python and applications

[Alex Martelli]

"William Park" <opengeometry at yahoo.ca> wrote in message
news:mailman.995133450.2297.python-list at python.org...
> On Sat, Jul 14, 2001 at 10:25:08AM -0700, Aahz Maruch wrote:
> > tyler spivey <tspivey8 at home.com> wrote:
> > >how many blind programmers use python?
> >
> > No idea.  Python is probably good for blind people because you usually
> > write less code in Python -- each statement in Python does more.
>
> If the original author meant "visually impaired", then I agree.  Python
> code is short, easy to read, and easy to write.  This would be important

I have modest visual impairment (slowly worsening with age) and I
agree.  But when and if it gets to blindness, I don't know if Python's
reliance on whitespace/indentation will be a problem -- normal screen
readers won't help much, I guess it would require a special one that
understands the significance of indent and dedent.  Perhaps not too
big a project, but I'm not aware of any such special readers, which
would seem to indicate a dearth of blind (as opposed to visually
impaired) Python programmers -- even pretty serious visual problems
still leave one able to see the block structure/indentation quite well
(perhaps with some magnification of course, but less than would be
needed for, say, braces!) -- but total blindness is another issue.


Alex