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

Even just getting diagnosed I had to fight my insurance company who said that a DNA test was not necessary (it's a genetic condition???).

All of these things are the reason I'm trying to get ahead of all this. This entire thread has given me a lot of hope, thank you.

Here is what I learned back then. What we were working on was an automated system to monitor data circuits, which back then were basically modems connected to a dedicated audio circuit. They called it a private line data circuit.

The problem back then of course was that you essentially needed a way to sample the audio modem circuit and do analysis of it. We had written some code on a Symbolics computer that could do the analysis (that was the old timey LISP type AI computer).

The trick was how to get the samples without a person having to jack in and record it or whatever. Today this seems trivial but it was more complicated back then. We brainstormed on it (he had a sharp ear BTW). We ended up building a device that had some custom hardware on it that then interfaced the ADC over DMA to a 68000 processor and could monitor multiple circuits etc. and fed that to the Symbolics which could predict all sorts of things.

Anyhow, it taught me how you could sort of combine the two to offload some stuff to HW but still keep the flexibility of SW.

I see a lot of similar types of trade offs today. Now of course we have FPGA's for hardware that can do a lot but you still need interface circuitry to the real world depending on the application. I have worked on a lot of projects where there is a tendency to always reach for software or vice versa.

What I think happens is you might have a company let's say company 'G' that is basically a software company and everyone they hire knows software really well. And they interview and hire more software people. Then if they were to let's say... buy a company that makes HW, perhaps phones, they have a difficult time. Or they try to build out a network and struggle.

Then maybe you have another company 'V' and they are good at building a network but they don't understand software so if they buy a software company it is difficult for them.

Then you have a company Apple that has always done both and they seem to make better choices.

I am sure a lot of you out there can think of similar examples.

This is just my observations based on my experiences. The more a team has a diverse set of experiences and background (HW, SW, Network) the better the chance of getting an optimal solution.

I was an animator and VFX artist and lost my vision suddenly in 2014 in the span of 30 minutes. I can no longer do that work, but started learning orientation & mobility white cane training from the Lighthouse for the Blind in San Francisco and worked with the Dept. of Rehab to figure out life moving forwards. I received training in how to use a screen reader in iOS, Android, Mac, and Windows. I learned about accessibility and dove into my background as a former QA engineer for animation software and my UX/UI experience from VFX and motion graphics and started learning development on my own time. Figured out Python using TextEdit and Terminal on my Mac, am in the process of learning JS, used Xcode to learn Swift, and I tend to code websites by hand, then share them with someone with sight to check out my CSS.

There are a lot of resources out there to help you adapt, but it will take baby steps. I highly recommend you learn braille as blind coders tend to use braille displays to quickly check through lines of code, although I primarily just use VoiceOver to listen to code line by line at a very fast speed. Braille will help you type a lot faster on your phone when you find a collaborative work experience to be inaccessible; we use Slack at work, but the desktop version is awful in terms of accessibility, so I only use the iOS app and can quickly and accurately type out very detailed messages using Apple's braille screen input.

It's all about adaptation and not being afraid to ask for help. Zoom and Google Meet work great, and Microsoft products have gotten much much better in terms of accessibility. Google Suite takes a lot of getting used to, but is doable and functional with enough practice.

If you are on Windows, Jaws and NVDA will be essential to learn, and I've heard that Visual Basic studio is very accessible. I haven't found Sublime, atom, or other text editors to be accessible on the Mac, but TextEdit and Xcode work just fine for all matter of filetypes, and of course emacsspeak and Vim work in Terminal or iTerm.

Check out the /r/Blind sub reddit, Applevis.com, and know that you'll have support. It's a huge transition but you'll make it through!