Re: programming on Windows (was RE: Any support/suggestions for a blind student)

From: "qubit" <lauraeaves@xxxxxxxxx>
To: <programmingblind@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>
Date: Fri, 27 Aug 2010 17:44:04 -0500
ah greetings Laura, I am also Laura and I am blind and program, although I 
did the bulk of my work when I still had a little vision.
To answer your question, screen readers are used for both speech and braille 
access to software -- there is little need for an app to be self voicing.
For those with a little vision, screen magnification is also used.
Most "old-time" programmers (those of us who started in the 80s and before), 
command line is the preffered type of environment, and, but screen reader 
support for windows based IDE's (or I should also say windows support for 
screen reader access) has made GUI development accessible as well.
As for console environments, I don't know of others besides the ones you 
mention.
I'm sure you will get a lot of replies to your queery.
Good luck and happy hacking *smile*
--le

----- Original Message ----- 
From: <arachna@xxxxxxxxxxxx>
To: <programmingblind@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>
Sent: Friday, August 27, 2010 4:44 PM
Subject: programming on Windows (was RE: Any support/suggestions for a blind 
student)


I ran across the following post in the list archives by accident when 
searching for something with Google and it piqued my curiousity:
 "DaShiell, Jude T. CIV NAVAIR 1490, 1, 26" wrote on 16 March 2010:
>As I see it, Microsoft made two mistakes with Windows which until they're 
>corrected the best software for those
of us with no memory of vision to program for will be Linux in its varied 
forms.
>First, the command line interface was made into a very poorly equipped 
>environment for software development.
>Second, if someone does console-based development of software within 
>Windows to my knowledge to date no xenity equivalents yet exist for any 
>supported software development package now running on Windows; I would love 
>to be
corrected on this point if at all possible even if packages under active 
development are all that can be offered as suggestions.


Would dialog be a decent replacement for zenity on Windows?  I have a how-to 
on building dialog for OpenWatcom here:
http://www.openwatcom.org/index.php/Dialog_howto
It's very similar to build it on mingw and msys.  There are just a few less 
places to patches.  I can put together the mingw patch if someone needs it.

By the way, did a quick search of zenity and win32 to check if someone had 
ported it yet and ran across this:
http://www.placella.com/software/zenity/

I've been experimenting with the idea of using dialog with bash or v8cgi to 
create menus that will work in or out of X Windows on FreeBSD and Linux. 
Since I like to program cross-platform, the menus would work on Windows just 
as well.

There are at least 3 versions of bash I know of for Windows.  Cygwin, djgpp 
and msys all have one.
Here's a stand-alone package based on Cygwin:
http://www.steve.org.uk/Software/bash/

The other tool I've been looking at for cross-platform scripting that I'm 
really starting to like is v8cgi:
http://code.google.com/p/v8cgi/
Syntax will be more familiar to C/C++ programmers than bash is.

Since I'm not a blind user, I've been wondering just how the visually 
impaired use console based tools.  Does the terminal emulator or some such 
software read the information out loud, because the programs themselves 
usually don't add speech capability?  Read an example on the INX list where 
someone used tee and sent the information to espeak as well as the menu.  I 
was wondering how hard it would be to add an option to dialog that sent the 
information it drew out to another program like espeak.  However, if a 
screen reader program already exists and works fine with dialog and other 
software, that would be a more general purpose solution.

The other option I've been checking into is using the browser and Javascript 
for the programming environment, but the one thing still lacking is being 
able to shell out to other local programs and use the results.  There are 
some work-arounds for this specific to browsers, but I'm waiting to find out 
if a more portable solution becomes available.  What I'd really like is a 
merge of a Javascript server side language like v8cgi with the ability to 
create an interface like a browser can.  Of course, since it could do local 
file access, the Internet access part should probably be shut off for 
security reasons.  The other drawback to the browser approach is that 
relatively few console based or light weight browsers fully support 
Javascript and css standards.

Would be curious to know what's lacking in the Windows console environment 
for software development that's available in other environments like Linux. 
I use mingw and msys all the time for quick console development.  I use the 
DOS command prompt and have customized it to a way I'm comfortable with, but 
other options like Console 2 are available and I believe Cygwin has a 
limited port of rxvt.  There are a number of good compilers that work from 
console mode, including mingw, djgpp and OpenWatcom.  There are also some 
decent shell script languages such as bash if batch files aren't enough.  I 
haven't found any information on ncurses working on Windows, but you do have 
pdcurses.  I also I read about a Windows port of vifm to Windows, so I would 
guess that means s-lang is available as well.

Couldn't resist discussing this topic even though the original post was from 
some time ago.  I've been very interested in some of the subjects and would 
enjoy hearing other programmers viewpoints on them as well.

Sincerely,
Laura
http://www.distasis.com/cpp
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References:
- programming on Windows (was RE: Any support/suggestions for a blind student)
  - From: arachna
Re: programming on Windows (was RE: Any support/suggestions for a blind student)

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