HACKER Q&A
📣 dgellow

Text-to-speech recommendations for code editors?


Hi there,

I’m in an annoying situation where I’ve been unable to work effectively for the past 2 weeks due to some eye inflammation. I didn’t lose my sight but focusing and reading text on a display for longer than 15-20 minutes makes me feel pretty tired and results in headaches, itching, slight nausea, and other uncomfortable feelings.

I touch type and I can write without problem with closed eyes (modulo a few typos), and can see my screen, but not focus on block of text. That makes it basically not possible to write and review code.

I started looking into accessibility features, but while I found pretty good speech-to-text tools for VSCode based on GitHub Copilot, I haven’t found the opposite, something that would help me review blocks of code via audio. Screen readers I tried aren’t ideal, they are more adapted to situations where the user cannot see their display at all (with all the complexity that goes with it) and read everything as if it was prose, which doesn’t work well for code (or it’s a skill issue on my side, I have limited experience using them).

Just curious if people on HN would have interesting recommendations. Accessibility features are often pretty niche, it has been difficult to find information about them that go a bit further than “activate voiceover” and discuss actual use cases.


  👤 sargstuff Accepted Answer ✓
Alternatively, could go the chatgpt assitant route. aka tell chatgpt to generate a talon script that does .

simlar demo examples:

quick macros for talon : https://github.com/rntz/quick_macro

creating macros with chatgpt : https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iUGShgAvN_E

System Level Python Macros With Voice Commands Using Talon : https://www.bekk.christmas/post/2021/22/system-level-python-...

zendesk macros : https://www.salto.io/blog-posts/the-best-way-to-quickly-clea...

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[0] : https://www.cursorless.org/docs/user/installation/


👤 sargstuff
treesitter[1] is one behind the scenes approach to 'blocking' text to reduced/hi-light what is under review. VSCode is one program that makes use of treesitter. Related alternate discussions of editors using treesitter aerial.neovim[2] / outline.vim[3]. One can setup voice equivalents of macro's to do the verbal equivalent of regular expression(s) to search/sound out tagged list of sections of interest to further voice in detail.

Cursorless[4][5][6]

AI assistant with jetbrains[7]

speach related editing sources:

"Ask HN: What are the best / most accessible languages for blind programmers?" covers some ideas.[0]

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[0] : http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37926926

[1] : http://tree-sitter.github.io/tree-sitter/

[2] : http://www.reddit.com/r/neovim/comments/qzp4as/aerialnvim_ou...

[3] : http://www.reddit.com/r/neovim/comments/mx6lfh/symbolsoutlin...

[4] : Cursorless talk : http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NcUJnmBqHTY

[5] Cursorless : https://github.com/cursorless-dev/cursorless-talon

[6] : cursorless examples : https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2hPwfBCtXws / https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sEDIiJd7rwE

[7] : https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-NnYtfzO7qU