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Ask HN: I'm a software engineer going blind, how should I prepare?

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Re: Ask HN: I'm a software engineer going blind, how should I prepare?

#231

Post by Ragib_Zaman »

Drakar1903 wrote: post #230
jedberg wrote: post #129

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> you'll be bumping the speech rate up to 1.75-2X normal speech. You'll be the only one who can understand your screen reader Huh. I already listen to most podcasts and recorded presentations at 2x. Now you make me wonder if I could process information faster with a screen reader even though my sight works just fine...

As someone who also does this, I find that the problem becomes not processing the information, but retaining it, and I haven't found a solution to that yet.

I used to listen/watch everything at 1.5x-2x speed but found a similar result. Now I only increase the speed if it's information I only need to process once (e.g the news) but not remember later (lectures, tutorials etc).

Re: Ask HN: I'm a software engineer going blind, how should I prepare?

#232

Post by jaggirs »

hutzlibu wrote: post #228
kolanos wrote: post #47

You can definitely continue as a software engineer. I'm living proof. It won't be easy, especially at first. For a while it will feel like you're working twice as hard just to keep up with your sighted peers. But eventually, the better you get with your tools, you'll find you have some superpowers over your sighted peers. For example, as you get better with a screen reader, you'll be bumping the speech rate up to 1.7…

"When you abandon this two dimensional representation, your non-visual mental map suffers no spatial limits. " My visual representation is definitely 3 dimensional and I am not sure what you mean by abandoning it? I mean, code is statement blocks and controll flow elements. It is data and connections between them at execution. I can imagine, not being visual gives you much more focus and fewer distractions on the men…

I imagine it is like representing code with a flowchart. Suddenly you are a lot less restricted by your mental representation and you can draw arrows any way you want.

I often experience something similar, even though I'm not blind: When I'm doing algebra I sometimes get stuck 'looking' at the equation and systematically trying patterns on it. But what works much better is to really load the equation into your brain so that you have an intuitive idea that guides your pattern matching. If you are blind, I suppose you always need to load it up.

Re: Ask HN: I'm a software engineer going blind, how should I prepare?

#233

Post by simias »

hutzlibu wrote: post #228
kolanos wrote: post #47

You can definitely continue as a software engineer. I'm living proof. It won't be easy, especially at first. For a while it will feel like you're working twice as hard just to keep up with your sighted peers. But eventually, the better you get with your tools, you'll find you have some superpowers over your sighted peers. For example, as you get better with a screen reader, you'll be bumping the speech rate up to 1.7…

"When you abandon this two dimensional representation, your non-visual mental map suffers no spatial limits. " My visual representation is definitely 3 dimensional and I am not sure what you mean by abandoning it? I mean, code is statement blocks and controll flow elements. It is data and connections between them at execution. I can imagine, not being visual gives you much more focus and fewer distractions on the men…

I don't have this super-power but I can imagine that it could work.

When I'm digging into foreign code especially, I always find myself overwhelmed by the intricacies of the call stack. I get lost in layers, confused by indirections, I lose track of where I was a few steps before or what specific conditions lead me down a particular path.

I guess that if you're blind you need to become a lot better at keeping track of things for basically the entirity of your daily routine. Imagine merely cooking without sight. You need to know where all the ingredients are, you lack a lot of feedback on what you're doing to catch mistakes (did you add the pasta to the water yet or not?). I assume that you need to constantly build a fairly detailed map of the world in your mind where the rest of us can just wing it, basically. I can believe that this skill might make you a better coder.

Re: Ask HN: I'm a software engineer going blind, how should I prepare?

#234

Post by scott_w »

adrianN wrote: post #225
richardw wrote: post #164

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Just for a laugh, try changing your phone keyboard to Dvorak. It seemed like a good idea but felt alien to see the keys I naturally use. Swiping was just ridiculous. Obviously it’s just practice but I don’t mind using qwerty on my phone. It keeps it vaguely present in my memory.

Wow doing that would make so little sense. The benefit of dvorak is less finger movement when touch typing. It would be interesting to optimize the keyboard layout on a phone for less finger movement while swiping, but that probably looks a lot different than Dvorak.

For swiping it’s the opposite: you need to move your finger more to clearly disambiguate which letters you want to “select.” The hardest words are things like “as” and “tool” where there’s letters close by to miss-swipe over. At least in my experience.

Re: Ask HN: I'm a software engineer going blind, how should I prepare?

#235

Post by shrimpx »

kolanos wrote: post #47

You can definitely continue as a software engineer. I'm living proof. It won't be easy, especially at first. For a while it will feel like you're working twice as hard just to keep up with your sighted peers. But eventually, the better you get with your tools, you'll find you have some superpowers over your sighted peers. For example, as you get better with a screen reader, you'll be bumping the speech rate up to 1.7…

Just curious, is it harder to read white space indentation code like python versus curly bracket code like JavaScript?

Re: Ask HN: I'm a software engineer going blind, how should I prepare?

#236

Post by [deleted] »

kolanos wrote: post #47

You can definitely continue as a software engineer. I'm living proof. It won't be easy, especially at first. For a while it will feel like you're working twice as hard just to keep up with your sighted peers. But eventually, the better you get with your tools, you'll find you have some superpowers over your sighted peers. For example, as you get better with a screen reader, you'll be bumping the speech rate up to 1.7…

[deleted]

Re: Ask HN: I'm a software engineer going blind, how should I prepare?

#237

Post by hutzlibu »

simias wrote: post #233
hutzlibu wrote: post #228

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"When you abandon this two dimensional representation, your non-visual mental map suffers no spatial limits. " My visual representation is definitely 3 dimensional and I am not sure what you mean by abandoning it? I mean, code is statement blocks and controll flow elements. It is data and connections between them at execution. I can imagine, not being visual gives you much more focus and fewer distractions on the men…

I don't have this super-power but I can imagine that it could work. When I'm digging into foreign code especially, I always find myself overwhelmed by the intricacies of the call stack. I get lost in layers, confused by indirections, I lose track of where I was a few steps before or what specific conditions lead me down a particular path. I guess that if you're blind you need to become a lot better at keeping track o…

"I don't have this super-power but I can imagine that it could work."

I don't think it is a super power, I believe every programmer does that, I just maybe do it a bit more conscious. And when I have to process new code, that just takes time, like for everyone else .. and doing it in a hurry will mean a wrong mental model.

Re: Ask HN: I'm a software engineer going blind, how should I prepare?

#240

Post by ackbar03 »

Top comment has a good positive example but if you want another example of success, apparently the head of global macro at citadel hedge fund is blind as well, I don't know if he's still there. There was a story about him from before when he was working at standard chartered as a fx trader blind. He had a similar impairment where he was losing his vision and used the time in between to train himself to work and visualize graphs from data read out to him or something like that
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