Learning java while blind

[u/galaxy_wheelie]

Hay everyone as the title suggests I am blind and trying to learn java. I was just wondering if anyone had any experience, knolage or perhaps even knows one of the very illusive blind devs. If so I would realy appreciate any help you could offer.

[u/Ariakkas10]

About a year or more ago I came across a guy who did a study on blind developers and their IDE's. The results are obvious, but I'll post the abstract.

Integrated Development Environments (IDEs) play an important role in the workflow of many software developers, e.g. providing syntactic highlighting or other navigation aids to support the creation of lengthy codebases. Unfortunately, such complex visual information is difficult to convey with current screen-reader technologies, thereby creating barriers for programmers who are blind, who are nevertheless using IDEs. To better understand their usage strategies and challenges, we conducted an exploratory study to investigate the issue of code navigation by developers who are blind. We observed 28 blind programmers using their preferred coding tool while they performed various programming activities, in particular while they navigated through complex codebases. Participants encountered many navigation difficulties when using their preferred coding software with assistive technologies (e.g., screen readers). During interviews, participants reported dissatisfaction with the accessibility of most IDEs due to the heavy use of visual abstractions. To compensate, participants used multiple input methods and workarounds to navigate through code comfortably and reduce complexity, but these approaches often reduced their speed and introduced mistakes, thereby reducing their efficiency as programmers. Our findings suggest an opportunity for researchers and the software industry to improve the accessibility and usability of code navigation for blind developers in IDEs.

Albusays, Khaled & Ludi, Stephanie & Huenerfauth, Matt. (2017). Interviews and Observation of Blind Software Developers at Work to Understand Code Navigation Challenges. 91-100. 10.1145/3132525.3132550.

Published in ACM SIGACCESS 2017

Matt Heunerfauth runs a research lab dealing with these types of things . It's called CAIR. Communication Access and Inclusion Research. You might reach out to them and see if they have any resources. Here's a link to their contact page.

in 2018, Khaled Albusays got this paper published..

The goal of my research is to support the workflow of programmers who are blind; prior work has found that these users face challenges in using screen-readers to locate errors and debug software code. Recent advancements in auditory cues have made them a potential candidate for providing useful feedback to both sighted and visually impaired users, but little known about the effectiveness and the usability of such cues for blind programmers. I propose to investigate the efficiency of two different auditory techniques, to locate code errors and reduce the amount of time required to navigate through lengthy codebases. I will compare learning rates for Earcons (hierarchical representations of musical tones) and Spearcons (compressed speech) as potential candidates for the auditory feedback system. My research aim is to understand the proper way to implement usable auditory cues for these users. This document describes my research motivations, proposed research plan, current progress, and the potential contribution to the field of software engineering and accessibility for blind programmers.

ResearchGate has some more of his abstracts listed. I don't know how to get the papers though. I recommend reaching out to CAIR(Khalid is listed on their people page).

Good luck!

[u/galaxy_wheelie → u/Ariakkas10]

Thanks