Re: Auditory interface ideas, what would help?

  • From: Andreas Stefik <stefika@xxxxxxxxx>
  • To: programmingblind@xxxxxxxxxxxxx
  • Date: Tue, 1 Sep 2009 21:11:59 -0500

Howdy,

 Hi Andreas --
> Is your dissertation available online?
>

Yes, it is available on my homepage:
http://www.cs.siue.edu/~astefik/Papers.php

Do a search for the word "Dissertation" on the page and you should find it
pretty quickly. Sina (who is on this list), told me that it was a pretty
accessible PDF (And I really hope so!), but no guarantees.



> What languages did you work with?
>

Right now our tool integrates a custom programming language HOP into
NetBeans. We are doing this specifically because part of our experimentation
and testing regiment analyzes whether the actual language itself effects the
performance of the programmer (including whether it adversely effects the
blind). I'm honestly not sure whether it does yet, but my intuition tells me
it does ...

This inevitably makes designing the tools time consuming though, because we
need to implement our own compilers and debuggers. On the other hand, it
makes it vastly easier to generate high quality auditory cues for folks.
That's a huge help.


> I remember many battles with scope management back when I worked on C++
> compiler and tools.  There were a number of people working on components of
> early IDEs for C++, which was difficult to manage as the language was still
> evolving and changing.  But scope was one thing that received a lot of
> attention, especially in the front end where it influenced parsing and
> typing and beyond.
>

I'm not surprised, I spent about a year testing scoping cues in a previous
version of our environment. Specifically, I came up with this technique
(called artifact encoding), that allows you to basically give someone a
swath of code, then have a computer analyze what they came up with using
something very similar to DNA encoding techniques(long -- complicated --
story), and it will pop out some numbers that seem to indicate how well the
cues told you what was going on. There's a long experiment about it in my
dissertation if you want the details. Nothing's perfect, and my techniques
aren't either, but they really helped us improve our auditory cues for
scoping.


> It is interesting now to see how things have evolved.  I worked on it back
> in the stone age (hmm, maybe the stone age through the bronze age).
> I would love to read about your work. Was it on java?
>

For my dissertation, I wrote a c-compiler and custom c virtual machine that
allowed us to run tests. Our new language, and new VM, is a much more
powerful environment. There's a ton of work left to do (e.g., the installer
on netbeans is horribly inaccessible, for example), but ... ya know, we're
making progress, and we're sure trying. We've applied for some grants and
such. If we get lucky and win one, things will only get better.

Stefik

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