help with Python Environment For Blind User

[Zachary]

Hello,
I'm a blind non-programmer trying to learn Python.
I've got python 2.3 for windows, but the problem is that Idle doesn't seem
to work two well with my screen reading program.
Is notepad, then, my only other real choice? Pythonwin worked similarly
badly.
The problem is my programs inability to track the cursor. It doesn't tell
me what line I'm on, where I am in that line, or what I just deleted. It
would do this in a normal editor.
Any help with this would be appreciated.
Zack

[Anton Vredegoor]

Zachary" <vz******@veriz on.net> wrote:

I'm a blind non-programmer trying to learn Python.
I've got python 2.3 for windows, but the problem is that Idle doesn't seem
to work two well with my screen reading program.
Is notepad, then, my only other real choice? Pythonwin worked similarly
badly.
The problem is my programs inability to track the cursor. It doesn't tell
me what line I'm on, where I am in that line, or what I just deleted. It
would do this in a normal editor.
Any help with this would be appreciated.

Idle provides an editor and an interactive commandline. Maybe you end
up in the commandline while expecting to be in the editor? Pythonwin
has a similar setup.

I vaguely remember being puzzled by this too when I first met Python a
long time ago. Later I had another problem in that I didn't know how
to "run" a Python script. For some time I tried to use MsDos batch
files to call the scripts from. In the end things settled down and I
became comfortable with the tools.

At the moment my setup includes a lot of tools that aren't standard,
some tools were written by me, using Python!

Using my eyes to read from the screen and already being a programmer
when I started with Python it's a bit hard to anticipate your
specific situation.

Don't give up to soon. There seems to be one obvious way to do things
with Python, but in my case the interpretation of what is obvious
changes fairly often, for the better I hope :-)

Anton

[Samuel Walters]

I had a blind friend who swore by vim. It integrated well with his text
to speech converter as well as his braille terminal, and provided him lots
of facilities to figure out where exactly he was in a file.

In fact, poking around in the source, I see that there's several files
related to braille encodings and terminals.

Look into it. vim can be hard to learn at first, but it may pay off for
you in the end. It's a very powerful program, and could make many tools
easier for you to use.

Sam Walters

[John J. Lee]

"Zachary" <vz******@veriz on.net> writes:

I'm a blind non-programmer trying to learn Python.
I've got python 2.3 for windows, but the problem is that Idle doesn't seem
to work two well with my screen reading program.
Is notepad, then, my only other real choice? Pythonwin worked similarly
badly.
The problem is my programs inability to track the cursor. It doesn't tell
me what line I'm on, where I am in that line, or what I just deleted. It
would do this in a normal editor.
Any help with this would be appreciated.

There have been several threads on this in the past:

http://www.google.com/groups?as_q=bl...=&num=30&hl=en
Including one from T. V. Raman, author of emacspeak, revealing that
emacs / python-mode works for blind users (emacs is vi's enemy in the
endless emacs-vi editor war ;-).

Whichever editor you choose (toss a coin), be prepared for a struggle:
editors like vi and emacs are an *entirely* different species to
something like notepad. It's certainly worth it in the end.
John

[John J. Lee]

Forgot to include the tinyURL for that URL I posted:

http://tinyurl.com/28pod
John