361–370 of 497 posts
I see you got a lot of great technical suggestions here. I am in no way able to comprehend what you must be going through mentally, but to tackle your anxiety, please consider meditation. If you have never done that before, there is an excellent 10 day course that can be followed, onsite, on a donation basis. If you're broke you don't have to pay. It's a 10 day silent retreat, which means you don't have to talk to an…
I suggest you to learn meditation. It can help to relief your stress.
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Similar experience for when I taught myself the Dvorak layout years ago. My fingers learned the common motion for whole words first. Actually, I'm not sure I could draw the layout of the qwerty keyboard I'm typing on right now from memory either.
I never understood why Dvorak is a thing. I and others like me can touch type with Qwerty just fine. I can comfortably do 70-90 wpm, which is above my speed of thought. I don't suffer from RSI either and I've been touch typing for 20 years. Also the Qwerty layout is more international. In non-English languages the Dvorak assumptions break down, the layout being optimized for English. And good luck finding Dvorak vers…
- Others have mentioned touch typing. I was taught touch typing from an early age with the help of an educational support teacher. I can say that it's one of the most valuable skills I have and I'm really, really thankful to the special teachers that put in the effort with me over those years.
- I naturally gravitated to computers. I don't know what it was, but after seeing them in school, I had to have one! I never got into blind sports as a kid and couldn't play most regular sports at school, so my parents saw the opportunity of computers as something I could get into. Something else I'm really really grateful for (I've been incredibly, incredibly lucky). The rest is history.
- I'll stress again - if you love software engineering and computers, there is no reason at all that it can't be your profession.
- Tech-wise, I use a magnifier on my Android phone and I use the magnifier on OSX. On Windows, it's easier to sit close to the screen. If you're at the stage where you need screen magnification, I can say that I've found the OSX built-in magnifier along with the trackpad a stellar combination.
- I find it difficult to locate the mouse pointer, so I use an extension called Saka Keys in my browser, which allows me to follow links on pages without having to use the mouse. I primarily use the command line for things if I can, especially if I might be on another machine that I can't get as close to as I need (eg- helping a friend quickly). You get to a point with touch-typing where you can feel when you've made a typing mistake. You also get really good at memorizing stuff, as others have said.
- At work, don't be afraid to speak up about what you need. This is tough. For many years I was embarrassed about needing help. It's illogical, I know, but it happens. You want to be independent and prove that you can be 'just as capable' as everyone else. That's a double-edged sword though. People WILL forget you are vision-impaired. I had a friend that I've known for years ask me why I sit so close to the webcam a few days ago when we were video chatting. My webcam is on top of my monitor.
- Believe it or not, people WILL forget you are vision impaired or even blind. I have plenty of experience with the former. If you're fiercely independent, people won't think to offer you help. You need to get comfortable with asking for help when you need it. It's a long, long process and something I'm still not 100% on myself; it's difficult.
- A case in point: At work, for the longest time if somebody wanted to show me code or talk me through code, I'd feel too self-conscious and awkward to say anything as we sat there and they started talking through their code. You get really good at memorizing stuff and going off what they say along with the broad 'shape' of the code. It would only be when I needed something specific, like they were pointing to a value or something, where I would lean in and say "what was that value again?". Nowadays I'm much more comfortable in my own skin and I simply ask them to either enable the magnifier on their machine, show me code through a remote desktop connection or I go to my machine and I have them talk through the code while I'm sitting as close to the screen as I need to.
- On a more philosophical note about other people; you're going to come across some strange, but well-intentioned behaviour. I've had new co-workers ask me why I sit so close to the screen; people assume if you're wearing glasses that your vision must be fine. You'll get really annoyed at the "sitting close to screens ruins your eyes" crowd; yes, I've been told (with good intentions) that sitting so close might damage my eyes.
- The way I think of this is that people are generally good and I'm happy to answer questions from anyone, as long as they're made in good faith. Often I think that people are just uncomfortable with talking about disability. Being a kind of a taboo, they think it's better to 'not say anything', or they're afraid of being rude. I'd rather people ask and I've also become a lot better at being forthcoming about what I need.
- I'm still learning not to shy away from being a 'vision impaired' person. There are some YouTubers that I recommend which I find really inspiring and helpful in this regard:
- The Blind Life is a YouTuber (who if I recall correctly has RP) who focuses on assistive technology and gadgets.
- Molly Burke does some great stuff. She is also blind, RP I think.
- For disability more generally, I cannot recommend 'Special Books By Special Kids' highly enough. It will literally change the way that you react to people. It is utterly incredible.
I know it's very different when you haven't grown up with a disability and suddenly you have to deal with it vs it being "the way it's always been", but I hope some of this might help and I wish you all the best.
Definitely get a refreshable braille display, and learn it and set up your usual development workflow while you can still see.
I was amazed by how plug-and-play the braille display of my friend was. I plugged it via USB into my Ubuntu laptop with brltty and it worked out of the box: I could read my terminal output on it, and it even did the "blinking cursor" of where the cursor is on screen without any configuration.
Within 2 days, I learned basic Braille (we simulated learning it fully blindly, that is with closed eyes), could read things slowly, and also learned typing Braille with the 6-chord keys present on the refreshable braille display.
The blind friends that taught me can use both text-to-speech and the braille display at insane speeds.
They can give free-standing presentations, talking at high speed for an hour in perfectly sophisticated language while looking at the audience with the laptop apparently closed, when in fact they are just reading it off the braille device with a finger! Reading the braille device certainly has the chance to give you apparently-superhuman abilities. I found that so cool that I considered getting good at it already just for that purpose.
So, in summary:
1) I think you have very good chances of staying very proficient even if you go fully blind.
2) Play around with the tool set already now, and fix apparent pain points ahead of time that are easier to fix while still seeing.
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I use a refreshable braille display. I use it mainly on the Linux console, but I've been thinking about rigging something up for use with Sway.
Wow, I underestimated your seriousness about adapting to alternate output methods. Did you have to buy that braille display at your own expense? As I'm sure you know, they're expensive. How recently did you start learning braille? Has it been a challenge for you to learn to read it with your fingers?
The most difficult thing for me would be learning advanced levels of braille, which involves memorizing shortened forms of many words, but I reckon I can get away with just using long-form for a good long while.
A couple of folks mentioned this before - government contractors and federal agencies are required to be compliant with WCAG 2.0 A/AA standards.
I work at a financial institution in front end web. Accessibility is a big deal for us and I can tell you from experience that it is significant pain point for everyone (front end developers and testers). I would estimate that about 70% of the defects I work on are accessibility related. Also, my first job out of boot camp was doing only web accessibility work for a company that was trying to get their site WCAG compliant by 2017.
I toyed with the idea of starting my own accessibility consulting service, given how frustrating it can be. Its a challenge to get a UI to work visually consistent across browsers, operating systems, and devices. Add screen readers and focus placement to the mix, and the work becomes very annoying and time consuming.
I would speculate that accessibility becomes its own niche specialty, similar to how front end and back end work is often viewed as their own specialties. That's opportunity for you, my friend. I hope you can make the best of it. Good luck.
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> Try 5-6x. I've met some blind people who listen to audio so fast, it sounds like noise to me. As someone who isn't blind, I regularly listen to lectures and audiobooks on 1.75-2.5x (depending on the base rate) without issues, but 6x is just something else entirely. Yes, indeed. I was writing that original comment for someone just getting started. What ends up happening is no matter how fast the speech rate is, you'…
When I listen to audiobooks or podcasts, I can easily bump up the speed by 25% until I hit 2x. Faster, depending on the reader and the type of book. If it's a good non-fiction reader like Edward Herrmann, I can go faster. If it's a fiction book with an expressive reader using accents and emoting, I sometimes can't get beyond 1.5.
teamblind.com has forums on employers and hiring info.