How A Blind Developer Uses Visual Studio
Why Hacker News recommends it
HN recommends it, especially to developers losing their sight, as a concrete demonstration of coding with text-to-speech.
What it is
Saqib Shaikh, a blind developer, shows how he writes and debugs code in Visual Studio 2017 using a screen reader. The short demo shows an expert doing ordinary developer tasks.
Recommended by 4 HN commenters across 3 different months, 2019 to 2023.
What Hacker News said
Recommends dejawu · 2019-08 · on “What Does a Coder Do If They Can't Type?”
On the other side of this, I found it very interesting how a programmer who can't see codes using text-to-speech: [this video]
Recommends DCRichards · 2020-04 · on “Ask HN: I'm a software engineer going blind, how should I prepare?”
I recommend watching (and listening to) this talk by Saqib Shaikh, a blind developer using Visual Studio and how we codes and debugs with his screen reader [this video]
Recommends ChrisRR · 2020-04 · on “Ask HN: I'm a software engineer going blind, how should I prepare?”
I'm reminded of this short video of a blind software developer using Visual Studio. Maybe it'll give you some idea [this video]
Recommends lzybkr · 2021-10 · on “How does apt render its fancy progress bar?”
Saqib Shaikh, a blind developer at Microsoft, gave this short talk on using Visual Studio: [this video] I realize this isn't a console, but I think it is a good demonstration of an expert doing typical developer activities.
Cites jodrellblank · 2019-02 · on “Rules for Choosing Nonfiction Books”
There's a blind developer giving a talk on Visual Studio accessibility here - [this video] - and you can hear examples of him using text to speech starting at about 0m 45s but he doesn't say how fast.
Cites 3boll · 2020-04 · on “Ask HN: I'm a software engineer going blind, how should I prepare?”
Hey, there you have a few references that could be of some help! Google: [LINK] Visual Studio: [this video] Forzano (Amazon) [LINK] , [LINK] Wishing you the best, J
Cites jodrellblank · 2021-04 · on “Show HN: Giving my mother-in-law an easy internet radio with real icon buttons”
My understanding is that blind or visually impaired people tend to use Windows because that's where the two(?) big screenreader programs run; JAWS is one[1], I forget the other but it might be NVDA[2]. Microsoft have traditionally had some focus on accessibility, e.g. there's a video from a few years back of a blind programmer demonstrating how they program in Visual Studio[3]. Outside that, Emacspeak[4] is an eyes-free Emacs, I think it can boot into that environment; it was developed by a blind person and claims: > Emacspeak introduces several improvements and innovations when compared with screenreaders designed to allow blind users to interact with personal computers. Unlike screenreader
Cites withinboredom · 2022-06 · on “Welcome to the M1 Windows project”
Windows has fantastic accessibility properties/support. They even have a blind dev working on Visual Studio (or did)[0] for awhile. Apple's accessibility options are not anywhere near on-par with Windows. Linux ... I honestly haven't ever tried a screen reader in Linux and I have a feeling it is 100% up to whichever dev implemented something with no centralized style of doing things. [0] [this video]