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I'm a totally blind individual who would like to learn more of the theory aspect of computer science. I've had an intro data structures class and the general intro programming but would like to learn more on things such as software design, advanced data structures, and compiler design. I want to do this as a self study course not as part of college classes.

Unfortunately there aren’t many text books available on computer science from Recordings for the Blind and Dyslexic where I normally get my textbooks. I would appreciate any electronic resources preferably free that could help me get more of a computer science education rather then the newest language or platform that a lot of programming sites appear to focus on.

Jared
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  • Accessibility would be a good tag - certainly it's a topic that needs more coverage. Jared, what kind of system are you running? It may help to know if, say, PDF is or isn't an issue or if you prefer other formats, e.g. HTML or just plain text. – Geoglyph Dec 16 '08 at 17:02
  • I use Jaws for Windows on Windows XP so anything works although prefference is for audio or video that can be ripped to audio so I can listen to it on an mp3 player. For files to be read on the computer anything works since I can run it through OCR software if I need to. – Jared Dec 16 '08 at 22:57

8 Answers8

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You might find the Experiences of a Blind Computer Scientist a good read.

MIT's Open Courseware would be a good resource for you with the amount of videos/audio they have.

Really though, for the core computer-science topics I find it pretty hard to beat some of the better textbooks out there. Some offer digital versions of their book with purchase and some don't. For those that don't, I would just purchase the book and then download via a torrent site a digital e-book equivelant. Since you already own the book I don't think this would be a major problem.

mmcdole
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UC Berkley has a couple of computer science courses online for free as mp3 and video files (including RSS feed for each course). And if reading PDF files aren't an issue you could check out O'Reilly's Safari.

Jasper Bekkers
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The text book for Structure and Interpretation of Computer Programs appears to be accessible. Software engineering radio is a good podcast that I listen to but recently has focused a lot on model driven development and UML which doesn't interest me. The UC Berkley lectures are of varying quality, it's like all other college classes it depends on the professor. I've found I can follow along with the cs162 lectures fine but not so much with the cs61b. Part of this is because of the professor and part is probably because 61b is more math heavy since it's a data structures class. Unfortunately the RSS feeds are useless since the file names are meaningless. I used my podcatcher to download the entire lecture series, then used the converting capability of foobar 2000 to rename the files with there track number so I could listen to them in order. I've used Safari at work before and it is accessible although to expensive for me to get a yearly subscription. Open Courseware appears to have a lot of good stuff. Unfortunately I don't use itunes so instead of downloading each mp3 file individually I used the firefox extension DownThemAll! with a custom filter to grab all the mp3 files at once from the specific course I wanted. Another series of books that looks useful are the data structures books by Bruno R. Preiss several of which are available online at http://www.brpreiss.com/books/opus5/ Some of the equations are represented as graphics but I can often tell what the general idea is by context.

Jared
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  • In addition to the link you posted, I find [robert sedgewick's booksite](http://algs4.cs.princeton.edu), along with the asociated book and video lectures to be extremely useful/accessible as well. He mostly describes in text many information contained in the images where most tutorials just rely on the reader visualizing the graphics on their own – lightning_missile Apr 25 '15 at 06:53
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I wonder would the Structure and Interpretation of Computer Programs video lectures by Hal Abelson and Gerald Jay Sussman be of any use?

If the audio content is enough on its own without the video, they are an excellent digital resource.

Galwegian
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The podcast "software engineering radio" is excellent. Though not CS courseware, it is the most academic and intellectually stimulating podcast I have found about software development and computer science.

http://www.se-radio.net/

Tim
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I to am a new blind programmer! I only lost my vision 5 years ago. Anyway, I have been programming in Visual Basic 2008 throughout the past year. It turned out to be more accessible than I had at first suspected. I start a Java class next semester and the required text is a free online text! It is posted below. Introduction to Programming Using Java, Fifth Edition http://math.hws.edu/javanotes/

Can some of you seasoned blind programmers share with us any blogs or websites where other blind programmers can be found??

tRavenous
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I'm also a totally blind programmer, currently working for Microsoft. The most valuable resource for te technical books is Safari (safari.oreilly.com). You can read thousands of computer science texts there. if you're in the USA, you can also get many of those titles for free from BookShare (www.bookshare.org). In both cases graphical images will be an issue, but there's no easy solution for that. Most good books have enough descriptive text that one can manage without the diagrams.

Saqib
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A language called Quorum is a lot like Python but optimized across a few more syntactic details, and the corresponding development environment is designed with the blind in mind. https://quorumlanguage.com/ This might fit especially well with the use case where most students are using Python.

A 2016 blog about CSed (actually a response to a blog post) points to

Also, see other ideas in a similar question on another SO site: https://cseducators.stackexchange.com/questions/3441/teaching-a-blind-high-school-student

Bennett Brown
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