If Code Could Speak

The first time I met James I was amazed to see him sitting mere inches from the monitor. As I moved closer to see what it was all about I saw the text and graphics on the screen zooming in and out. It was enough to make my stomach turn.

James is legally blind. It’s actually not as bad as it sounds (it does come with some perks like free public transport hahaha) and he uses a great bit of software called ZoomText to magnify the display. But the best bit is the Text-To-Speech (TTS) feature. Highlight a paragraph of text (for which there is a short-cut key combination) and Davros reads the text back to you. You can also adjust the speed at which text is read back. I can just understand it at about medium pace but James has it turned all the way up to Chipmunks.

Recently, James wondered what source code would sound like and, to his delight, discovered that not only did ZoomText read the source code back as intelligibly as (perhaps more so than) a human, it even understood CamelCase text, separating the words appropriately.

Like most developers, I guess, I’ve always tried to adhere to one of the longest serving mantras of the development community - to write readable code. As you’ve probably guessed, James and I pair program quite a bit and now that he uses ZoomText to read back our code, never has this meant as much to me as it does now.

As I’m coding away now, there is this little voice in the back of my head (yes I am nuts but that’s a different voice) constantly reading back the statements, constantly reminding me of what it will sound like when James uses his TTS. And I think it’s made a difference. I think because of it I’ve changed the way I name methods, classes, etc., and even the way I structure statements, hopefully, for the better.