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January 13, 2005
Programming for the Blind
Recently asked on the SIGCSE mailing list was about tools for supporting blind programmers (students). A few things came to light that are worth mentioning; if anything else should be added, please let us know.
In no particular order:
- The new Mac OSX (10.4) has "screen reading" built into the OS. That is, out-of-the-box, it should provide a rich spoken interface. Called VoiceOver, we don't have any first-hand experience with it at this time.
- Silias Brown has a webpage with some good resources; he is partially sighted himself.
- JAWS was mentioned more than once; a Windows-based solution.
- The work of Gary Bishop at UNC Chapel Hill was mentioned.
- Lambda the Ultimate had a live thread on a similar topic at the same time the question was asked. In that thread, a pointer to the Harmonia project at Berkely was made. "Programming by Voice" is perhaps a quick summary, but this is a rich project that can't be captured in just a few words; take a look.
- Dasher was discussed as well, but someone would need to develop either A) a language model that worked for programming, or B) a yacc-like language model that supported all languages. Currently, Dasher is only an n-gram based model that predicts n-gram+1.
Posted by mjadud at January 13, 2005 03:19 AM