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Blind and Visually Impaired Community

Full History - 2021 - 01 - 05 - ID#kqygro
12
Programmers of /r/blind, have you created anything for your own convenience? (self.Blind)
submitted by DaaxD
There are other programmers here on /r/blind, right? I was just thinking that have you created anything for yourself to make your own life a tad bit easier?

Like something you realised you wanted or needed, but nobody had either made it yet or the existing apps had a lackcluster implementation? Or is there something which does already exist, but you decided to make your own version for yourself just because you wanted to?

For instance after I got my RP diagnosis, I started to mesasure my FoV with my own VR app. After I have measured my FoV in biweekly basis for quite some time, I now have a rough "guesstimate" for how fast my vision is going to detoriate in the future.

Granted, my system don't offer scientific precision and I don't trust the results myself, but at least it's more than my ophthalmologist dared to say. It's not really feasible for me to visit optometrist every month to take the my current measures, so the ophthalmologist just has to work with much more smaller sample size.

But what have you guys made for own personal use?
retrolental_morose 5 points 2y ago
Gosh yes, I've lost track.
* software to dedrm and archive my paid-for content that I feel I should own rather than using it in a native app.
* numerous keyboard-direct interfaces to certain apps and interfaces, especially at work. For example the internal telephone directory.
* apps that modify data to make it less visual, i.e. abstracting a visual series of colour-coded diary entries into categorised headings
* command line tools to do things Windows can't seem to manage. Ping a host with audible feedback, set timers/alarms, find out if a user is online at work, determine if any of the LEDs on my security console have been activated and i've missed an alert, shutdown when a specific process ends or text appears, remotely control a networked machine, dump the latest newspaper onto my Braille Display, tonnes more besides.
* and the wife likes having a pet programmer for all sorts of things: faster sports scores during gameplay when the TV lags or only shows scores onscreen, a few web-scrapers to show her new products for things she is interested in, tools to manage her gigantic recipe collection (talking about a million files, a standard windows list struggles to be efficient in that sort of range. Probably more besides.
Marconius 5 points 2y ago
Yes, I have. I've been teaching myself Python off and on for the past 2 years, but really ramped up with it last year and created an app that uses the DocX API to create invoices through Terminal. I've also been building a suite of Casino games since I couldn't find any good accessible versions of them around, along with some fun little math apps for quick flash card problem training.

Here are links to my invoice app and games on github. I updated them to Python 3 and they are playable through Terminal, iTerm, power shell, or whatever other command line apps that can run Python:
$1 - Robust and fully featured Craps game.

$1 - An accessible Baccarat game that I just finished.

$1 - My first game, a robust Blackjack game.

$1 - Creates invoices through the command line and saves out a nicely designed Word document

As I have more time, I'm looking into programming a bot for Kik, web scraping apps for keeping track of grocery and product sales, and any other task that I need and can be automated.
dunktheball 1 points 2y ago
I realllllly wanted to make card games, but I don't know enough to do anything really visual like games. I've made a tournaments app, but it of course doesn't include actual gaming, just keeping track of where people placed in the tournaments etc...

Also, eventually I badly want to make a fantasy baseball program, but I have a lot to learn for that, mainly for the live draft aspect.... All i really know right now is php. lol.
DaaxD [OP] 1 points 2y ago
I can imagine that finding accessible casino games could be a next to impossible. I assume if I tried to find one either for browser or the mobile, the search results would be full of inaccessible shovelware riddled with obnoxious adds.

This is pretty much the reason why I ended up making my own shopping list app instead of using one from an appstore. I wanted it to be dead simple, but the ones made by the other folks were over engineered and had adds on them.
Marconius 2 points 2y ago
RS Games Client has a Blackjack game, but it's missing many core components to gameplay and isn't quite accurate. They also have Roulette, but you can only make 1 bet at a time per roll, so absolutely useless if you want to actually play a strategy or the game properly. The Slot Machines game is also a snoozefest.

The same RS folks made a series of accessible iOS games under the Blindfold Games name, but their Ears Craps game was difficult to play when trying to use basic strategy, plus several of the bets were incorrect or didn't work the way they do on a proper table, plus their Blackjack game was also sorely lacking. That's what drove me to make my own games, though they play in text-adventure style with a specific linear progression. I may rewrite a few to change the play style later, but for now my games have been much more accurate and a lot more fun. :)
CloudyBeep 1 points 2y ago
Blindfold Games are made by a different group to RS Games, though RS Games also has an iOS client.
AndAdapt 3 points 2y ago
Often small tools to bridge gaps in accessibility. For example, random name generators for when I am teaching to call on students
Fridux 2 points 2y ago
Although I went blind in 2014 I only returned to development in 2019, so I haven't worked on much since going blind yet.

I started an accessible MIDI sequencer for iOS that I could use to fully control any synthesizer and that could be controlled by any controller, but at some point was asked by an administrator of an old web game I play to make an iOS client for it so I suspended the sequencer project. Meanwhile I gave away the digital piano that I was using to test the sequencer so I can't really work on it for the time being, but plan on buying a cheap controller and hardware synthesizer at some point in order to resume working on the project. This project was written using a version of CoreMIDI that has since been deprecated by Apple due to MIDI 2.0 coming out, so once I return to it I will have some stuff to rewrite.

Another project in my growing backlog, which I haven't even started yet because I'm too busy with the game's app as well as a push notifications daemon, is an IRC client for MacOS designed with accessibility in mind, since I need access to FreeNode and can't find any Mac client that I feel comfortable using.
[deleted] 2 points 2y ago
[deleted]
LuisSalas 2 points 2y ago
https://youtu.be/-6uRZQ_srmw

Preparing Minecraft to be accessible.
dunktheball 2 points 2y ago
I just made things that were fun, like related to sports betting (not with real money) and then later made them public. I haven't really thought of anything related to my vision, though. Plus I am limited in which types of things I can make at this point.
Winnmark 2 points 2y ago
I didn't program anything, exactly, but I made an auto hockey script to change the Windows Magnifier "follow carrot" setting on the fly.

I made $1 post a while ago, but I think I should just upload the script somewhere so people can download it and not risk messing something up.

Hopefully Microsoft will implement this natively in the future though.
Collierr 2 points 2y ago
Former programmer here I never did because I could never think of anything practical.
DrillInstructorJan 1 points 2y ago
My other half is a keen amateur engineer and he used to make me carbon canes. They were better and cheaper than the real thing especially since they were much more repairable.

Also they were black, which is cool. I was eventually persuaded that there was value in some white reflective tape so I didn't die.
honestduane 1 points 2y ago
Yup.

I'm curranty pondering designing a programming language explicitly designed for the blinds accessibility needs.
DaaxD [OP] 2 points 2y ago
I'm curious, What do you mean by "explicitly designed for the blinds accessibility needs"? Do you have examples like what has frustrated you in the languages you have used in the past?
honestduane 1 points 2y ago
I have over 30 years software programming experience so if I were to explain every issue of every language I have worked with that I'm aware of that I think is not perfect, that would be a very long post, and it would actively create a flame war between a lot of people, so I don't want to get political like that... and I'm not going to.

What I will say is this:

There are aspects of many of the different programming languages that I have used - both professionally and non-professionally - that I really enjoy. But in general, every language has problems or issues, so aspects of them are known to be imperfect, and so I think as engineering excellence is sought after and humanity iterates on new "better" versions of what we have or new things we create to replace the old, that it is simply best to acknowledge that the needs of blind users has NEVER been addressed successfully nor have thy ever been a primary goal, as every attempt I have seen has focused on the absolute wrong things or syntax or had a view - and I use that word intentionally to make my point - that considered the needs or infrastructure of the sighted over that of the blind. So I'm looking at ways I can assure alternatives are available for me once I'm no longer sighted in any way myself.
DaaxD [OP] 2 points 2y ago
Naturally if you have encountered myriads of issues, then listing all of them wouldn't be fruitful.

I was just thinking if you could provide an exaggerated example to help me understand what kind of issues we are talking about here? Like what's the biggest offender you have ever encountered? Or what's the most glaring example you can come up with?

I personally find it quite interesting to read about motivations behind different languages. Like what programming languages the creators were mainly using previously, what parts of those languages caused them most headaches and how thet wanted to address these issues in their new fancy language.
honestduane 2 points 2y ago
Yes the "scratch your own itch" aspect of new language design is huge.

My biggest issue is the absolute huge cost of using modern programming languages for the blind or hard of sight; When you cant afford a braille terminal it really doesn't matter if the IDE supports it or not, but most IDE's really don't, anyway.

So after finding that that in order to debug some non-tail recursive multithreaded server spaghetti code I had inherited on the job, I had to be sighted as no blind friendly tools existed, I then realized in that moment that one day my skills will be too much to be usable due to my physical disability. After all, it doesn't matter if I can code or not, If I have no tools that give me that access. Then I had that thought that always pops into my head: "What about people worse off than me?"

From 8am to 5pm I look for work; After that I work on other projects that help me get work. I'm tempted to take a week off looking for work and just do a v0, but due to the pandemic I'm less interested in taking that amount of time off just for personal projects.
Winnmark 2 points 2y ago
What do blind people need specifically that, for example, Java, Python, c, c++, Ruby, and etc. don't offer?

Shouldn't programming languages be job dependent and not person dependent? I mean, you wouldn't use R to develop a UI, but you might use HTML & CSS to, at least, prototype it.

I seem to recall an old project trying to do something like this. Under its first iteration it was called Quorum afterwards they named it HOP (human operated programming I think it was?).

Have no idea what ended up happening to it, kind of useless if you think about it.

Maybe I'm missing something? Could you point it out to me?
honestduane 2 points 2y ago
> Quorum

Thanks. I looked and it doesn't seem to fit my use case.

I'm just playing around, it doesn't have a website or anything. One of my goals for this year is to either get a version zero done or abandon it.
Winnmark 1 points 2y ago
Pardon, v0?
honestduane 6 points 2y ago
To me a V0 or version zero is effectively just the first version that actually works and passes all unit tests.

But to design your own language and then get it working can take a while. I have other priorities at the moment because I’m looking for work, so I’m not working on my personal projects as much but making my own programming language is something that I’ve always wanted to do so it’s a problem looking for a solution at the moment and one of the issues that I have is that because my sight is deteriorating just like every other humans does when they get older, a part of me wonders how I can leverage my 30+ years of programming experience to do the most good in the world for people like me who don’t have perfect sight.

Thing is, I know in the future I’m not going to have the sight that I do now. I know that I will go fully blind. So part of me just wants to work on something that will enable me to keep going when that happens, while I still can.
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