Re: Searching for blind programmer to start a school for blind programmers

Hi Kerneels,

> BTW, I suppose the latest SodBeans is on Source Forge?

Yes, it is on sourceforge. The current trunk is relatively stable, but
there's still a bunch of bugs to hammer out before release.


> Suppose you already know Java, could you use SodBeans to code Java in
> addition to HOP?  How about other languages?

Yes, you can use Sodbeans with any NetBeans language (since 1.5),
although not all of the auditory features work with every programming
language, for technical reasons. For example, Java does not have an
auditory debugger. It's definitely possible to build auditory
debuggers or these auditory features for other languages into
Sodbeans, though. If folks want to put something in for some language
or another, let us know, and we can certainly help with that.

> Having recently started using Braille with a computer, does SodBeans offer
> any special support for Braille displays and Braille in general?

There has been some talk about it on the team, and there are community
offers occasionally sent to us to build it in, but I don't think
anything has happened yet. I imagine it will eventually, but it's sort
of on the back burner. There's also some talk, in addition to Braille,
to add python bindings to our text-to-speech engines, in addition to
Java, but I'm not sure where that's at, if it has gone forward.


>
> Very exciting that it would be possible to produce jar files with HOP some
> time in future!

We're pretty excited about getting it to work. Supposedly, one of my
students is bringing me in a really early demo of some code generation
today. We're still maybe up a year away from release on that feature,
but we're far enough along that there's a demo. :)

>
> Last comment / question. I know people complain a lot about the difficulty
> of using a modal text editor like vi or vim and I fully agree that it's a
> steep learning curve, but I must say, once you have the hang of it, even
> just the basic movement commands, bookmarks in code and jumps then you can
> edit complex and large code files very easily. I also suspect that RSI is
> less likely with heavy vim-ing since you generally don't have to use more
> than one key press at a time, unlike emacs *I believe. Some things require
> holding down one key but it is the minimal odd case only.
> OK now my question; is there any current or planned modal text editing
> support planned for the SodBeans editor code editor window?

Sodbeans actually uses the normal NetBeans plugin stack, meaning that
any netbeans plugin is also a sodbeans plugin. I'm not 100% sure, but
it looks like other folks have actually built VI plugins for NetBeans.
For example, I found this:

http://sourceforge.net/projects/viex/

On this note, however, we're hoping to add some hotkeys to make
jumping around a NetBeans editor possible without a plugin to make
things modal. We're still sorting out the details, but right now we're
thinking we want to make it possible for people to do things like jump
to the previous lexical scope, the beginning of an action (a function
in Hop), the ending brace, or other stuff like that. It's pretty easy
to build, but we haven't quite nailed down what the right design space
is, or what sounds Sodbeans should make. For example, if you jump over
a lexical scope, should Sodbeans try to aurally summarize the code you
jumped over, or should it only give you information about what line
you landed on? Or, should it give you the line you landed on first,
then aurally tell you after what you jumped over, allowing the user to
skip that information?

Lots of questions still. Designing these tools is a pretty fun design
space to work in, I think. Virtually none of this stuff has even been
discussed in the academic literature, let alone experimentally studied
or actually built.

Stefik
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