[nfbcs] Learning Programming Languages

Sat Apr 15 09:55:11 UTC 2017

On 4/15/17, William Grussenmeyer via nfbcs <nfbcs at nfbnet.org> wrote:
> It is not the programming languages that have accessibility problems.
> You can program in any language using any screen reader and notepad on
> windows or texteditor on mac, etc. without any accessibility issues.
> As to compile the program, all command line tools are accessible. But
> many programmers use what are called development environments which
> speed up the process of programming by helping you with auto-complete
> of words, sorting library calls, helping to organize your files, etc.

My personal opinion is that IDE's sometimes abstract away crutial
things that you need to understand when beginning to program. For me
jumping through the accessability hoops required to "learn" the IDE
was never worth it.

> For windows, an accessible development environment is Eclipse or
> visual studio.  But they both can be a little difficult to learn at
> first.  I would suggest starting with Java to learn basic programming
> concepts.  You can program java in Eclipse.  Its a typical type of
> language used in many university and used widely in industry.  It is
> better than starting with a web language or with  SQL which is a
> database language because it teaches you more formal  concepts, has a
> better debugging environment, and it is harder to make mistakes in.
Yes, Java can be a good choice.
> Java was design to be easy to learn and hard to make mistakes in.  It
> is easy in web languages to screw things up because they do not do any
> error checking and wont give you any feedback about  errors.  It is
> also easy in web langauges not to learn basic programming concepts or
> to misunderstand the ideas because they are so informal in their
> syntax.
Agreed. Though there are many languages that make it easy to get a
basic program built, the programmer never gets to learn about
important concepts. Type checking is a good example, both python and
php do not enforce setting the type of a variable. These type relaxed
languages are often indirectly the cause of very cryptic errors
(python can take any type as argument to a function, php has the "=="
and "===" operators that can also cause bugs that are hard to find
without understanding the theory behind them).

> Setting up eclipse and java on a windows machine takes some time and
> you'll have to look up some tutorial to do it.
> Another option is to try visual studio and C#.  I don't know much
> about those two but they are more formal languages that are easy to
> learn in.
C# is also good, but it is more tied to Windows than Java, which is
quite cross-platform. Java is also good for mobile development.

- Willem Venter
> There might be some books on bookshare about programming in different
> languages like java and C# that you might try to look up.  Online
> tutorials are not always good to learn from.  They are usually short
> and badly described.
>
>
>
> On 4/14/17, Jack Heim via nfbcs <nfbcs at nfbnet.org> wrote:
>> I think learning a web programming language like php is a good idea. I
>> was at lunch with some tech types last Saturday and one of them related
>> how his company had to pay a php programmer just out of college,
>> $80,000. Otherwise, he'd have gone somewhere else.  There is a ton of
>> stuff being written in python these days too.
>>
>>
>> One of the problems starting with a web programming language would be
>> that you'd have to get a web server working first. Early on it might be
>> difficult to know if the problem is with your script or with the server.
>> On the other hand, with a web app, you could immediately write something
>> actually useful. That might be good to keep you motivated.
>>
>> In terms of how hard they are to learn, the programming language itself
>> makes some difference but the biggest thing is going to be the
>> development environment. In other words, the biggest issue is probably
>> going to be how your screen reader interacts with the program you are
>> using to write the code. Personally, I use gedit in linux with the orca
>> screen reader.
>> On 04/14/2017 08:35 AM, Jim Fettgather via nfbcs wrote:
>>> Hello, we have a computer users group in the Midwest consisting of a
>>> number of visually impaired individuals who are interested in learning
>>> all
>>> that they can about programming languages, which work the best with
>>> screen
>>> readers, and resources for learning this advanced skill.
>>> If anyone would care to take a moment and share their experience and
>>> knowledge, either on or off list, I would sure appreciate any
>>> information
>>> regarding the process of learning to program, and which programming
>>> languages lend themselves for use with screen readers.
>>> Thanks a lot for any information you may wish to share..
>>> Jim Fettgather
>>>
>>> jfettgather at alphapointe.org<mailto:jfettgather at alphapointe.org>
>>>
>>>
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>>
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>
>
> --
> William Grussenmeyer
> PhD Student, Computer Science
> University of Nevada, Reno
> NSF Fellow
>
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