Navigating websites and recommendations
Finding information can be hard without sight. Here are a few quick tips to make it more easy.
1. Avoid searching for information
Ehhhhh what?! Yeah, RTFM
The difference between a good and a bad coder is that a good coder first learn a tool by reading the manual BEFORE they use the tool. Look, you can be a smart person and figure it all out yourself but if someone else figured it out before you did and wrote a book or manual, it would be stupid not to read that manual. Yes, of course it can be fun en educative but when it comes to speed, someone who reads a manual learns a tool way faster then someone that googles everything together. If there are libraries full of books that explain how you can build a house that lasts for decades, it would be really dum to just start building without reading a book and hope that it will work.
"No, I am a learning by doing person so let me alone, I do it my way."
You should have a basis before you learn-by-doing.
This sounds very basic like yeah yeah I already know this stuff lets move on but I see so many people doing the wrong stuff.
Lets say you want to learn how css works. Many people try to change the background color, changing the font and they make a piece of text bold. Then they think, Ohh this is going quite well! Lets make a website!
But then they should center a image in a div and they are googeling from sunrise to sunset combining all sorts of copy pasta answers from stack overflow without knowing what actually happens or what it means.
This is what a lot of people do, coders laugh about a how to center div css joke and they go on with their stupid google everything together mentality.
If you want to learn css, read a book about it and then learn by doing.
Many people say, ohhhh rust is so hard what is a lifetime? Then they google what lifetimes are and the answer uses terminology from other rust concepts that they do not understand and as a solution copy the suggestion from the compiler and hope that it works without understanding what it means that they've copied into their project.
Rust is easy if you have the discipline to just read a book about the rust language.
If you have the feeling that I am talking to you, don't worry, every good programmer learned this at some point so if you are learning this now, enjoy! You can be way more productive.
The benefits of reading the manual are:
- You work way faster.
- You actually know how something works.
- You do not have to visit all sorts of websites with cookies that are harder to navigate with a screen reader.
2. Don't use google
If google works for you that is fine.
I like duckduckgo way more from an accessibility standpoint.
This is because duckduckgo most of the time only gives a list of links.
It is easier to navigate that with a screen reader.
The only thing that you have to do is next heading and previous heading to navigate through the list
Google gives a fragment of a youtube video as its first result and advertisements that have nothing to do with your search.
But the best feature from an accessibility standpoint are bangs.
If you want to search for coding with eyes closed on github. Normally you would go to github.com, navigate for the search text field, enter your query and go through the search results.
With duckduckgo, you can enter this query:
!gh coding with eyes closed
If you want to learn more about ISO_8691, enter this query:
!w iso 8601
If you want to learn more about a crate on docs.rs, clap for example, enter this query:
!docsrs clap
How editors are way faster with shortcuts, duckduckgo is way faster with bangs.
Bangs are shortcuts for the search-engine.
3. Consider AI-based chat bots
Chat bots such as chat gpt can boost your productivity significantly. Chat bots can scrape information from websites and format it in such a way that it can save you many minutes otherwise spent on googling.
Those where my tips. We've covered a lot. The next chapter is the last technical chapter, we will talk about programming languages. Ready? Lets go!