Viewing profile — ahicks

I'm a senior/low-end-of-staff engineer. I've worked on the Rust compiler, been coding for 20 years, etc. etc. If you ask me to solve a problem I can solve it. But I'm going to do s…

Location: Seattle Remote: Yes Willing to relocate: No Technologies: Rust, C/C++, Python, SQL, Kubernetes, many others Résumé/CV: https://ahicks.io/files/resume.pdf Email: ahicks@ah…

Location: Seattle Remote: Yes Willing to relocate: No Technologies: Rust, C/C++, Python, SQL, Kubernetes, many others Résumé/CV: https://ahicks.io/files/resume.pdf Email: ahicks@ah…

Strict or no, Google actually fails at accessibility a lot. The basically broken unergonomic keybindings in docs for starters and the entire fiasco that is Android come to mind imm…

Sadly the screen readers do actually do a not-so-good job of this, but I think that may in practice be more a function of poor UI for switching indicators on and off. You get 80 ce…

I own a braille display and use the 93-volume trigonometry textbook from high school and the logic around it with respect to making sure the right chapter was in the classroom with…

Sadly no. Making charts accessible is an unsolved problem. There have been some efforts for accessible graphing calculators that work more or less, but it's not trivial to make a g…

From my perspective there is very little difference. The interface I get out of Firefox is exposed as if it were a text-based browser for lack of a better analogy (it's not quite t…

Firefox and Chrome both have mature accessibility API implementations at this point. Edge is also at least okay. Internet Explorer has worked forever. You then couple those with a …

I appreciate your assistance but I can check spelling; a simple "Did you know that it's Lynx" would have sufficed. Good to know there's two text-based browsers. I didn't, but I and…

Google themselves are your example. Leaving aside some horrible accessibility keybindings in Docs, both Docs and Sheets are basically fully accessible. in fact Sheets is the best s…

I see this like supporting DOS in 2019 or somesuch. There might be an esoteric reason to do so but when 99% of the userbase has left and the old thing can't support new technologie…

I am blind. I know or have known at least 20 other blind people sufficiently to know what their browsers are. None of them used Links. One of them used Edbrowse. The rest (includin…

In the insert case call the function InsertWithAllocqation, and also provide an Insert variant that doesn't allocate but can fail. In the reversing case, call the function ReverseI…

Screen readers have a lot of commands for reading different sized chunks of content. In general there's probably around 50 keystrokes I use on a daily basis. It's not as straightfo…

They're harsh. But you get used to it in about a week. Espeak is an atypically bad example, which is why NVDA experimented with a fork (and maybe one day the NVDA work will make it…

I haven't specifically tried different types of audiobooks to see if there's some preferred category. With movies I don't bother with them unless they have descriptive audio, at wh…

But when the in-group is defined as "is blind"?? I'm not just talking about programmers in this context, or any other cross-section wherein there's some sort of shared vocabulary a…

You can pass Espeak recordings around legally. It's just GPL. The license applies to the software, not the content produced via it. I will attempt to remember and find the time to …

Other people in realtime aren't...I guess the best way I have to put it is informationally sparse. There's a lot going on beside what's being said in conversation. Synths don't imp…

And as a followup to that--because really this is the weird part--some circles of blind people (including mine) talk faster between ourselves. That's not common, but it happens. I …

I'm the blind dev who refactored a huge chunk of the Rust compiler [0]. I'm at roughly 800 words a minute with a synth, with the proven ability to top out at 1219. 800 or so is the…

Location: Seattle Remote: Strongly preferred Willing to relocate: Not right now Programming languages: Python, Rust, C++, some JavaScript and Go Technologies: Most of Google Cloud …

Location: Seattle Remote: Strongly preferred Willing to relocate: Not right now Programming languages: Python, Rust, C++, some JavaScript and Go Technologies: Most of Google Cloud …

I'd agree with you here, but Rust is powerful enough to abstract serialization behind a macro. You'd probably be using something like Serde instead of writing your own decoder. The…