I think it would be much better if the screen reader could use sounds for punctuation, like the sound of a typewriter typing to indicate a dot, and some meep-like sound with the frequency goes up for an opening parenthesis, and down for a closing parenthesis.

I liked Urbit's mapping from symbols to syllables: https://github.com/urbit/docs/blob/master/docs/hoon/syntax.m...

That idea is as old as Victor Borge...

Interesting, how do blind developers feel about minimalist languages like lisp? On one hand it seems like it would read very well in some circumstances (+ 1 2), but the scoping could be a real pain. Cobol seems like another language that might be well suited to them.

I'm not aware of any correlation between blindness and programming language preference, even when blind programmers work on their own projects. I used to think blind programmers wouldn't like Python because it has significant indentation. (Note: I'm visually impaired, but I program visually, not with a screen reader.) But as it turns out, I know blind programmers who love Python and can deal with the indentation just fine. The NVDA screen reader is written in Python, and that project was started by a blind programmer who could choose any language he pleased.

Some projects developed exclusively or primarily by blind programmers do make odd indentation choices. A couple of my blind programmer friends prefer single-space indentation, or at least they did the last time I worked with them (using Python). NVDA uses tabs for indentation, which breaks with the Python convention of four spaces per indentation level. But blind programmers are perfectly capable of following the usual indentation conventions when working with sighted programmers.

Finally, I don't know of any blind programmers who like COBOL. I'm sure there are some, probably working at banks like their sighted counterparts; I just don't happen to know them.

Emacspeak[0] is one of the more popular voice oriented IDEs. I have yet to get it working, but I think you can do things like get it to read visual regions and sections between matching parens, etc. Ideally this is what I want to use, but it has resisted my efforts so far. Maybe I'll give it another try this weekend.

[0] - http://emacspeak.sourceforge.net/

"parens parens parens parens parens parens parens some code here parens parens parens"

The regularity of Lisp's syntax suggests an interesting way to render it in speech, at least for blind people who happen to have a good ear for music. Set the TTS engine to monotone (i.e. no attempt at natural intonation), and increase the pitch for each level of parenthesis nesting. So it would basically be singing the code, going up a note or two for each level of nesting. It would sound weird, but I think it could work for some people, myself included.

I like that direction, but it also sounds like it might be hard to know the reference points. I wonder if it'd be easier to separate if you used musical notes in conjunction, where the octave/note/chord/scale is mapped to the indentation?

Even better would be tools that are aware of indentation, that you can't see the indentation, and help you debug problems without having to make it so explicit all the time. It could get really weird / grinding to have to listen to monotone speech that's constantly changing pitch.

What if instead of just the pitch it said "do ra mi fa so la ti do" every time you went up/down a level? If I ever lost my sight I doubt my tone deafness would would go away.

Ugh, that won't do. I need my: brace bracket paren asterisk some code paren bracket brace semicolon.