My name is Cory, and I am a totally blind Computer Science major at The College of New Jersey. I will hopefully be able to provide some valuable feedback as this project progresses.
Speaking of which, let me give a quick update. I was hoping to find a textbook in digital format that covers the subject of Python in grueling detail, and would be adequate for the project at hand. Unfortunately, it seems that recorded textbooks on this subject are a bit hard to come by. Doing a search through the RFB & D book catalog of recorded books yielded one search result having nothing to do with the Python I was interested in. Luckily, there seems to be a plethora of free resources and tutorials online for learning Python. I am currently looking through the Python tutorial that is part of the python documentation. This tutorial assumes prior programming knowledge. While I’m sure I’ll quickly outgrow this particular tutorial it’s a good starting place to get the syntax down. I’m also pretty sure it does not cover multi-media topics such as image manipulation and the like. After looking through this documentation, I just recently wrote my first, all be it very simple python program. The fact that there is no compilation required seems to greatly speed up the process of testing. My first program was very simple, displaying text to the screen and containing one conditional statement.
I should also point out that, while I did install active python on my Windows-based computer, I was excited to learn that the Mac comes with Python built in. Since I just recently purchased a macbook pro I plan to try it out on that platform as well, just as soon as I get a bit more comfortable with the mac in general. I may have some things to say about screen reading on the mac, and general mac accessibility once I delve into it a bit more.
