Blind and Visually Impaired Community
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Possibilities (self.Blind)
submitted by dmzww
Hi guys! I am low vision and not completely blind. Lost part of my vision about 3 years ago., used to have perfect vision I’ve completely mastered voice over for iOS and slowly getting the hand of it on the macOS10 which btw is really slow lol but anyway my question is, is it possible to learn coding and programing? If so, what are most accessible softwares for it? And is learning twice as hard from our pov?
I’d also like to know possible other skills and job opportunities we could learn and be good at if that makes sense lol comment yours below hehe btw any filipinos here? Hello!!
Edit: i am now getting the hang of vo on macos but its hella frustrating to work cos its super slow. As in lag to the nth level. Also worth mentioning that its still on os10 and only works when plugged. Huhu its totally messing with my mind and productivity. Cant afford to get an upgrade yet. :( plus having no support from my family isnt helping as well. Send help lol
I’d also like to know possible other skills and job opportunities we could learn and be good at if that makes sense lol comment yours below hehe btw any filipinos here? Hello!!
Edit: i am now getting the hang of vo on macos but its hella frustrating to work cos its super slow. As in lag to the nth level. Also worth mentioning that its still on os10 and only works when plugged. Huhu its totally messing with my mind and productivity. Cant afford to get an upgrade yet. :( plus having no support from my family isnt helping as well. Send help lol
zersiax 2 points 2y ago
Ok, OP ...a few things.
First, yes, you can absolutely learn how to code as a low vision/blind person. I myself am blind, have been since birth, and am a developer and apprentice cybersecurity person in training.
Depending on what kind of coding you want to do, there's tools available for most workflows, some harder than others.
Having said that, I will be honest. I don't think doing this learning on a mac is wise.
While VoiceOver is a very capable screenreader in some respects, it's rather limited customization options can make it difficult to set it up nicely for programming. It can absolutely be done, but things like it's inability to efficiently tell you your indentation level and the fact that it , at times, has to deal with less polished accessibility experiences can be an obstacle that is less prevalent on Windows.
As another comment points out, braille can be very helpful/useful if you have access to it. That technology is prohibitively expensive though if you can't get funding for it.
If you let us know what kind of coding you were thinking of doing, we can give better recommendations on what to look at. :)
First, yes, you can absolutely learn how to code as a low vision/blind person. I myself am blind, have been since birth, and am a developer and apprentice cybersecurity person in training.
Depending on what kind of coding you want to do, there's tools available for most workflows, some harder than others.
Having said that, I will be honest. I don't think doing this learning on a mac is wise.
While VoiceOver is a very capable screenreader in some respects, it's rather limited customization options can make it difficult to set it up nicely for programming. It can absolutely be done, but things like it's inability to efficiently tell you your indentation level and the fact that it , at times, has to deal with less polished accessibility experiences can be an obstacle that is less prevalent on Windows.
As another comment points out, braille can be very helpful/useful if you have access to it. That technology is prohibitively expensive though if you can't get funding for it.
If you let us know what kind of coding you were thinking of doing, we can give better recommendations on what to look at. :)
Fridux 1 points 2y ago
> While VoiceOver is a very capable screenreader in some respects, it's rather limited customization options can make it difficult to set it up nicely for programming. It can absolutely be done, but things like it's inability to efficiently tell you your indentation level and the fact that it , at times, has to deal with less polished accessibility experiences can be an obstacle that is less prevalent on Windows.
It's not the screen-reader's job to tell indentation, since it's not in a position to know how you configured your editor, so unless you indent with tabs it has no way of knowing how many spaces correspond to one indent level. Xcode, for example, does tell you the indent level among other things when you press VO+T to read text attributes, though I don't know how it does it since I couldn't find anything in NSAccessibilityProtocol related to that. In any case one can always assign an AppleScript to do it, just like Windows screen-readers use scripts for the same purpose.
It's not the screen-reader's job to tell indentation, since it's not in a position to know how you configured your editor, so unless you indent with tabs it has no way of knowing how many spaces correspond to one indent level. Xcode, for example, does tell you the indent level among other things when you press VO+T to read text attributes, though I don't know how it does it since I couldn't find anything in NSAccessibilityProtocol related to that. In any case one can always assign an AppleScript to do it, just like Windows screen-readers use scripts for the same purpose.
zersiax 1 points 2y ago
It is absolutely the screenreader's job to tell you about indentation, as indentation is not a code-only phenomenon. Indentation can happen in Word documents, on the web, you can use it in a text editor to create hierarchy in plain text content, it has very little to do with how you configure your editor. And yes, you can write an AppleScript for it if you can figure out the rather poorly documented APIs you would have to work with, which is not exactly something I'd recommend for a new user/coder/anything really. On Windows with, say, NVDA, you change a single setting to either have it indicated by announcements "3 spaces, 2 tabs, etc", o r a played tone, and off you go, and it gives you access to addons like IndentNav which let you quickly jump to the end of the current indent level and other such things, a massively larger catalog of voices, 1st class support for things like VS Code, a much better braille stack if you ever want to go that route ... I'm not here to bash Mac, and you can absolutely code on a mac, I'm just saying you have more options on Windows to be more productive.
Fridux 1 points 2y ago
Paragraph indentation and code indentation are technically not the same thing, at least on MacOS. Paragraph indentation is a text attribute defined as a floating point value containing the number of points from the start of the text block by which text is indented. Code indentation is text content defined as the integer number of leading white space characters on a line. So yes, code indentation is very much a code phenomenon. Xcode does report code indentation along with text attributes according to its configuration when you press VO+T, so the functionality exists contrary to your claim, I just don't know how I would implement it into an editor if I was to make one myself.
zersiax 1 points 2y ago
Ok, so it is either a points value, which nobody actually uses, or it is a universal phenomenon that also happens to work for code.
When it comes down to it, from an actual coder's perspective, your indentation is either going to be x amount of spaces, or x amount of tabs. Just like it is in paragraph indentation or any other kind of indentation. Most, if not all, editors will let you configure that indentation in either tabs or spaces, and in the case of tabs, you can configure how many spaces equals a tab. I have never heard of setting this as a floating point value expressed in points, and I can not see that being productive whatsoever particularly if you either have to have VO read it manually, or have it read all the text attributes given I am pretty sure you can't tell VO to only read indentation in xCode but not anywhere else and not any other text attribute.
Not telling you you're wrong, I'm sure VO expresses it that way if you say it does, but indentation is something you need to be able to get, act on and work with in an easy and preferably automated manner. Anything else is a productivity hit, given you can't take a quick glance at your code and grasp it in a glance, particularly in code that is nested several levels deep.
When it comes down to it, from an actual coder's perspective, your indentation is either going to be x amount of spaces, or x amount of tabs. Just like it is in paragraph indentation or any other kind of indentation. Most, if not all, editors will let you configure that indentation in either tabs or spaces, and in the case of tabs, you can configure how many spaces equals a tab. I have never heard of setting this as a floating point value expressed in points, and I can not see that being productive whatsoever particularly if you either have to have VO read it manually, or have it read all the text attributes given I am pretty sure you can't tell VO to only read indentation in xCode but not anywhere else and not any other text attribute.
Not telling you you're wrong, I'm sure VO expresses it that way if you say it does, but indentation is something you need to be able to get, act on and work with in an easy and preferably automated manner. Anything else is a productivity hit, given you can't take a quick glance at your code and grasp it in a glance, particularly in code that is nested several levels deep.
Fridux 2 points 2y ago
I'm surprised you find VoiceOver slow on MacOS, unless you are on an old / low end machine.
Xcode is fairly accessible; it still has some issues with Interface Builder, the SwiftUI canvas, its command line interface to the debugger, the visual interface and representation of some instruments and debuggers like the memory graph, and Asset catalogs, but none of this issues prevents you from targeting any of Apple's platforms, they just make it a little bit harder. For everything else I use TextMate 2, and develop inside disposable Linux Docker containers to avoid cluttering my system with development tools and libraries, test in an environment that is as close as possible to the final production environment, and create very small packaged images for distribution.
As for learning blind, I'd say it's 10 times harder. After going blind I learned Swift and am now learning Rust, and the experience of learning syntax was very bad for me since I don't use Braille, but once syntax stoped being a problem, producing actual code became only 3 times harder. Finding my way around large codebases, something that I used to be very good at with sight, is also proving to be a huge challenge to me now, so I do not contribute to existing projects anymore.
Xcode is fairly accessible; it still has some issues with Interface Builder, the SwiftUI canvas, its command line interface to the debugger, the visual interface and representation of some instruments and debuggers like the memory graph, and Asset catalogs, but none of this issues prevents you from targeting any of Apple's platforms, they just make it a little bit harder. For everything else I use TextMate 2, and develop inside disposable Linux Docker containers to avoid cluttering my system with development tools and libraries, test in an environment that is as close as possible to the final production environment, and create very small packaged images for distribution.
As for learning blind, I'd say it's 10 times harder. After going blind I learned Swift and am now learning Rust, and the experience of learning syntax was very bad for me since I don't use Braille, but once syntax stoped being a problem, producing actual code became only 3 times harder. Finding my way around large codebases, something that I used to be very good at with sight, is also proving to be a huge challenge to me now, so I do not contribute to existing projects anymore.
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