Re: The top three big problems
- From: "Will Pearson" <will@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>
- To: <programmingblind@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>
- Date: Sun, 14 Oct 2007 01:18:28 +0100
Hi Andy,
Andy wrote:
"I think, while perhaps an old argument, that my mind keeps coming back to
the idea of curb cuts. Originally, with curb cuts the idea was to cut in to
make curbs accessible to wheelchairs. At first glance, this may sound like a
custom change that only helps a small community, although as we now know, it
makes bike access, stroller access, and other wheeled access more accessible
for all.
I think of the programming tools for the blind in the same way. By studying
how we can best represent speech for analyzing state information, control
flow, data flow, whatever, and carefully controlling how navigation and
other issues work, we might be able to create programming tools that are
wildly more effective for the blind and at least potentially more effective
in general."
I agree. I think that Marlon's suggestions about navigating by perceptual
groups would be a useful idea to explore in this regard. Visually, code is
presented in parallel for the most part but it is serialised sometimes. By
this I mean that you get multiple code elements on a single page but you get
multiple pages with each page being presented serially.
If a perceptual group spans a page then it may be the case that the next
perceptual marker that someone wants to move their attention to isn't
visible at that time. This would mean that the user would have to scroll
the file to find the perceptual marker they were looking for. I suspect
that searching for a perceptual marker in this manner not only reduces
efficiency, as people can't use the quick cognitive mechanisms of moving
attentional focus, but also raises the cognitive workload as the user would
have to perform comparison operations on the code elements to discover
whether they were the target of their search. As the target is likely to be
identifiable based on it's perceptual attributes I don't think the workload
introduced by the search would be significant but it would still be an
increase.
Speech is serial by nature. So, a lot of the navigation techniques that are
designed to overcome the problems inherent in serial speech can be used to
overcome navigation problems associated with serialising other sensory
stimuli.
Will
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