I'm so sorry to hear that. I'm curious what people's opinions are specifically around frontend. How can software enable someone who's blind to ensure that a frontend matches a design? Can we as a community develop new tools for this?
Ask HN: I'm a software engineer going blind, how should I prepare?
31–40 of 497 posts
Re: Ask HN: I'm a software engineer going blind, how should I prepare?
#32I'd suggest making the focus being what you need in order to support yourself as a blind person, not being a software engineer.
There may be particular things blind people excel at and do very well with. Use a list of those things as your starting point.
Perhaps software engineering is on that list, but I'd make sure.
Re: Ask HN: I'm a software engineer going blind, how should I prepare?
#33Accessibility engineering perhaps.
I'm fairly certain I'm going to get ARMD because of genetics and family history, and won't have anyone to care for me. It's going to suck.
As my late grandfather said: Getting old isn't for wimps, but the alternative is worse.
Re: Ask HN: I'm a software engineer going blind, how should I prepare?
#34Quit programming and get a job at delivery or Walmart.
This job is killing you.
Re: Ask HN: I'm a software engineer going blind, how should I prepare?
#35There is this guy who is pretty well known in the spanish dev community:
https://www.xataka.com/otros/soy-ciego-nacimiento-asi-mi-tra...
He often talks at conferences about his situation and setup, so if you understand spanish you might be able to find quite a lot on this. Also it might be worth a shot contacting him for more info.
Best of luck with your new adventure.
Re: Ask HN: I'm a software engineer going blind, how should I prepare?
#36First, I'm very sorry this is happening to you. I hope to later read where you have been very successful.
I work for Red Hat, we have a successful executive named Chad E. Foster (https://chadefoster.com/), he has some recorded talks that outline some of the pitfalls he's encountered and the ways he found around them. Maybe his advice can be of use. (You might even consider reaching out. He seems a very approachable guy.)
I worked closely with another person who went blind. He relied on big monitors and monitor settings to help him.
Good luck, we'll all be rooting for you.
Re: Ask HN: I'm a software engineer going blind, how should I prepare?
#37I can't imagine how hard it is to keep positive in this situation and I think it's great that you're asking these practical questions to help your future self out. I hope you get some really useful answers from the rest of the community.
I don't have the answers to those questions but I did want to drop a line of encouragement and say this; your hard work up until now will not be wasted, whatever you end up doing. You can — and will — find ways to continue to stretch and apply your engineering mind, and most likely in ways that you can't predict right now.
Later on, you will look back and find that nobody would be better placed for whatever you're doing at that moment than you.
Finally (and I'm not saying this to deter you from continuing down the SE route, there are plenty of examples online of partially-sighted or blind SEs doing very well and you're attitude is indicative that you should experience no different), but everyone of us has so much more to give to this world than just our skillset, and you don't need a qualification for the things that truly matter in life.
Keep going and I echo the other commenter, take car of your soul, it's important.
Re: Ask HN: I'm a software engineer going blind, how should I prepare?
#38There is a lot of good advice here, and I know you can continue to do SE if you’re committed. In addition to the advice here, you could consider
- finding businesses who would benefit from employing a blind SE. I have no idea who, but probably companies who care a lot about accessibility
- you could become a tech project manager or another career that is tangential to SE. I know there will be obstacles to overcome, but maybe not as many as in SE, idk.
Re: Ask HN: I'm a software engineer going blind, how should I prepare?
#39I had a coworker this happened too. He was in his late 40s when this happened and so had to use a screen reader instead of a Braille display. He used edlin over putty on Windows. Since Jaws ran best there for him. He had to stop working on languages like Python where a screen reader is of little help.
Which languages work best with a screen reader?
Re: Ask HN: I'm a software engineer going blind, how should I prepare?
#40While I don’t have this my grandmother became blind so there could be a genetic disposition and I’ve wondered (worried?) about what would happen if I did. I would focus on the things I could manipulate with my mind rather than a keyboard and monitor. Basically this boils down to the algorithms and mathematical aspects, they are more about thinking and logic than writing code.
All too often we get stuck in the tools and not the thing we are trying to do. I remember a quite about photography (sorry for a story about vision): “I wanted to become a photographer so I took a class. We learned all sorts of things shutter speeds, aperture, film types, etc. But of all the things we learned, we never learned where to point the damned camera!” The computer science take on this quote is “Computer Science is no more about computers than astronomy is about telescopes." I try to keep these in mind when I feel myself drifting towards the tools side of things and come back to what’s important.
As also noted, there’s never been a better time for accessibility than now. It’s an opportunity to advance that area and become an expert.