The first time I taught a blind student, I was teaching C. I walked up to them to find they were clearly irritated, and said something like "Nothing works, I don't understand".

Looking at their computer, it appeared to be off. I said, delicately, that were they sure the computer was turned on. They laughed and turned their laptop's screen on, saying (as you say), they left it off to save battery life!

The problem turned out to be they were using textedit, which while a nice light (and highly accessible) editor, by default turns "s into “”. Unfortunately, Apple's text-to-speech "helpfully" just described all these as speech quotes. This made it impossible to understand, from the compiler error, why the code wasn't working. A quick head into settings and the student was off (they soon changed to textmate, also very accessible).

I hate text editor assumptions

Well only the ones that don’t work for me

But i hate how hard it is to find an assumptionless and offline text editor these days

What about SciTE or Geany?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SciTE

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Geany

pluma is pretty good

I didn't know it was possible to turn off the laptop screen while it's in use. How is that done?

I know you can turn a MacBook's brightness essentially off, just by bringing it to the lowest tick. On iOS there is a VoiceOver gesture to turn off the screen even while the phone is on, so there may also be a purpose-built version of that in VO for macOS.

edit: Evidently there is VO-specific tooling: https://support.apple.com/en-us/HT201443

Most PC laptops have a key in the function key or media control row for this. Look for one that resembles a monitor, or check your laptop's owners' manual.

There’s an accessibility feature called Screen Curtain that turns it off completely https://support.apple.com/en-us/HT201443

This seems cool for a11y development/testing as well. Sometimes I close my eyes but it's difficult not to cheat.

Now I need to figure out how to press `VO-Shift-Fn-_`

I've a Microsoft Surface Book 2 and I can't turn off the backlight entirely with the brightness adjustment. I also can't just turn the display off and have the computer keep processing unless I use a third party tool.

I didn't catch if she said she was completely blind or not. She may be able to make out some shape or color distinctions and is using that as a navigational aid.

I have a friend who is blind but keeps their phone on max brightness for this reason. Very little comes through but they still find it helpful.

> Random thought: She could turn down the screen's brightness all the way to save battery and improve privacy... ;-)

She probably turned it up so viewers could follow what was happening.

Otherwise there’s a builtin companion feature to voiceover which disables the display (screen curtain).

She probably has it turned up for the benefit of us who are utterly dependent on visible light ;)

She probably does, but you're seeing a video she's making for you, a sighted person.

Funny you mention this. Most screen readers actually have that as a feature, and it's called screen curtain. As many things in this field, it was pioneered by Apple, but it's available almost everywhere these days.

This opens up really interesting opportunities, think cheating at school for example.

Previously, other tricks have been used to achieve the same effect, including not having a display plugged in at al, Configuring Windows to use a second display while none was actually plugged in, or using a fake HDMI dongle.

Without using a headset it's less privacy, as the phone would read out the screen contents to anybody in hearing range.

Well that's a given, the screen isn't