🌐 https://www.vincit.com/blog/software-development-450-words-per-minute
Tags:a11y
Highlights & Notes
“Something’s a little bit off here.” That’s what I predict your first thought to be upon seeing my cubicle for the first time. There’s no screen or mouse in sight. Instead there’s a guy hammering away on a keyboard, staring at seemingly nothing.
And it’s not the kind of synthetic speech you hear in today’s smart assistants. I use a robotic-sounding voice which speaks at around 450 words per minute. For comparison, English is commonly spoken at around 120–150 words per minute.
Since I need to read both Finnish and English regularly I’m reading English with a Finnish speech synthesizer.
For example, if I press the down arrow key on a web page I hear the next line of the page. This type of reading means that I can’t just scan the contents of my screen the same way a sighted person would do with their eyes. Instead, I have to read through everything chunk by chunk, or skip over those chunks I don’t care about.
That’s right: I don’t know that a check box is a check box if it’s only styled to look like one. However, more on that later; I’ll be devoting an entire post to this subject. Just remember that the example I just gave is a crime against humanity.
The answer is simple: Windows is the most accessible operating system there is. NVDA, my screen reader of choice is open source and maintained more actively than any other screen reader out there. If I had the choice I would use Mac OS since in my opinion it strikes a neat balance between usability and functionality. Unfortunately VoiceOver, the screen reader built in to Mac OS, suffers from long release cycles and general neglect, and its navigation models aren’t really compatible with my particular way of working.
Naturally I can’t just read through a huge codebase like that. In those cases I have to abstract some parts of the code in my mind: this component takes x as its input and returns y, never mind what it actually does.
For example, when doing a code review I prefer to look at the raw diff output whenever I can. Side-by-side diffs are not useful to me, in fact they are a distraction if anything. The + and — signs are also a far better indicator of modified lines than background colours, not because I couldn’t get the names of those colours, but because “plus” takes far less time to say than some convoluted shade of red that is used for highlighting an added line.
This is not true: proper indentation helps me just as much as it does a sighted programmer. Whenever I’m reading code in braille (which, by the way, is a lot more efficient than with speech) it gives me a good visual clue of where I am, just like it does for a sighted programmer. I also get verbal announcements whenever I enter an indented or unindented block of text. This information helps me to paint a map of the code in my head. In fact Python development was the first real programming language I picked up (Php doesn’t count) and its forced indentation never posed a problem for me. I’m a strong advocate of a clean and consistent coding style for a number of reasons, but mostly because not having one makes my life much more difficult.
But why Notepad++, you might ask. There are more advanced lightweight editors out there like Sublime text or Atom. The answer is simple: neither of them is accessible to screen readers. Text-mode editors like Vim aren’t an option either, since the screen reader I use has some problems in its support of console applications that prevent those editors from being used for anything longer than a commit message. Sadly, accessibility is the one thing that has the last word on the tools I use. If it’s not workable enough that I can use it efficiently, it’s out of the question.
For example, I once worked a couple of weeks adding internationalization support to a somewhat complex Angular app. I didn’t need to do any visual changes at all.
I’ve found that libraries like Bootstrap are a godsend for people like me. Because of the grid system I can lay out a rough version of the user interface on my own.