Comment by densh
Comment by densh a day ago
> As a blind person, AI has changed my life.
Something one doesn't see in news headlines. Happy to see this comment.
Comment by densh a day ago
> As a blind person, AI has changed my life.
Something one doesn't see in news headlines. Happy to see this comment.
I did a maths undergrad degree and the way my blind, mostly deaf friend and I communicated was using a stylized version of TeX markup. I typed on a terminal and he read / wrote on his braille terminal. It worked really well.
Yes, mostly raw TeX, just plain ascii - not specially coded for Braille. This was quite a long time ago, mid 1980's, so not long after TeX had started to spread in computer science and maths communities. My friend was using a "Versa Braille" terminal hooked via a serial port to a BBC Micro running a terminal program that I'd written. I cannot completely remember how we came to an understanding of the syntax to use. We did shorten some items because the Versa Braille only had 20 chars per "line".
He is still active and online and has a contact page see https://www.foneware.net. I have been a poor correspondent with him - he will not know my HN username. I will try to reach out to him.
Now that I've been recalling more memories of this, I do remember there being encoding or "escaped" character issues - particularly with brackets and parentheses.
There was another device between the BBC Micro and the "Versa Braille" unit. The interposing unit was a matrix switch that could multiplex between different serial devices - I now suspect it might also have been doing some character escaping / translation.
For those not familiar with Braille, it uses a 2x3 array (6 bits) to encode everything. The "standard" (ahem, by country) Braille encodings are super-sub-optimal for pretty much any programming language or mathematics.
After a bit of (me)memory refresh, in "standard" Braille you only get ( and ) - and they both encode to the same 2x3 pattern! So in Braille ()() and (()) would "read" as the same thing.
I now understand why you were asking about the software used. I do not recall how we completely worked this out. We had to have added some sort of convention for scoping.
I now also remember that the Braille terminal aggressively compressed whitespace. My friend liked to use (physical) touch to build a picture, but it was not easy to send spatial / line-by-line information to the Braille terminal.
Being able to rely on spatial information has always stuck with me. It is for this reason I've always had a bias against Python, it is one of the few languages that depends on precise whitespace for statement syntax / scope.
For a physical view on this see:
https://www.reddit.com/r/openscad/comments/1p6iv5y/christmas...
The creator, https://www.reddit.com/user/Mrblindguardian/ has asked for help a few times in the past (I provided feedback when I could), but hasn't needed to as often of late, presumably due to using one or more LLMs.
+1 and I would be curious to read and learn more about it.
A blind comedian / TV personality in the UK has just done a TV show on this subject - I haven't seen it, but here's a recent article about it: https://www.theguardian.com/tv-and-radio/2025/nov/23/chris-m...
Chris McCausland is great. A fair bit of his material _does_ reference his visual impairment, but it's genuinely witty and sharp, and it never feels like he's leaning on it for laughs/relying on sympathy.
He did a great skit with Lee Mack at the BAFTAs 2022[0], riffing on the autocue the speakers use for announcing awards.
Hilariously, he beat the other teams in the “Say What You See” round (yes, really) of last year’s Big fat Quiz. No AI involved.
Haha that's great!
I'm not a fan of his (nothing against him, just not my cup of tea when it comes to comedy and mostly not been interested in other stuff he's done), but the few times I have seen him as a guest on shows it's been clear that he's a generally clever person.
I remembered he was once a techie, and Wikipedia confirms that he (Chris McCausland) has a BSc Honours in Software Engineering.
Same! @devinprater, have you written about your experiences? You have an eager audience...
I suppose I should write about them. A good few will be about issues with the mobile apps and websites for AI, like Claude not even letting me know a response is available to read, let alone sending it to the screen reader to be read. It's a mess, but if we blind people want it, we have to push through inaccessibility to get it.
What other accessibility features do you wish existed in video AI models? Real-time vs post-processing?
Mainly realtime processing. I play video games, and would love to play something like Legend of Zelda and just have the AI going, then ask it "read the menu options as I move between them," and it would speak each menu option as the cursor moves to it. Or when navigating a 3D environment, ask it to describe the surroundings, then ask it to tell me how to get to a place or object, then it guide me to it. That could be useful in real-world scenarios too.
I have to believe you used the word see twice ironically.
Like many others, I too would very much like to hear about this.
I taught our entry-level calculus course a few years ago and had two blind students in the class. The technology available for supporting them was abysmal then -- the toolchain for typesetting math for screen readers was unreliable (and anyway very slow), for braille was non-existent, and translating figures into braille involved sending material out to a vendor and waiting weeks. I would love to hear how we may better support our students in subjects like math, chemistry, physics, etc, that depend so much on visualization.