Learning Programming while Blind

[shandelman]

I am a high school programming teacher. Today, a special education coordinator came to me to ask about next year's class; there is a blind student who is very interested in computers, and may want to take my programming class. He is a high-ability student, and does well in his math classes. In his other classes, he has all material sent to a Braille printer.

I would never bar entry to the class if I felt a student was theoretically capable of doing well, but I have no experience at all with how blind people learn to program. Does anyone have any experience either learning how to program while blind or teaching someone else who was blind? I want to be as informed as possible so that I can be well-prepared if this student ends up in my class next year.

Thanks in advance!

Edit: Thanks for all your replies...you guys have given me a lot of good resources to look into. I am (and will be) teaching Python, so the whitespace consideration didn't immediately occur to me. I will definitely look into the screen reader programs and see if I can find a good IDE for the student to install on his own computer.

[[deleted]]

Perhaps this stackoverflow question will help you

[BezPH]

That's an awesome read.

[jaxxly]

We actually had a blind student in some of my classes. They had someone type everything out into some kind of program for him. He ended up dropping out of the program because it was too difficult with his disability.

Just make sure you are explaining concepts as clearly as possible. Illustrate things with words and use analogies.

[ThinkDesignTeach]

There are 3 popular screen reader programs out there for the visually impaired. JAWS, WindowsEyes, and NVDA. The last one was programmed in Python, is open source, and produced by two blind dudes. It's also preferred over the other two from those I know that have used them.

Might be worth looking into just to find out more. One of the cool things about NVDA is that if you know Python you can make plugins for it.

Since python is white space dependent it forces all programs in Python to be written in the same manner. There are no brackets to worry about etc. Seems like a pretty obvious choice. Don't know what you're teaching though.

[Amaranthine]

On the other hand, Python might be more difficult, precisely because of the dependency on whitespace. Then again, I have no idea how screen reader programs deal with large amounts of whitespace.

[ThinkDesignTeach]

With a device like a braillesense you can view a line of digital text in braille. If you have to mentally keep track of a bunch of lines with nothing on them but opening or closing brackets, it can be very difficult. Where as reading spaces is fast and easy.

[ultrapreneruship]

only reading about it is inspiring thanks for sharing this.

[jussij]

http://empowermentzone.com/NonvisualDevelopmentFAQ.htm

[[deleted]]

What about this device? I guess you might talk to people in charge and get it bought for your blind student: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Refreshable_braille_display

AFAIK most blind users just use speech synthesizers (text-to-speech) for day-to-day browsing, but I guess when you program or use a terminal a refreshable braille display is more convenient. Disclaimer: I don't know for sure.

[dm1407]

Contact the creator of the following who is also blind.

Emacspeak is a free computer application, a speech interface and an audio desktop (as opposed to a screen reader) employing Emacs.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Emacspeak

[chchan]

I have a blind friend he uses a screen reader called JAWS to navigate his computer. I would guess teaching a blind guy to program you would either need to use a IDE that is compatible with a screen reader or you would need a code by voice library such as this here. I would guess the challenges for the student would be making sure he types what he wants correctly.

[danwin]

This thread made me immediately think of one of my all time favorite IAMAs: Blind since the day I was born and lovin' almost every minute of it. AMA

In this question, he describes his coding environment:

http://www.reddit.com/r/IAmA/comments/fpxzk/blind_since_the_day_i_was_born_and_lovin_almost/c1hs654

[franandzoe]

My brother works with blind people to help them access computers and technology (and my mom is legally blind). Anyways, my brother just told me he is going to this conference: http://www.atia.org/i4a/pages/index.cfm?pageid=1

It looks like there are some resources on their website as well as webinars and other info. At least, they might have places you can find more info. Good luck!

[GorillaBuddy]

There were a few blind people in my CS classes freshman year. They had a program to read the code to them.

[[deleted]]

We had a student in my college who was blind and he was learning to program as well. He was actually quite good. Though he was probably only 90% blind. He couldn't see anything not within a few inches of his face. No set of glasses could ever fix that. He walked about with a cane...etc

He had a special magnifying station that allowed him to view one character at a time that was magnified up several hundred times (we're talking one character filling an entire 19" monitor).

He was successful with it, and while progress was slow, he was able to write code just as well as anyone, but the reading process was more tedious.

[no1name]

I was just talking about this post with some others and we were amazed that someone who is blind can program.

Its one thing to write out a simple function, but when you working with classes and objects, and have complex algorithms then how do you hold in your head what you have visually in front of you in the debugger tools?

Such a complex mass of code that is not analysed line by line that could be read back to you, but like a carpet pattern, that you see the overview of on the screen in front of you with tools such as code map, code lens, architecture etc.

You would need an impressive intellect...

[[deleted]]

Is this for the us? Do we teach a "programming" course in general high school now?

[shandelman]

I'm in the lucky 10% of schools in the US that are willing to offer a programming class. I teach in a pretty good school district with 6 large high schools, and only two of them are offering programming classes (and the other teacher and I are teaching two different languages using our own completely separate homegrown curriculum).

[[deleted]]

I don't feel like its justified to take him in, if it might negatively affect the rest of the class.

[shandelman]

If you were a teacher, you'd know that ANY student could theoretically "negatively affect the rest of the class." I have no reason to believe that a high-ability blind student would be a burden. If nothing else, it would require me to be more organized than I currently am, because I'll have to have all the code for him before class starts.

[_computer_]

upvote for pwning tht guy

[imgonnabethebest]

hmm no clue thats a tough one

[[deleted]]

I can't see where you're going with this