Accessible tools

[Eric S. Johansson]

On 2/19/2015 10:33 AM, Bryan Duarte wrote:
> Thank you jwi, and Jacob,
>
> I took a look at that posting and it seems pretty unique. I am not much interested in the speech driven development, but I am very interested in developing an accessible IDE.

Well you should be because it looks like an aural interface (uses speech 
instead of keyboards) uses the same kinds of data to present to either a 
text to speech or speech recognition driven environment.
> A professor and I have been throwing around the idea of developing a completely text based IDE. There are a lot of reasons this could be beneficial to a blind developer and maybe even some sighted developers who are comfortable in the terminal. The idea would be really just to provide a way of easily navigating blocks of code using some kind of tabular formatting, and being able to collapse blocks of code and hearing from a high level information about the code within. All tools and features would obviously be spoken or output in some kind of audio manor.
I've been working with another professor working on some of these issues 
as well. His focus has been mostly blind young adults in India.  come up 
with some pretty cool concepts that looks very usable. The challenge now 
is to make them work and, quite frankly monetize the effort to pay for 
the development.

Again, this shows the similarities in functionality used by both speech 
recognition and text-to-speech. All I care about is text and what I can 
say. We're now working with constructs such as with-open, argument by 
number, plaintext symbol names (with bidirectional transform to and from 
code form), guided construct generation for things like classes, 
methods, comprehensions etc.

All of these things would be useful to handed programmers as well as a 
way of accelerating co-creation and editing. Unfortunately, like with 
disabled people stove piping text-to-speech versus speech recognition, 
handed developers stovepipe keyboard interfaces and don't really think 
about what they are trying to do, only how they are doing it.

Yes yes, it's a broadbrush that you can probably slap me with. :-)
>
> Oh and before I forget does anyone know how to contact Eric who was developing that accessible speech driven IDE? Thanks

Well, you could try looking in a mirror and speaking my name three times 
at midnight But you would get better results if you used my non-mailing 
list email address. esj at eggo.org.

--- eric