| It is interesting that you're getting a lot of suggestions from people that don't claim to have disabilities. Perhaps few of them read hacker news? It seems that their needs would vary. One thing you could do is try to an interface to test it yourself. I tried to write and edit a document once using just voice commands. (Let's say someone has carpal tunnel and needs to use voice commands). It was eye opening. I realized how much more frustrating it is to go back and try to delete or fix something than anything else. And if the software didn't recognize an unusual word, it was really hard. Dragon dictate -- the software I used -- had already learned a lot of this over the years, and there were many commands for changing that, or deleting up to a point. The hard part was moving the cursor to exactly one spot and then talking in a new word. Anyway, if you tried something like that you would learn a lot. Imagine if you are blind folded, and have to hear the program and then have to keep it all in memory. Well, that is a lot to keep in your working memory. I would want some kind of canonical "view" to always get to in order to find my way around. I am glad you are working on this. |
I've tried that as well. It was very frustrating. I used the Windows speech-to-text features.
Programming code is made to be typed and read. If you can't do either of those reliably, you'll be simulating that you can, which sort of by definition can't work well, because if you could simulate being able to write well, then you wouldn't even call that a disability, you'd just be different.
What I'm getting at is that the problem is simulation. Ideally, there would be a way to program by voice (or with a mouse, etc). Not program by typing code with voice, but find a way to describe a program (i.e. program) via voice. A voice-centric toolkit. I hope I'm not being too vague.
What we have now is such a typing-centric development world that we don't even think about all the other possiblities. Isn't the modern laptop just a really fancy version of a 100 year old typewriter?
I think Bret Victor would have a lot to say about this [0].
[0] http://worrydream.com/#!/TheFutureOfProgramming