The NVDA screen reader for Windows, with punctuation set to all, actually reads the snippet at the beginning of the post like this:
def foo left bracket A colon (pause) wibble right bracket left paren s colon (pause) string comma (pause) b colon (pause) wobble left bracket a right bracket right paren colon (pause) int equals
So, not quite as bad as the rendering given in the blog post. If you need to know capitalization, you can move the cursor to the character in question and read that. That shouldn’t be necessary often though, for code that follows the language’s conventions.
I find it difficult to read code this way. But even though I’ve been legally blind my whole life, I have enough sight to read the screen up close, and I’ve been programming that way for almost 30 years (I started when I was 8), because I didn’t have access to a speech synthesizer at home back in the 80s. So I’m not used to reading code with TTS.
Still, the fact that people can learn to make do with something doesn’t mean that we shouldn’t try to do better. I just hope that this Accessible Scala project is taking input from blind programmers, or perhaps blind people who are struggling to become programmers. See also Nothing About Us Without Us.
The NVDA screen reader for Windows, with punctuation set to all, actually reads the snippet at the beginning of the post like this:
def foo left bracket A colon (pause) wibble right bracket left paren s colon (pause) string comma (pause) b colon (pause) wobble left bracket a right bracket right paren colon (pause) int equals
So, not quite as bad as the rendering given in the blog post. If you need to know capitalization, you can move the cursor to the character in question and read that. That shouldn’t be necessary often though, for code that follows the language’s conventions.
I find it difficult to read code this way. But even though I’ve been legally blind my whole life, I have enough sight to read the screen up close, and I’ve been programming that way for almost 30 years (I started when I was 8), because I didn’t have access to a speech synthesizer at home back in the 80s. So I’m not used to reading code with TTS.
I have several totally blind friends who program though, and it doesn’t seem to be a problem for them. One even programmed in Scala for a while, and as far as I know, he was happy with it. As it happens, he also wrote a comment on not making assumptions about what’s feasible for a blind person based on brief exposure to a screen reader. So I’m sure I could learn to efficiently read and understand code with TTS if I worked at it.
Still, the fact that people can learn to make do with something doesn’t mean that we shouldn’t try to do better. I just hope that this Accessible Scala project is taking input from blind programmers, or perhaps blind people who are struggling to become programmers. See also Nothing About Us Without Us.