I don’t know the limitations or even average braille reading speeds, though I would imagine that someone experienced enough could at least match average reading speeds. Assuming continues reading, not skimming through a page. At that point typos should be more tolerable.

I don’t want to speak for Bashar, but I understand how being outclassed by someone with a pretty heavy handicap against them can be a blow to the ego. Being forced to realize that the logic error you coded that took two days to find and nearly halted the development process is bad enough as it is. “Being beaten by someone who can’t see” may sound even worse.

But when you think about what it is to look through each line individually, it seems like Peter’s view of the code is the same as the ’step-through’ method of debugging in Visual Studio, or placing a breakpoint on every line in a GCC IDE like Bloodshed.

Also, I’d be interested in knowing if braille readers follow the same grouping patterns that sighted readers follow, for anyone that’s ever read the mispseleld wrods are sltil rdeable if all the ltters are teher, as typos in case-sensitive languages like C/ tend to cause me a lot of frustration, and also if the speed of braille reading is comparable to reading plain text.

Thinking things through, conceptually, away from the computer screen and the syntax of exact implementation certainly helps. I’m beginning to develop a new appreciation for all the written programming exams. Although they never prepare you for that in lectures or assignments. And comes to think of it, often time your writing is still evaluation on the correctness of the syntax. What a shame, things could be done so much better.

I find the staring problem happens to my brother, who was taking a grade 11 class. He’d just sit there, and ask me “why won’t it work?” Really, somehow, the teachers in the highschool need to teach the students how to think logically…to look at a bunch of code, and be able to explain what it does. I think that was missing from my brother’s class. (I helped him a bit with this.)

Problem number two for my brother involved scaling problems down to smaller problems. He’d look at the question and say to himself: “How do I do that?” I helped him with this…he hated it, but I got him off the computer, took out a pen and paper, and basically got him to tell me what the program needed to do, step by step. Getting away from the computer seemed to help him.

Another interesting observation on my part, is a few people I know taking a degree in CS at my uni, will stare at their code and say “I coded it right, it just doesn’t work!” I HATE when people say that, lol.

The blind being able to code….that’s just amazing.