This brings up a really interesting point - how do blind people visualise code, conceptually? When people talk about stacks, heaps, lists etc, there's generally a visual representation that goes along with it. I wonder what kind of abstractions blind people use.
Being blind doesn't mean you don't conceptualize things visually, or at least spatially.
When I was younger and being taught how to get around a new area, I had a hell of a time trying to get my instructors to draw me a map. Not sure if I wasn't explaining myself well or if those instructors just decided to play stupid, but I had to fight to get even a simple drawn tactile map, and once I had one everything more or less clicked into place. Now that we have accessible touchscreens on just about every modern mainstream OS, I'd love a shared whiteboard app that could accessibly render UML diagrams or whatever else drawn on one tablet to a roomful of connected phones, laptops and tablets. You couldn't necessarily convey shapes and such exactly, but if you could position a shape meaningfully and add some sort of access hint metadata (I.e. "downward-pointing arrow") I could spatially explore a UI or system diagram and everyone else can have their pretty pictures.
Are there any blind compiler/interpreter hackers? A programming language optimized for the blind would make an interesting esolang [0]. I guess a REPL works great. Does Forth or Lisp read better to the blind? Can you do syntax "coloring" in sound? Are static types helpful or is type inference prefered? Would they like an editor like ed?
Check out Emacspeak[0] for one of the best audio coding environments I've worked with. Not a big fan of Raman's "ignore decades of accessibility work and run Emacs apps for everything!" approach, but based on my recollections of 15 years or so ago, it was one of the best coding environments I've worked with. It did a sort of audio syntax highlighting with different voices for different tokens, and more or less nailed auditory bracket/paren matching.
I can't for the life of me code in any Lisp-like language. Too much nesting, and whereas speech synthesis inserts pauses at commas and other punctuation marks, Lisp's lack of them makes it hard to parse a heavily-nested function call by ear. This is true to a lesser extent with Haskell and its emphasis on ., $ and other operators that change how a function call is structured.
As always, opinions expressed are my own, and shouldn't be taken as a statement of how collective blind people do X. I'm one of many, so please don't walk away from this thinking Lisps are hard for blind folks. They're tough for me, and above are my particular reasons why.
To be very honest with you, I never really think about the stack and the heap. I know the concepts, but I tend to zoom into my code far closer. I work with the current function only, its inputs and outputs. Someone on Twitter recommended TDD to me, which indeed is only a small logical step from what I am already mentally conceptualizing
