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It seems to me that one thing we could do would be to use some updated version of our existing technologies to provide people with personalized notifications of such things as what station they're entering via personal technologies such as a phone. Your phone (or alternative device) tells you, in a language or visual or tactile cue of your choice, where you are, what station you are entering, how much more time to your destination station, and so on. You subscribe to the notifications you want in the format you want. This sort of thing could be approached more generally, so that it would work for kids who aren't paying attention, for travelers who don't speak the loudspeaker's language even when it's working, adults who see and understand the language just fine but need an alarm because of a tendency to fall asleep and miss their stop, and so on. Which then tells me that the big tech companies should all have whole divisions of employees with various "features" (very short, tall, blind, speech problems, etc.) who would not only test ideas like these but design, prototype, and build them. They would not only be experimenting with products and services for customers but with how to get their own work done, looking into questions such as whether you could design a programming language with a syntax optimized for hearing instead of looking, which would then be transpiled into something more mainstream, or creating alternatives to keyboard & mouse for those with muscular disorders, or countless other things. My guess is that many of the ideas they come up with for helping some small niche of the population will be discovered to be of great value to many other groups in ways that weren't anticipated. Of course the dev tools they come up with for blind coders would be made available to all, but the "audio-optimized syntax" might just prove to be popular with programmers with no vision problems, and the keyboard/mouse replacement might be a big hit with cooks, surgeons, and musicians. I'm sure there are many such things already going on that I haven't heard of, but I'm thinking it could become a very rich source of innovative technologies and products with big markets and should be such a big push that everybody knows about it. |
It also makes me wonder what the "best" programming language would be for blind coders. I know my friend has talked about Java and Python, and I think Python has problems for blind folks because of the significant white space; but I believe even that is surmountable.
But, your mention of a syntax optimized for hearing is probably something we want to build, anyway. I just noticed a while back that there's a whole generation of kids who don't type to interact with their devices. They talk to them; I guess they still read the screen for replies, but I would guess there will come a time when even reading is optimized out of the system...already lots of folks interact primarily with their device through an earbud. Things like Google Glass will eventually happen.
In short, optimizing for other abilities seems like a future-friendly direction for exploration.