This may be even more important for the rest of the code. Who cares about the parentheses after the `if` keyword? No one, they're just there to delimit the condition. Likewise the curly braces, they just delimit a sub-block. Their absence should not stop the screen reader from spotting the end of the `if` block. They should say "end if" regardless. Same goes for Python.
Structural editors have mostly failed, but maybe some specialised version could be more useful to blind people?
Or "referer" in HTTP because that's what the standard uses. Or "creat" when discussing the UNIX system call or a function with the same purpose on another platform.
To the point of the article, I try really hard to make sure that things like this don't happen, ideally before a typo like that gets merged.
That helps a lot because with a screen reader “slash star <comment text> star slash” is significantly more listenable to when compared to “slash slash <one line> slash slash <another line> slash slash <third line>…”
Surprisingly this is the only thing I cannot seem to find around my IRC logs… Digging through the logs other things that were called out to make comprehension harder for blind people are:
* Unicode identifiers;
* Boilerplate you cannot easily skip past without losing context (common in e.g. Java);
* Typos (esp. if done on purpose, inconsistently);
All this comes from their preferred interface being a screen reader which, I believe, is true for most blind programmers.