[miki123211]

Blind person here, though not living in the US. I don't know the exact stats about unemployment here, but, from my observations, they're pretty similar. Most kids do know braille, though. I think that nowadays, braille doesn't help much, as only blind people can use it anyway. Literacy isn't as important for blind people as for the sighted, as they can't use braille to communicate with the rest of society anyway. I generally consider braille not that useful, except in certain narrow contexts. Beware that this is a personal opinion, and braille versus speech is almost as hot in the blind community as static versus dynamic typing with software developers. I don't really use braille daily (except for math drawings, as I'm still in education). I consider technology to be much, much more important now. Computers have probably been the most revolutionary thing when blind people are concerned. Communicating with the sighted, reading books that haven't been specially prepared, access to services etc. Also programming is one of the most accessible jobs out there, as code is just text that can be read aloud by a program, and most tools are CLI-based or have CLI-based alternatives. I think money would be better spend on teaching people on how to use the internet effectively instead of teaching them braille. Braille is a tool whose existence blind people should be aware of, as it may be useful, but it lost its relevance.

When it comes to unemployment, I don't see how braille could help here. Half of the problem is employer bias, actual obstacles that are hard/impossible to overcome or artifical obstacles (inaccessible software) also matter. I think that solving the bias problem would make the situation much better, though. One more problem I see, at least here, is education. Blind people aren't really that aware of what they can realistically do, so they get majors in art, history, literature etc, or think they can get by without good education. No one tells them where to go to have a real chance of finding a job. Sighted people also do it, but, if nothing else works out, they can get a job at Wallmart/Mcdonald's. Blind people don't have that possibility.

[Fr0styMatt88]

I’m not blind but very visually-impaired and couldn’t agree with you more about computers. The iPad and eBooks have been an absolute godsend for me — I still remember the old days of getting unwieldy enlarged physical books. Now it’s so much nicer!!

When growing up I had to prepare for the possibility that I’d go totally blind one day (thankfully that did not happen). One of the best things that was ever done for me was getting regular touch-typing lessons from a young age.

On screen readers - I’m really excited to see what ML could bring to the table here. I think accessibility could be increased greatly with an ML that could recognise what was happening on the screen based only on the contents of say, the last few seconds of frame buffer data.

I’m also really excited for what AR (augmented with audio in particular) glasses and the like could do here too.

[mavhc]

As a random observer I always thought that a linear text based OS would be good for blind people, basically what the CLI is but with more metadata, a tree structure so things not of interest could be skipped, eg a long list of filenames. A CLI with folding.

[miki123211]

Actually GUIs or websites, if done right, can be way better than anything that is text based. They include much more semantic information that a screen reader can use. For example, on websites, we have special shortcut keys to i.e. jump to next heading, table, landmark etc. We can even navigate within tables. This makes using most web/electron/chromium apps pretty easy. Most blind people prefer traditional win32 guis, but I actually don't. Problems arise when semantic information isn't provided, as in a web developer making the text whatever color is fashionable now and adding an onClick instead of using <button>. I don't see how a text-based OS would be different from that.

[mwcampbell]

Can you expand on why you don't prefer traditional Win32 GUIs?

[miki123211]

Web UIs can be used with my screen reader's search functionality and quick navigation keys. For example, in Spotify, which uses a web UI, I can do ctrl+ins+f, type rock, press enter and I'm focused on the Rock playlist. Similarly, in Skype, I can search for "audio call" etc. Some elements can also be reached pretty quickly with navigation keys. I think it's much easier to screw up a win32 gui than a web app. The non-web paets of Itunes are a good example. They're accessible, but all objects need to be reached by pressing tab, and there's a lot of objects. There's no semantic structure and no way to provide one. A website-like document would work better in this case.

[toast0]

Many years ago, I was looking into emacspeak [1], which seems like it could work for this. (I thought it would be a cool way to interact with a wearable computer; I didn't get much farther than those thoughts)

[1] http://emacspeak.sourceforge.net/

[miki123211]

Emacspeak is something I always wanted to try, but keep putting it off for later. Emacs is a powerful tool in itself, and the way Emacspeak integrates with it is unprecedented. It's not just a screen reader getting stuff from OS APIs, it knows a lot about internals of most Emacs features so it can make the speech output as efficient as possible. It also has some cool features like sounds in stereo/3d, changing voice parameters for different text styles etc.

[jareds]

Were you born blind or did you lose your vision later in life? I was born totally blind and grew up as computers became accessible. While I don’t use braille much now, I don’t understand how someone born blind can have basic literacy using only speech. Growing up reading books allowed me to understand basic sentence structure, spelling, etc. These are all important as a programmer considering a large part of the job is communicating your decisions and opinions. I also found braille to be very useful in math. I think that braille is critical for early education if you are blind. It’s less important if you lose your vision later in life and already are literate do to reading print growing up.

[miki123211]

I was born blind. I have read only a single book in Braille in my life, though I used it at school for notetaking. I switched to using the computer in last year of secondary (age of 15). I wanted to do so before, but I was in a very backwards special school for the blind. For math, I have been using LaTeX, which, coupled with some speech dictionary hacks in my screen reader, works pretty great. Braille is still useful when drawings are concerned, but only if you have the right books, which is not always the case. Most book reading was either done by my parents (before the age of ten) or by audiobooks afterwards. I don't have that many spelling problems, and those I do have are usually detected by Word, which is what I use when I really do care. I think the warning beep that my screen reader plays when typing a misspelled word is actually a much better learning tool than any form of reading.

[mwcampbell]

One of my blind friends told me there's some evidence that since braille is a form of literacy, people who were blind from birth and never learned braille also never developed some critical brain functions, so they're seriously limited in what kinds of jobs they can do. So if that's true, then even if you don't use braille much, learning it still helped you.

As for me, I'm partially sighted, so I learned to read print; I just need it larger and/or need to get up close to read it. So I can't contribute any first-hand knowledge or opinions on this topic.