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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?

#341

Post by apetresc »

WalterBright wrote: post #280
avip wrote: post #278

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Any modestly "modern" elevator would have Braille indicators. And many also announce floors same way public transit does.

I've never been in an elevator that announced the floors with anything better than a ping. This is despite elevators being controlled by single board computers since around 1980. The buttons have had braille on them for a long time.

Canadian here - even my condo building elevator announces floor numbers with a (pretty well-digitized) voice. And believe me, my building is no marvel of modernity.

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

#342

Post by WhyNotHugo »

I had a professor in university who was blind.

To this day, I'm amazed at how I could read code to him, and he's spot where the mistake was.

He coded with a screen reader. AFAIK, accessibility on Linux is pretty poor in general (I'm a fan of Linux, but I get the impression that's the truth), so you might want to consider well what you main OS will be.

Frontend might be tough -- but then, you're a perfect candidate to give feedback on website accessibility. There might be a career there if well-planned.

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

#344

Post by mwcampbell »

ddevault wrote: post #327
cookiengineer wrote: post #203

Earlier quoted context omitted.

As someone preparing for this, too, I still have no clue on how to rasterize the code quickly. Voice always feels inefficient and braille feels like a joke when it comes to the amount of information being displayed. Do you have suggestions? Do you transpile code? I also use VIM because it feels like the best case of voice integration or braille integration...but I have no source for how to actually do this properly.…

Even with the aid of sight, I don't read an entire codebase at once. I follow the logic, a few lines at a time, as it moves through the parts I'm interested in. I use grep to find the things I ought to read. With this approach, I build a mental model of the codebase quickly, with lots of blanks - but with detail in the areas I'm focusing on. As for how to actually rig up braille readers on Linux, check out BRLTTY. It…

I think your use of the term "braille reader" might be causing some confusion. I know you use brltty. But do you use its text-to-speech output, or do you use a refreshable braille device that moves little pins up and down to form braille cells? If the former, I'd suggest referring to brltty as a screen reader.

Also, do you run brltty on a Linux text console, or in a terminal window in your Sway session?

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

#346

Post by carapace »

cookiengineer wrote: post #203
ddevault wrote: post #82

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Not perfectly, and not for long. I wear glasses, but they only do so much, and my vision worsens every year. I use some light assistive technologies on the daily - higher contrast, large fonts, zooming in on things. To test the tools I linked to, I spend the occasional workday with all of my monitors turned off, relying on these tools to get work done. I also have a braille reader that I occasionally pull out. I have…

As someone preparing for this, too, I still have no clue on how to rasterize the code quickly. Voice always feels inefficient and braille feels like a joke when it comes to the amount of information being displayed. Do you have suggestions? Do you transpile code? I also use VIM because it feels like the best case of voice integration or braille integration...but I have no source for how to actually do this properly.…

(BTW, stealth sounds awesome!)

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

#347

Post by tmnster85 »

My one year old daughter is a survivor of bacterial meningitis, she had to have a bilateral craniotomy to help get the infection under control. This left her with moderate brain sesquale. She is with us today, she has cortical visual impairment. While my daughter situation is a little different. These comments give me so much hope. Thank you. It really means the world after a tough weekend.

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

#348

Post by webczat »

jimohalloranau wrote: post #124

A couple of years ago I was staring down the barrel of giving up a 20 year career in software development due to a degenerative eye condition. I can't tell you how many hours I wasted chasing parse errors in PHP code because I literally couldn't see the difference between a "." and "," anymore. My solution ended up being transplant surgery to replace one of my corneas, which has largely restored vision in one eye. I…

Partially sighted people are less productive than blind people. You had problems with seeing difference between characters, but if you would have used a screenreader it would just unambiguously tell you which one it is... From my experience people with very low vision will generally do far more spelling errors when typing on a phone than me (and I am not comfortable typing on a touch screen).

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

#349

Post by mhkool »

Search for Dr den Boer on YouTube. In one of his videos he says: I am no ofthalmologist and a patient that was loosing sight came in and TL;DR his sight came back after 6 months of treatment. Of course I cannot make promises but with loosing sight I would certainly visit him.

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

#350

Post by kqr »

chillacy wrote: post #226
PureParadigm wrote: post #221

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I've been typing Dvorak on my computer since middle school and so I thought it'd naturally be a good idea to switch my phone... turns out not so much. While having all the common letters on the home row is good for regular typing, it is not good for phone typing which is heavily dependent on autocorrect. If I miss a letter by one key it's still likely for it to be a valid word because common letters are clustered and…

Supposedly the entire reason Qwerty was designed was to prevent typewriters from jamming by making the keys as disambiguous as possible, which is now ironically ideal on tiny screens.

Indeed. All the reasons Qwerty are bad for 10 finger typing are specifically the reasons it's fairly good for tiny touchscreen typing!
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