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Speaking Python

Yvonne Thomson yvonne at thewatch.net
Mon Oct 13 21:13:40 EDT 2003 
At Mon, 13 Oct 2003 17:35:47 -0400,
Mike C Fletcher wrote:
> 
> David Mertz wrote:
> 
> >In the endless Lisp/macro threads, Alex Martelli mentioned something a
> >bit interesting about screen-reading applications.  Specifically, he
> >expressed reservations about whether Python would be a good language for
> >visually impaired or blind programmers.
> >
> >The concern, I think, is that pronouncing
> >'space-space-space-space-space-space-space-space' isn't all that easy to
> >follow if spoken with every line.  Even a reduced form like
> >"eight-spaces' isn't perfect either.  Actually, a symmetric concern is
> >with voice recognition applications--perhaps for people with motor
> >disabilities.
> >  
Hi, guys. As someone who is totally blind, uses speech, and programs in
python, I think I'm probably qualified to talk about this. First, I
might as well say that what I'm using, most people can easily experiment
with if they've got a unixish OS and know how to muck around with
emacs. I'm using the speech interface for that, known as emacspeak.

Strangely enough, python is actually the *easiest* of the languages I've
played with. Admittedly, they're only php and perl, but still, I find
python a far nicer language to program in. I know people call perl
executable line noise, but in my case that's almost literally true. All
those damned punctuation characters are enough to give anyone a
headache, <grin>. In my case, I've got the indent system set up so that,
it sounds something like
indent 4, indent 8, indent 16, etc. It does say this every time you
press your arrow key, but in my experience, that's mostly how I read
code, one line at a time.

I use things like speedbar in emacs, an tags, to jump between functions
and have a look at the overall shape of the code. I can't ever remember
just hitting the command that starts reading a buffer and just listening
to it.

Emacspeak also does do what someone suggested, changing pitch for things
like documentation and keywords which is also quite helpful. I'm afraid
you'll have to ask specific questions for me to actually know what else
to tell you, but I figured I might as well chime in on this.
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