The compass tones are ingenius, but aside from that I'm not surprised he was able to do this as sailing is one of those things where feeling plays a much larger role than one would expect. There are many forces at play that have nothing to do with sight. Having helmed in night storms of 20 foot seas where I could basically see nothing, the motion of the vessel and feedback force exerted on the wheel, I quickly got a sense of how the boat was moving. In fact in those situations I probably would have been much better off with your friends compass than the soaked one at the wheel. And dont even get me started on trying to read the windex in such conditions!
Coding blind would be much different. The input is physical but there is nothing tangible coming back. It is more or less all visual. Come to think of it, if I ever lost my vision I would probably become a full time sailor :)
> The input is physical but there is nothing tangible coming back. It is more or less all visual.
Not really. At the end of the day it's just data, text, how you encode it is not very important as long as it can be understood.
Because humans very strongly rely on sight, it makes sense that the default serialization format for text output be print/visual, but there are a number of non-visual interfaces to text. And if none fits, build a new paradigm.
I think samlittlewood below makes a good point: even with a fairly slow (e.g. braille) output, it's at worst similar to coding using a line-oriented editor (e.g. ed). Except you're used to it because you see pretty much everything via a line-editor so you're probably proficient at it.
I went to school with a blind CS student. He had no problem using a computer by himself but the normal classroom setting was vary difficult for him. Based on how he operated meetings would be far more difficult than actually writing code.
PS: Ok, his is not going to be building a GUI but text to speech works well. And a keyboard only interface works fine for both VI and visual studio.
The tendency of people explaining their ideas to draw diagrams on paper / a white board. Once a diagram was on a computer there are tools to help him understand it, but it took a while. So, the only way for him to keep up with a free flowing discussion is to follow what people said.
I remember looking into whiteboard systems that automatically digitize what people write as a way to conveniently record what was written but the implication that this tech could also be used to help a blind person during a meeting is interesting.
Coding blind would be much different. The input is physical but there is nothing tangible coming back. It is more or less all visual. Come to think of it, if I ever lost my vision I would probably become a full time sailor :)