is the worst, there are addons like Hackervision etc but they slow down the browser and are not a perfect solution, better than nothing and a huge help for a lot of people but it's still lacking.

And on mobile phones/tablets: To have white on black text in apps I have to root my phone, install a custom rom (I use SlimROM) and I have to resort to third party sources for modified APKs that have white on black text. Which is obviously a security risk.

Yes you can invert the entire screen on Android, iOS but that inverts *everything* and that also means that if you have a black keyboard, then your keyboard becomes white, or that page you're looking at has various bright/dark areas that, well, just invert to the opposite. It makes so much more sense to let users choose their desired text colour, background colour and other things and use those.

It's even worse when companies don't give a shit about their users, I've emailed many developers/companies asking politely to follow the Windows colour scheme, some have been helpful but the majority don't respond or care.

It's outrageous that in 2015 it's easier to overclock adn watercool my CPU than it is to change the UI colours/fonts on my computer.

Microsoft has made improvements, Windows 8 now lets you have a high contrast theme AND fullscreen magnification (like good ol' Compiz did) and I've written a bit of Autohotkey script to improve it but it's still lacking, you can't change many elements of the High Contrast theme, if you want the window borders to be non-white, you have to change the Button Text colour value (or it's something else non-related to window borders)

Another issue (for me) is that low vision options for phones is always a case of: Normal users get the cool themes/GUI but low vision means you get the unchangable theme, why not just let us set the colours/layouts/styles *WE* want and work with that? ie: Windows 8's high contrast theme is very useful and a big improvement but because I can't tweak it much, I am forced to have white lines (window borders/outlines of things) everywhere, which is NOT eye-friendly if you have retina problems or suffer from migraines (lots of outlines/grids = migraine attack)

So if anyone reads my comment and is a developer, please run your OS in a High Contrast theme, see how various apps don't comply, see how much of a fuckup it is trying to surf the web with a high contrast theme and try improve your code to comply and encourage your friends to do the same.

It's also not just us low vision chaps that hate white UIs, so many of the users I assist at work ask me how to change the colours/fonts to make it clearer/less bright/comfortable because staring at a PC/phone/tablet all day is NOT comfortable for many.

(please excuse brevity, software accessibility issues gets my blood boiling) :)

I worked with a blind guy once

[Snotnose]

Some 20 years ago I worked for a small company who's lead programmer was legally blind. He wasn't 100% blind, but had very little vision. He worked on a Linux box that had one of the biggest screens available at the time, and his font size was huge. I could easily read his screen from across the room.

Guy was a phenomenal programmer. His code seldom had bugs. He knew the entire code-base inside out. Basically, as it was so hard for him to read code, he memorized it when he did read it.