Does anyone know if there are audio-only programming environments? Ostensibly, I'm interested in tools that facilitate blind programmers, but I'm curious about more esoteric things as well. It would be ...interesting... if an editor played more ominous music as your cyclomatic complexity increased. Or, assigned a different motif to each class so you could tell where you were in the code by listening.

Curious about this too. I'm not aware of any environment specifically designed for this, but a few years ago I saw this video, which I found interesting Using Python to Code by Voice (). And now I see there's been a similar StrageLoop talk given by someone else

Oh, that's a really interesting point!

Blind programming would be facilitated if we could have big 2D braille readers instead of the row at a time devices they currently use. An ipad sized device with thousands of bumps would be great. Nobody has figure out how to build one

I haven't used a braille monitor before. How would you use a 2d one? Would you still have to read it one line at a time, or is it reasonable to expect people to consume more than one line at once?

One of the most interesting aspects of braille is that traditionally for example when translating a magazine like playboy was they would hire Artists to make tactile versions of the Cartoons, In this way people could feel a piece of art. You can imagine some software that automatically generates a tactile version of an image, but you have to have a grid of Bumps that can be individually addressed. Outside of the lab there aren’t any two dimensional bump grid systems, most braille readers are only one row because it costs too much to make a 2d one. Braille faded away once the reading machine from Kurzweil came out. Every library in America bought a Kurzweil machine and made his reputation. However braille offers higher comprehension then listening to voice, And it is a shame they moved away from braille because it is a superior system in many ways. And I did my bachelors thesis on braille Translation by Computer, and it’s a very easy program, Braille is basically an abbreviation system, And was so well designed it has barely changed in 100 years. I think with unicode One could make the case that it’s time to increase from six bumps to nine, But really the thing holding blind Programmer’s back The lack of a 2d output device that lets them see the screens they’re drawing. There have been some very interesting patterns from Nokia and Apple relating to vibrating haptic areas on the screen to allow a person to feel something in a region, but none of these devices have ever shipped. You would need some kind of elastic surface that could be raised with electrostatic charge and a grid addressing system. Anyway if anyone is also a mechanical genius they should think about this it would be an immense value to the visually impaired. My thesis advisor was fond of telling me that blind people can do everything except sort socks.

Edward's comment blows my mind. I would really love to have a VS Code plugin that shifted ambient music knobs based on place in a codebase... It would likely help me a lot with switching programming contexts or languages more quickly.

There are many digital audio workstations for sale that have motorized sliders that Can be controlled by the computer. nowadays the industry is moving towards rotary controls Such as on the excellently designed Yamaha CP 88, where the lights around the knob allow the knob to be electronically set without a motor. However those controls don’t work for a blind person, and the CP 88 is not handicap friendly. It is a real shame that Nokia was destroyed by that Microsoft mole elop, They had been working on some really great haptic interface technologies. One of the problems with our Patent system is that you can patent things that you haven’t actually invented yet. So Companies squat on ideas. If you consider imagination invention then Jules Verne invented everything practically. That guy was unbelievable. Most people don’t realize that Jules Verne was so imaginative and so futuristic That his novels were considered by his publisher only suitable for children because they were wild fantasies, but almost everything he imagined was implemented eventually. A militant ecoterrorist vegetarian named Captain Nemo, Who made synthetic meat out of plant material And ran around interfering with the whaling industry.