Having read many posts by blind programmers across different communities, including AppleVis, I would like to draw attention to something that many of you may already know, but that still seems to be underestimated.
1. Integrated Development Environments based on graphical user interfaces have become extremely complex. Even many sighted developers struggle with them, and some of the most experienced developers still prefer programming in an ANSI terminal environment.
2. Graphical user interface applications are often difficult or impossible to test thoroughly as a blind developer, which makes them a less attractive development target.
3. Terminal-based computing is purely symbolic and text-driven, with a predictable and linear screen layout. This makes it a natural fit for blind users—not only for programming, but also for everyday tasks such as email, communication, and system administration.
Linux is probably the strongest platform for this style of work. It can run on a Raspberry Pi (which I personally recommend), or be used on macOS or Windows via containers or hosted systems.
Terminal-based computing and programming certainly involve a learning curve, but many users find the effort worthwhile and empowering in the long run.
In this spirit, I have prepared a Braille-first, terminal-only Linux environment that may serve as a starting point. It is open source and free. Being based on Debian Linux, it allows users to easily install additional software for programming or other purposes as needed.
Project page:
https://github.com/stwelebny/beaver
Beaver is not an operating system itself, but can be installed after you already have setup Debian Linux.
Comments
Not a silver bullet
I have a very strong Linux background dating all the way back to early 1998 when I had the crazy idea of downloading the RedHat Linux 5.1 CD image (currently known as Fedora) over a dial-up connection, got involved in kernel development in the early and mid-2000s during the days of Linux 2.4 and 2.6, and with the exception of gaming, which I had a dedicated PC with Windows for, all my computer use was on Linux. I was one of the first people to join the compositor craze in 2006 with Compiz, used Gentoo for most of my sighted days, and only switched to macOS in 2011 when my vision began to deteriorate. Since then I kept using Linux on VPS hosts, containers, Raspberry Pis, you name it, but never again on the desktop, because the days in which I had fun recompiling the kernel to add support for a Wi-Fi driver, or patching power management code to make some buggy drivers wake back up from suspension, are long gone. Also and since I'm not congenitally blind and lost my sight well into my adulthood, I never felt much need to use Braille, which I did learn in rehabilitation but never actually practiced, and I don't think Braille is particularly useful for coding.
As a speech synthesizer screen-reader user, while I agree that command-line interfaces are vastly superior to graphical interfaces, my opinion flips completely when it comes to other kinds of text user interfaces with graphical user interfaces, so I run from console editors like the devil, and whenever I want to edit something on a remote machine, I just install
rmateon it, which is a Ruby script that makes it possible to use TextMate over ansshtunnel to edit remote files from the command-line as if they were local, and always try to learn about available command-line invocations that can help me avoid all kinds ofncursesinterfaces.Text user interfaces
Try some of those fancy TUI's, with animated spinners, or those Python Terminal prettifyer libs, and you'll see why the Terminal still isn't safe from the sighted's need to visualize, verb, everything. That being said, it is still, at it's core, the most accessible input output system. And that's also why AI's work so well too.
Thank you for this
This is really interesting.
Please forgive my foolishness. I'm assuming I can use something like parallels to set this up? What you've created is like an overlay for the linux OS, is that right?