It led to debugging situations like this:

"Okay, so that's two clanks when we click on this button, but if we do it on this other page it's only one clank. Hm."

Turns out, there are some bugs that are easier to detect this way. Looking at timestamps doesn't really give a "sense" of whether two events are in a tight causal link. With sound, you can immediately "hear" that two adverse events are occuring at identical intervals every time. What's great is that the sound information doesn't take up any additional attention. It just fades into the background if you don't need it. When there is a pattern, it stands out.

It should simply announce each floor as it passes. I know from experience that you can make quite comprehensible voice sounds by connecting a 5V I/O pin to a speaker, so there is no excuse. (All you do is digitize the speech, then turn the pin on and off as the wave crosses 0.)

Ditto for every device that comes with a chart saying which LED blink pattern means what status. Like the "fast blink" and "slow blink". The LED is blinking, is that "fast" or "slow"?

The buttons have had braille on them for a long time.

I'd imagine in Macau, they might use four (those three plus Portuguese); the public transit stop announcements do, and quite frankly I'm not sure how they guarantee that they can complete the announcements before the next stop.

Instead they only announces floors that are stopped on, so this works fine.

One benefit of using spoken vernaculars rather than Morse is that Morse has to be taught; Hong Kong historically draws large portions of its population from migrants originating from all over China, where until recently there was wide variance in schooling and literacy rates.

So not only can you get comprehensible voices from a 5V I/O pin to a speaker, pretty much any CPU newer than the mid 70's will be powerful enough to drive it.

So I agree - there's not really any excuse other than that people haven't thought about the UI.

A tip is to turn off the screen during sampling and playback, as otherwise the video chip steals a lot of memory cycles.

You might then also be interested in this far more impressive playback with the C64:

https://brokenbytes.blogspot.com/2018/03/a-48khz-digital-mus...

Exactly, he's not worse off.

Besides, I've traveled in foreign countries where I literally do not know a single word in that language. You start picking up words by association almost immediately.

But still, hardly any use a voice.

(At least) on one occasion I forgot; years later a puzzled chief engineer calls me and says that his first officer had told him that E209 had a pending IGBT failure while they were discussing issues with the equipment we'd delivered over the din of the buzzers. Would that hypothesis have any possible merit?

If you say something that is grammatically incorrect in your own language, most native speakers will tell you it just "sounds" wrong. They can't even explain the rules of why it is wrong, but they know it sounds wrong.

- https://www.usenix.org/legacy/publications/library/proceedin...

- http://peep.sourceforge.net/intro.html

You could tell where it went wrong by the "song" after a while. Sorta like tuning your car by ear.

Once I was introduced to an oscilloscope, I much preferred that. I bought a nice one off of ebay for about $60, and another peach of a scope from the pawn shop for $40.

They put microphones in the reactor and monitors for them in the control room, so they can hear if something sounds wrong.

Obviously it’s just practice but I don’t mind using qwerty on my phone. It keeps it vaguely present in my memory.

Sadly, I'm in a bit too deep to go back to Qwerty on my phone (I'd be very slow for awhile). I do still enjoy Dvorak on the computer and while I don't think I'm a faster typist than I would be with Qwerty, I rarely (pretty much never) experience finger strain when typing for long periods.

However, any attempt at using Dvorak on a touch screen keyboard has failed as I can't rely on my muscle memory.

I found that for touch screen input I preferred using qwerty since I have a better feel about where keys are to hunt and peck. Funnily when typing dvorak, my fingers knows where the keys are but I don't have a good conscious mental map of the layout.

Maybe it's due to the fact that you have to touch type dvorak without any visual help since most users use regular qwerty layout keyboards.

I'm used to it now and it doesn't quite bother me enough to relearn qwerty on mobile. Kinda stuck in this weird limbo of relying on autocorrect for every 5th word. Hahaha.

It's still Colemak to this day.

I think the dvorak equivalent of an osk is something more like MessageEase. If they would bother to update their Windows offering to something a little more recent (high dpi instead of scaling etc) it would be nice tho

I was never able to get over my qwerty touchtyping skills and gave up very quickly but I left my smartphone keyboard that way as I thought people's reactions when they tried to use it was funny.

Six years later, I bought a kinesis advantage and discovered to my horror that my touchtyping skills were useless with the alien key layout and I couldn't remember where any of the keys were because I'd not looked at them for so long.

However - the kinesis had a "dvorak" button and after having used it on my phone for so long I found it easier to learn that then re-learn qwerty. 4 years later and I get hopelessly lost every time I try to use qwerty.

I've been using it for about 7 months now and it's been great. I especially like being able to type complex passwords without looking at my phone's keyboard. (like when joining a new wifi network, for example)

I and others like me can touch type with Qwerty just fine. I can comfortably do 70-90 wpm, which is above my speed of thought. I don't suffer from RSI either and I've been touch typing for 20 years.

Also the Qwerty layout is more international. In non-English languages the Dvorak assumptions break down, the layout being optimized for English. And good luck finding Dvorak versions for other languages. Whereas all localized keyboard layouts that I've seen are based on Qwerty (for languages using Latin chars obviously). So for people communicating in more than English, like myself, anything non-Qwerty would be a pain.

So the biggest problem with Dvorak is that it is non-standard and it ain't worth it imo. I have issues with using other workstations, of friends and colleagues, just by having reconfigured Caps Lock into another Ctrl.

Dvorak fixed my RSI problems, it is not possible that Qwerty have the same physical impact than Dvorak because physically a Qwerty typer has to "walk" a lot more distance with their fingers to type the same thing than a Dvorak typer that has all voyels on the home row.

You can spot a Dvorak user by just watching them type: their fingers walk a lot less distance than other users. It's a trick that I learned from other Dvorak users who had spotted me.

I can still touch type with Qwerty, but my hands hurt after 5 minutes.

I type around 145 wpm, including in the 3 languages I speak (all ASCII based though) and languages or frameworks that I know by hearth.

To make it easy for colleges and friends, I just have 2 aliases:

alias aoeu="setxkbmap fr"

alias qsdf="setxkbmap -I ~/.xkb code -print | xkbcomp -I$HOME/.xkb - $DISPLAY"

As you can see, the four letters of the how row, in dvorak switches to french, in french switches to dvorak. Of course it could be more complicated with more layouts if I had to support them but then I guess a systray icon would work.

Anyway, also using Kinesis Advantage 2 LF, absolutely love it, and plenty of other "non-standard" stuff like the OP says, such as a tiling window manager.

Highly recommend learning or making a better layout than Qwerty because the drawbacks are largely country balanced by the benefits IMHO.

It's not about whatever someone thinks is "standard" it's about how you want to touch the machine for the rest of your life.

That's not a good metric. In your case, you might be right, but for the general public it's like when picking up any new exercise or sport, like running or biking or anything really, when untrained you end up for the first few days with sore ligaments, joints and muscles. You get used to it.

My hands never hurt, even though I love writing long texts, long emails, long code comments, etc. I can also do 120 wpm but I don't feel the need to do it because it's stressful, not necessarily on the hands, but on my thought process. Speed isn't an issue.

If Dvorak solved your RSI, that's awesome, I can understand why you switched, however I don't think this is a causality issue, meaning that I don't think it was Qwerty that caused RSI in the first place. If Dvorak is a good strategy for you to manage the pain, then great, but it's pain management, not a cure.

I also used to configure my machines a lot, going into a yak shaving rabbit hole every time it wasn't functioning properly. I was on Linux back then, but I gave it up and nowadays I'm much happier. The only yak shaving sink I still have is Emacs and I'll get rid of it as soon as I find something better.

I don't have proof that less finger distance means less hand work means less pain, so maybe you're right, maybe it's just a coincidence.

Or maybe less finger distance means less work which means less tension accumulated in the muscles and then indeed less pain.

Nonetheless, I changed "fixed my RSI" by "fixed my RSI problems" thanks to your feedback, which should clear out the misunderstanding.

I'm a long time Vim user, myself (and no, not looking to spark a holy war here). One observation I have about my own habits is that I subconsciously slap the ESC key every time I'm done with something, even if I'm in a non-modal editor like Notepad or SQL Management studio. It's just become so ingrained in me that I can't stop doing it. Mostly because there's no negative feedback loop associated with doing it.

But I just aliased `us` and `dv` to setxkbmap shortcuts, so thanks for that!

(That said, I still use Colemak because it happens to work better for my native tongue. If I only wrote English, I would have been a Dvorak user.)

Fortunately, I haven't had RSI ever since I switched to Dvorak.

Switching to Dvorak is quite tedious, and I wouldn't recommend it unless you have a good reason to do so.

Regarding internationalization, I write in English, Spanish and Italian in Dvorak with no problem. It really doesn't any difference to me as compared to Qwerty.

I definitely recommend Neo2 for German users. Ctrl + a,x,v and c still with the left hand. Letter frequency optimised for German first, English second. All programming symbols easy accessible, additional layers for Greek symbols and math notation. Also, users of non-US layouts have much more to "gain" by switching from query-like layouts: Due to umlauts or accents, brackets tend to be way harder to reach.

http://www.justlearnmorsecode.com/koch.html

https://www.qsl.net/n1irz/finley.morse.html

For fun, pronounce "R" like a pirate would.

Try 5-6x. I've met some blind people who listen to audio so fast, it sounds like noise to me. As someone who isn't blind, I regularly listen to lectures and audiobooks on 1.75-2.5x (depending on the base rate) without issues, but 6x is just something else entirely.

> Typos will be easily spotted as they just won't "sound right".

Really good way to describe this. It's almost like listening to an audio fingerprint which magically indexes the answer in your brain. My blind friend was doing law, but I'm sure she did something similar to help her map the dependencies between laws.

Yes, indeed. I was writing that original comment for someone just getting started. What ends up happening is no matter how fast the speech rate is, you'll eventually get used to it and your brain will grow impatient. So you'll bump the rate up another 0.25 and rinse and repeat. Pretty soon it's incomprehensible to anyone but you.

I'm pretty sure anyone can get used to 2X+ without much effort. After a while you'll wonder how you ever listened to speech at a normal rate. Be careful, though, as I've found myself grow impatient listening to people in real life and can trace it back to my high-speed listening habits.

Nobody calls them dependencies, but yes, you would be able to hear if `Re Estates Croft, deceased [2018] NSWSC 1303` were wrong.

does refactoring by other team members have an outsized negative effect on this?

That's all really interesting. I personally have a problem with my thoughts in that I need to "sound out" or read them aloud in my head. This sometimes really slows me down, I mull over a thought until it sounds right. Especially when I'm tired I can get stuck in a loop. And it applies when reading too, I can force myself to read faster but usually I slow down and hear every word out of habit.

I know some people don't have this inner voice. I wonder if it means they can think more freely.

There are varying degrees of aphantasia. For context, I am completely unable to “see” anything in my mind. I do not dream either. If I close my eyes and think of something, nothing happens visually, though I can more easily remember things about whatever it is. I would describe it more as complete emptiness, instead of darkness (as darkness implies there is something there at all). I have been like this since I was born.

One thing that stood out to me in GPs comment was that programmers tend to visualize code to reason about it. I asked a bunch of my friends after finding out my minds eye is blind and they all said they do it at least sometimes, some of them do it constantly.

I obviously don’t, but I can say that I have a very good memory (in general, but also for code), and often find myself capable of context switching between related bits of code faster than many of my peers. I rarely reach for a diagram for explanation, however I do use them very regularly for documentation and explaining designs because I find other people seem to be able to process that format better.

I don’t know if my aphantasia contributes to any of this, these are just things I’ve noticed I’m good at. One thing I am terrible at, however, is design.

[0] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aphantasia

Correct me if I'm wrong but I suspect a lot of self-diagnosed cases of aphantasia are due to the ambiguity of language (specifically, English)... Qualia lost in translation.

I suspect nobody really sees something visually when thinking/imagining something, in a sober waking state (barring maybe a few rare exceptions or psychotic disorders). If you would see something superimposed on your visual field, with closed eyes or not, that would be called hallucinating.

For me, "seeing it in my mind's eye" is a different kind of "seeing": there is no visual input.

Example: imagine a tree. Where are the branches? Where are the roots? Where are the leaves? What color do the leaves have? Etc... You can answer these questions, right? The place where you find the answers is where the mind's eye is. I've yet to meet someone who actually sees the tree with the same visual clarity as if looking at an actual tree.

Dreaming is somewhere in between for me: it's usually visual, but not of the same visual quality as waking life, except when lucid. A lot of people don't remember their dreams, but that doesn't mean they don't have them. Ask yourself right after waking up in REM sleep (don't even open your eyes if you can): what just happened? What were you thinking?

I suspect that you may have some degree of aphantasia.

Visualizing something encumbers the same visual processing as sight does. Personally I have a hard time visualizing something and looking at something at the same time. I can only pay close attention to inside or outside, not both simultaneously. (Casual attention, like half-listening, is possible otherwise I'd be a terrible driver.)

To think of it another way: when you say "I've yet to meet someone who actually sees the tree with the same visual clarity as if looking at an actual tree," maybe you should ask some more. I can look at things, close my eyes, and continue studying them up to the limits of my memory and original attention.

Aphantasia seems to come in degrees, not a binary "have it"/"don't have it."

It's more like a second virtual desktop than superimposed; it takes up the same coordinates, but there's a clear distinction between "real" and "imagined" objects (unless I'm particularly tired, but that's closer to "hallucinating" than "visualising").

I used to be able to visualise things in positions relative to real objects, but at the moment I can only manage floating in the air, such that focusing on the position of imagined objects de-focuses the background, either relative to my field of view (so it moves when I move my head) or in a defined position in space (so it doesn't move when I move my head – though obviously this is limited by my ability to instinctively judge positions and distances, so it often doesn't quite work right when things are moving in complex ways, or I'm moving fast).

Have you always been able to do this, because you mention practising this skill? Also, does this only happen after focussing on something, or does it happen spontaneously when thinking? I imagine it would be pretty distracting if someone says for example, "don't think of scary thing X", and then the scary thing manifests visually for you because you are thinking about it.

That sounds about right. For me, "don't think of a pink elephant" results in the image of a pink elephant, though if I'm not concentrating on its location it's just… somewhere.

> Have you always been able to do this, because you mention practising this skill?

I think I've always been able to do it – but I haven't been doing it as much since I stopped playing with toys, going outside and generally doing activities where such a thing would be useful, so it's less instinctive.

The only time I've ever experienced anything like that I was trying psychedelic mushrooms for the one (and so far, only) time, and so it was literally a hallucination.

Me: There's no way everyone actually sees things and I made it 30 years without knowing.

Everyone else: Yeah I see things.

Me: but, like really see or just remember features?

Everyone else: <some variation of quality, but it was always described visually and everyone agreed it was basically like seeing>

I put "see" in quotes in my original comment simply because that is how everyone I spoke to described it; that it's clearly not physical vision, but it's also clearly a visual experience. I have absolutely zero visual experience when I close my eyes, and I never have, it is simply emptiness.

You seem to describe dreaming as if you experience that visually too, while not being able to do it while awake. It's worth noting that this is not uncommon for people with aphantasia, which is why it is the inability to _voluntarily_ invoke your minds eye. Many people can still dream visually, however I do not. I go to sleep and then simply wakeup with nothing but emptiness in between (not an experience of emptiness as time passes, but more like a time skip).

I can imagine something, but it's like rendering a layer with the opacity brought all the way down to 0, but my "mental computer" knows it's there and can tell its shape, color, all its features & details in 3D space... without seeing the actual visual image.

Dreaming on the other hand is usually multi-sensory and especially visual for me. Much like being awake or in a VR environment, but with internally generated input.

Have you spend time really consciously investigating your sleep? To the point of interrupting it with alarms etc..? I'm someone who's very interested in my dreams: for years, every night before sleep I wonder what I will dream, sometimes I get lucid during the dream, and when I awake my first instinct is to recall my dreams. I think this is why I dream so much. I wonder if the same thing applies to visualization and whether or not aphantasia is "curable" through consciously exercising visualization.

Of course I can imagine sheep jumping over a fence, even in vivid detail, but this imagining is not really seeing visually like in real life, not even like in a dream. As I said, I would describe seeing things that aren't there (with closed eyelids or not) as hallucinating. Perhaps not being able to do that at will is aphantasia, I don't know, but it would blow my mind if it were

More rarely I also get it with sounds and then it definitely does feel that the sound is originating externally to my mind

You’re right that these experiences are more like hallucinations but I think they are points on a spectrum rather than separate things

I had many arguments with my wife about how I did not have visual dreams and did not see anything when I close my eyes. When she says she sees stuff when she closes her eyes, I always assumed it was some sort of metaphor and it was usual for human beings not to see anything when their eyes are closed.

I think when I "visualize" something, not limited to math and code, I do not see anything per se. Mostly I think my thoughts are directed graphs whose nodes are concepts I have in memory.

May I ask how did you get a diagnosis? And did you learn anything of use thanks to this diagnosis?

There isn't a scientific diagnosis, it's more of a self observation kind of thing right now. The reason is that there has been very little research into it so far. You may notice that the wikipedia article is extremely short and most of the references are news articles, opinion pieces, and blog entries. Personally, I've found that the realization has offered slightly new ways of approaching life. It's fun to explain to people how I think and how that may differ from them. Nothing truly changed except perspective.

For reference, I also think mostly in directed graphs. I'm also able to roughly draw a shape in my head, but its very quickly erased and is hyperlocal, like trying to draw in the air with a sparkler.

There is a subreddit, r/aphantasia, but I've found that it's mostly a mix of curious gawkers and bitter people claiming that having it has somehow deprived them of essential life experiences.

There's the Vividness of Visual Imagery Quiz but that's self-administered and is a questionnaire.

I think I must have this too. E.g. if I close my eyes and try to visualise the face of someone that I hang out with every day, I can't do it.

If I try really hard, the best I can do is a flash of bits of some photographs I remember. It also starts to give me a headache. I think though, if I want to remember how something physically looks it helps to have my eyes open. Even then it's more like flashes than being able to actually see something.

Mostly when I "visualise" something e.g. the house where I live, I think in terms of how things are spatially connected to one another. It's more like a scene from the matrix - where what I'm remember are more the concepts of things and where they are spatially, rather than what things actually look like. This is pretty much also what happens when I'm coding - thinking in terms of concepts and how things are connected together spatially.

"This inner speech is characterized by minuscule movements in the larynx and other muscles involved in the articulation of speech. Most of these movements are undetectable (without the aid of machines) by the person who is reading."

The worst thing about the inner voice is it's not just when reading, it won't be quiet at bed time. And I have a tendency to complete thoughts as words. Even if I know where it is leading, and what the conclusion is, it feels like I have to see it through and phrase it correctly in my head. I feel very uncomfortable leaving it hanging.

I'm not sure how do I do that, but I guess because I do it a lot, so I can do it as familiar as walking?

Edit: Maybe because I didn't learn programming by listening to teacher, instead I learn from books and trials. I guess it's more like walking / playing sport, you don't need explicit inner voice to guide your body movement.

That's a really interesting idea to me, because I have been trying to improve my memory and recall (mostly of things like telephone numbers) using the Major Memory system and the emphasis behind that and similar techniques seems to be constructing visual imagery which encodes other information. So, it sounds like you are saying that you have found other pathways/techniques that do explicitly do not do this.

Would you say your ability to visualize has declined, or you’ve just favored other methods of thinking?

What also works for me to train memory is to learn phrases in a foreign language that I do not understand. Surprisingly combining those with text I do understand leads to better recall of the whole text. It is almost as understanding harms memory.

In my job I typically spend 3-4 hours a day in the IDE, but but rest of the day is spent looking at production issues and servers, looking at RabbitMQ management UI, etc. The emphasis being on "looking".

I'm just curious as to how a screen reader would allow you to do those things, in a high pressure environment?

Huh. I already listen to most podcasts and recorded presentations at 2x. Now you make me wonder if I could process information faster with a screen reader even though my sight works just fine...

The Video Speed Controller extension is indispensable part of my browsing experience, mostly for keyboard shortcuts to speed up/down and << >> videos.

I also think it's important that the screen readers use a "old school" synthesized voice, instead of a voice that sound natural, because each of the phonemes is articulated distinctly.

Especially presentations. For most movies, I am only comfortable with 1.25x. In presentations people talk extra slowly. It is a classic advice when learning to give presentations, talk slower. After getting used to 2X speed, it becomes extremely frustrating to listen to a live presentation.

Although even 2x presentations still feels slower than my reading speed as kid. But I cannot speed read anymore since I need glasses

I just put some news interview on YouTube at 2x.

It is fun how even the accents are easily recognizable.

Anyway, this is in Spanish. My guess by reading the comments is Spanish is a much easier language to listen at a faster speed.

When I'm digging into foreign code especially, I always find myself overwhelmed by the intricacies of the call stack. I get lost in layers, confused by indirections, I lose track of where I was a few steps before or what specific conditions lead me down a particular path.

I guess that if you're blind you need to become a lot better at keeping track of things for basically the entirity of your daily routine. Imagine merely cooking without sight. You need to know where all the ingredients are, you lack a lot of feedback on what you're doing to catch mistakes (did you add the pasta to the water yet or not?). I assume that you need to constantly build a fairly detailed map of the world in your mind where the rest of us can just wing it, basically. I can believe that this skill might make you a better coder.

I don't think it is a super power, I believe every programmer does that, I just maybe do it a bit more conscious. And when I have to process new code, that just takes time, like for everyone else .. and doing it in a hurry will mean a wrong mental model.

An earlier commenter described it like a directed graph. I think that's a pretty good way to describe it. As for whether it is different, I don't know how others think. But one thing I do know is that this is how my mind worked for non-analytical thought before I went blind and still does. I'm just more aware of it now that I don't visualize as much. I only really visualize things these days as a way to communicate ideas with sighted engineers.

I mean the mental graph and flow of the program in my head. And being a visual person, I can translate it to somehing graphical, but it does not neccesarily mean it is graphical. But thinking about it, gave some me interesting insights. ("insights" again, a word from a visual dominated world)

I often experience something similar, even though I'm not blind: When I'm doing algebra I sometimes get stuck 'looking' at the equation and systematically trying patterns on it. But what works much better is to really load the equation into your brain so that you have an intuitive idea that guides your pattern matching. If you are blind, I suppose you always need to load it up.

I have also written some plugins for using Vim (text editing) and Weechat (IRC chat) with speech synthesis:

https://git.sr.ht/~sircmpwn/dotfiles/tree/master/lib/vim/vim...

https://git.sr.ht/~sircmpwn/dotfiles/tree/master/.weechat/py...

And I have a script for Sway (a tiling window manager) which also gives you audible cues:

https://git.sr.ht/~sircmpwn/dotfiles/tree/master/bin/swaytal...

All of this is somewhat incomplete, but it's a good starting point if you want to get used to them and work on improvements while you're still sighted. Good luck, and let me know if I can be of service.

I have a different philosophy and approach to using computers than most, and that affects my views on accessibility. Stapling a screenreader onto a graphical application, for example, to me seems like the wrong approach. Text-based applications are much more accessible, and these are my bread and butter. To this end, my work on accessibility involves making more information available as text, organized logically rather than spatially, and making it easier to access and manipulate that information with vision impairments (and other sorts of impairments, too).

I also use VIM because it feels like the best case of voice integration or braille integration...but I have no source for how to actually do this properly. Are there good reading materials on this?

Currently I am trying to build a semantic web browser, also with the intention to filter out all legacy crap CSS that prevents interaction with the content [1] and the idea of being able to train CNNs with the content... but when it comes to code, my memory of it seems to suck so hard that I always have no clue of what I wrote the day before.

[1] still alpha as hell: https://github.com/cookiengineer/stealth

(Also a long time observer of your work here. You are one of the good guys. Stay awesome!)

As for how to actually rig up braille readers on Linux, check out BRLTTY. It's pretty straightforward. I was working on an Alpine Linux spin which was more accessible out of the box, but I got discouraged by various circumstances and shelved it.

Also, do you run brltty on a Linux text console, or in a terminal window in your Sway session?

The most difficult thing for me would be learning advanced levels of braille, which involves memorizing shortened forms of many words, but I reckon I can get away with just using long-form for a good long while.

Check out Emacsspeak: http://emacspeak.sourceforge.net/

It’s written by T.V. Raman, a blind engineer at Google by way of Cornell.

Among other things, with it you can just use the built-in Emacs browser!

I totally switched my workflow to Test Driven Development due to the last 6 months parsing CSS and http1.1 responses.

It’s amazing how much server infrastructure violates w3c specs and recommendations. Something like partial content (206) is mindblowingly crappily implemented on servers these days when it comes to keep alive sockets and multiple range requests. Some servers reply only with chunked encodings, even for frames with less than 256 bytes (looking at you, cloudflare dns), some only send back a single stream...some just send back ranges without headers...

And I only support http1.1 as of now, because http2 and 3 are both kinda undebuggable and there’s no reference-class testsuite to test against implementations.

Still, it seems like a very worthwhile project. I'm fed up with modern browsers myself (the "megabar" on Firefox 75 is, somehow, the last straw for me.)

I'm going to keep an eye on Stealth because it sounds like the perfect browser/proxy engine for an experimental UI I'm working on.

Cheers! Good work and good luck. :)

I've found that, counter-intuitively, a fully accessible GUI program with a good GUI screen reader is easier to use than a screen-oriented terminal program with a screen reader. The trouble with the latter is that the user has to understand visual concepts like highlighting, the meaning of special characters, etc.

Of course, an application or plugin that's tailor-made for doing a particular task with speech output is better than either of those other choices -- as long as you don't have to use an application that's overall inferior (e.g. using the Emacs/W3 web browser with Emacspeak as opposed to a mainstream browser).

Poorly. I want to improve aerc in this respect. For the time being, I use a mix of my braille reader (brltty) and piping emails into vipe so I can use my vim plugin to read them.

I can understand that. I think many of us have just accepted that it has to be this way, because we're a minority and we want to have all of the advantages of using mainstream applications (economies of scale, active development, not being at an extra disadvantage compared to sighted peers, etc.).

Of course, you don't fit the profile of a "mainstream consumer" when it comes to computers. In particular, I gather that you take full advantage of the hackability of free software. So using custom TTS plugins as opposed to a clunky generic screen reader is just an extension of that overall approach to using computers.

Braille is easy, I could read it reasonably well with just a couple of days of study.

Here is what I learned back then. What we were working on was an automated system to monitor data circuits, which back then were basically modems connected to a dedicated audio circuit. They called it a private line data circuit.

The problem back then of course was that you essentially needed a way to sample the audio modem circuit and do analysis of it. We had written some code on a Symbolics computer that could do the analysis (that was the old timey LISP type AI computer).

The trick was how to get the samples without a person having to jack in and record it or whatever. Today this seems trivial but it was more complicated back then. We brainstormed on it (he had a sharp ear BTW). We ended up building a device that had some custom hardware on it that then interfaced the ADC over DMA to a 68000 processor and could monitor multiple circuits etc. and fed that to the Symbolics which could predict all sorts of things.

Anyhow, it taught me how you could sort of combine the two to offload some stuff to HW but still keep the flexibility of SW.

I see a lot of similar types of trade offs today. Now of course we have FPGA's for hardware that can do a lot but you still need interface circuitry to the real world depending on the application. I have worked on a lot of projects where there is a tendency to always reach for software or vice versa.

What I think happens is you might have a company let's say company 'G' that is basically a software company and everyone they hire knows software really well. And they interview and hire more software people. Then if they were to let's say... buy a company that makes HW, perhaps phones, they have a difficult time. Or they try to build out a network and struggle.

Then maybe you have another company 'V' and they are good at building a network but they don't understand software so if they buy a software company it is difficult for them.

Then you have a company Apple that has always done both and they seem to make better choices.

I am sure a lot of you out there can think of similar examples.

This is just my observations based on my experiences. The more a team has a diverse set of experiences and background (HW, SW, Network) the better the chance of getting an optimal solution.

Reminds me of the stories about Stephen Hawking and how it seemed like he was just sitting there miserable but he instead he was thinking very deeply and how his disabilities forced him to be able to think visually in his mind and compensate because he would only get a quick chance to absorb input.

Huh. I've had this most of my career as well, especially in the latter years. I do consider this a secret power, but many of my colleagues (especially the younger ones) view it as a fault.

You said you have hearing loss. Is it bad enough to make speech output useless? If so you would need to learn braille.

I would never try front end design as I have no idea what it should look like, but you may still be able to do it if you have an image in your head of what you are trying to achieve. You would just have to ask someone to check it.

Python is not a problem with screen readers, contrary to what someone else said. The screen reader can be set to report the indentation level. In fact I can't think of any text based language that wouldn't be usable with a screen reader. Tools are a different story. Some work and some don't.

Feel free to contact me if you would like any more information, weather it's about computers or not. rob at mur.org.uk

https://pypi.org/project/dragonfly/

Project description:

Dragonfly offers a powerful Python interface to speech recognition and a high-level language object model to easily create and use voice commands. Dragonfly supports following speech recognition engines:

Dragon NaturallySpeaking (DNS), a product of Nuance

Windows Speech Recognition (WSR), included with Microsoft Windows Vista and freely available for Windows XP

Feel free to not answer :D

Gradually have it turned off for longer periods without turning it on to see what's happening until you can do it without seeing it at all.

Here's the Apple doc for anyone interested: https://support.apple.com/en-us/HT201443

I'm sipping a decent morning coffee, I'm in Japan, whereas my home is San Francisco. I've been here for ~5 weeks, trying to escape the coronavirus disaster that is unfolding in the US, and trying to enjoy spring in Japan as well. I'm lucky enough to be able to afford a few weeks abroad without too many money worries.

Work is a disaster. The last ~4 years of my life have been both unlucky (e.g. recently I was offered a highly lucrative executive job in SF, only to see the CEO change his mind on the whole operation - not on me specifically - at the last moment) and badly handled by me.

My professional career essentially came to a halt and so far didn't recover. I still keep my cool, but I am a bit worried about what's going to happen in the future, especially given the current situation with the virus.

And now, in all of this, few minutes ago I've read "I'm going blind, how to prepare", and my perspective suddenly changed. It's as if something clicked, and I can now "see" the world as it is.

I'm incredibly lucky. Most of us here are incredibly lucky. Zach, you probably didn't mean it, but today you somehow triggered a very positive reaction in me. I wanted to let you know.

I also wish you best of luck with your condition, and hope that you will manage to have a great life despite a deteriorating health.

But there are silver linings. I was born with severe hearing loss but it's stable and corrected with hearing aids. I don't have any balance issues (I have USH2A, which only results in hearing/vision loss). I'm so fortunate to have experienced all that I have and all that I will. Thank you for the kind words.

That is devastating.

Did you get a second opinion?

I would say you're selfish or dumb enough to be moving in a time where people should just stop those behaviors and stay wherever the fuck they are... And this is not even considering you know, GHG and stuff.

But globally this comment is so full of oneself I'm amazed.

What is it that you love doing? Mind sharing a bit?

https://www.natlawreview.com/article/ada-website-litigation-...

If you don't already place an emphasis on using semantic HTML markup, learn more about that, it's the foundation of accessible design.

- You can do frontend coding but certainly some assistance is needed for verifying the UI design. In any decent sized project, Personally I prefer my sighted colleague to handle look and feel (mainly the CSS part - though I know CSS) as I feel it's not a productive use of my time. It's always better to have a UI specialist anyway. FE devs have lot of other things to do especially when it is SPA based.

- Visual studio is good for development and debugging (for .net related languages at least). If you're on windows use autohotkey and setup shortcut keys and hotstrings to automate repetitive actions and text. For instance I prefer bash for using Git and have setup commands like 'gtcom' which expands to 'git add . (newline) git commit -am ''. I just have to type the comment then. Since you'd be working exclusively via keyboard it's important you do more with less hits to reduce strain on your wrists.

- Another important thing is to be able to find alternatives to UI tools your colleague are using but which could be highly inaccessible. Your programming skills and knowledge of system internals will help you with that. Do not settle with any tool which decreases your productivity considerably just because the team is using it, as you'll be judged based on your deliverable and not what tools you used.

I second what @kolanos has written. Programming is mostly a mental job (no pun intended) and everybody has to load a representation of the program in head before one can start fleshing out good code. PG has also written about it

I'm drawing a blank. What's the pun here?