Personally, I would like to say "Build", "Run", "Next Error", "insert line below", "rename function foo to bar", "Reformat file", "Reformat method", etc in my editor. Wouldn't we all benefit by having an editor that had some voice commands?
"Sep 29 '08" ohhh LOL
I don't know what it is like to program blind, but I imagine the big challenge is on reading and stepping through code.
When I do that, I have multiple windows that step through the structure and then I pause the code and interrogate variables.
When someone cannot see, do they load up a greater part of the code into their memory? Instead of relying on the editor to pull up the definition of a function in a window, do they just read it once and keep that in their head?
For example, I am in a subroutine in a subroutine, and I notice that an array has an unexpected value. I look at the function that is assigning that value and I wonder what it does. That is 4 windows right there.
They lived in California which helped with a lot of expensive Braille and other equipment, but mostly they achieved at a high academic and industry level thru sheer determination. Academics: degrees from MIT, Berkeley, other top programs. One critical skill was to crank up their browser readers to unbelievable speeds, I couldnt understand anything at that speed. I think most of them used the emacs-speak interface from Cornell. There weren't any tools to make schematics and similar dense graphic representations approachable, tho.
After discussions, we concluded that (at least given the tech we knew about and that he could afford), it would not work out. Sad for such people.
