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

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

#241

Post by lb1lf » Mon, Apr 20, 2020, 7:32 AM UTC

egd wrote: post #210

kendallpark wrote: post #190

Earlier quoted context omitted.

A while back I worked for a team that had wired up Jenkins to a speaker in the office. Each type of event would trigger a different Zelda sound effect. Victory music for successful deployments, game over music for breaking the build, etc. Notably, dev server exceptions were connected to sword clashing sounds. It led to debugging situations like this: "Okay, so that's two clanks when we click on this button, but if we…

At a previous gig, we had a lot of systems named after animals, and I'd joked about wiring our alerting system up to emit the animal sound for the system that was paging, but I think I'm actually going to do that at my next gig. Outside the land of software, engineers debug systems using sound all the time - I think we're underutilizing our senses and our pattern recognition.

-At a former employer, I had coded some embedded devices to spit out their bus address and current error code in morse code using the buzzer in the keypad. Saved me lots of time during initial debugging of new installations, then I'd just disable the buzzer before heading for home.

(At least) on one occasion I forgot; years later a puzzled chief engineer calls me and says that his first officer had told him that E209 had a pending IGBT failure while they were discussing issues with the equipment we'd delivered over the din of the buzzers. Would that hypothesis have any possible merit?

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

#242

Post by anonytrary » Mon, Apr 20, 2020, 7:38 AM UTC

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…

> you'll be bumping the speech rate up to 1.75-2X normal speech

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.

> Typos will be easily spotted as they just won't "sound right".

Really good way to describe this. It's almost like listening to an audio fingerprint which magically indexes the answer in your brain. My blind friend was doing law, but I'm sure she did something similar to help her map the dependencies between laws.

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

#243

Post by squiggleblaz » Mon, Apr 20, 2020, 7:39 AM UTC

richardw wrote: post #164

27182818284 wrote: post #150

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

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.

It is painful to use Windows on my surface as a tablet, since I want the physical keyboard layout to be dvorak and the osk layout to be qwerty (because I've never really seen the dvorak layout). Microsoft obviously has no interest in making it accessible to dvorak users.

I think the dvorak equivalent of an osk is something more like MessageEase. If they would bother to update their Windows offering to something a little more recent (high dpi instead of scaling etc) it would be nice tho

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

#244

Post by john4532452 » Mon, Apr 20, 2020, 7:42 AM UTC

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.

The problem with retaining is independent of processing information speed.

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

#245

Post by hycaria » Mon, Apr 20, 2020, 7:46 AM UTC

simonebrunozzi wrote: post #63

I don't have any answer for Zach (the poster), but I feel a big need to share my feelings about this. I'm sipping a decent morning coffee, I'm in Japan, whereas my home is San Francisco. I've been here for ~5 weeks, trying to escape the coronavirus disaster that is unfolding in the US, and trying to enjoy spring in Japan as well. I'm lucky enough to be able to afford a few weeks abroad without too many money worries.…

>I'm sipping a decent morning coffee, I'm in Japan, whereas my home is San Francisco. I've been here for ~5 weeks, trying to escape the coronavirus disaster that is unfolding in the US, and trying to enjoy spring in Japan as well. I'm lucky enough to be able to afford a few weeks abroad without too many money worries.

I would say you're selfish or dumb enough to be moving in a time where people should just stop those behaviors and stay wherever the fuck they are... And this is not even considering you know, GHG and stuff.

But globally this comment is so full of oneself I'm amazed.

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

#246

Post by WalterBright » Mon, Apr 20, 2020, 7:46 AM UTC

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…

Since I work on the D programming language design, I'm interested in any advice you can give on what would make a programming language design more accessible to blind programmers.

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

#247

Post by WalterBright » Mon, Apr 20, 2020, 7:49 AM UTC

kendallpark wrote: post #190

vidanay wrote: post #68

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Your comment about proof reading and errors not sounding right reminds me of the "proper/best" way to learn Morse code for ham radio. Most everyone is familiar with the charts that show A=.- B=-... etc. Lots of beginners try to actually interpret the sounds in their ears and convert that to a letter and then convert a bunch of those to a word. Obviously, that is very processor intensive and has a high failure rate. T…

A while back I worked for a team that had wired up Jenkins to a speaker in the office. Each type of event would trigger a different Zelda sound effect. Victory music for successful deployments, game over music for breaking the build, etc. Notably, dev server exceptions were connected to sword clashing sounds. It led to debugging situations like this: "Okay, so that's two clanks when we click on this button, but if we…

I used to debug embedded systems by hooking an I/O pin to the speaker, then would toggle the pin level at various points in the program.

You could tell where it went wrong by the "song" after a while. Sorta like tuning your car by ear.

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

#248

Post by tuukkao » Mon, Apr 20, 2020, 7:51 AM UTC

Blind since birth full stack software developer here. I might not be able to relate to your situation completely but here are some of my experiences:

>Are there blind frontend engineers?

I don't think so. It's not that you can't do frontend at all, just that you can't do it completely. Something like copying the layout from a visual mockup doesn't really work unless someone describes the mockup to you, and even then it might not be 100 % correct, though i'd say your experience as a sighted frontend developer would definitely help there. Thankfully (in this case anyway) SPA's tend to be so complex these days that there is plenty of work to do without touching the actual layout. My frontend work has consisted mostly of refactoring and writing various integrations. Occasionally I've written some complete features where I've laid out a rough version of the UI and someone sighted in the team has finished it off for me. This strategy has worked out relatively well for me in the past. However I'd say doing solo frontend work is sadly a no-go.

> What kinds of software engineering lend themselves to someone with limited vision? Backend only?

Basically anything non-visual works out. Backend, yes, but also the business logic of SPA apps as well as devops work.

> Besides a screen reader, what are some of the best tools for building software with limited vision?

- A good editor which is accessible and has an extensive set of keyboard shortcuts. Visual Studio Code and Eclipse are the two editors that I use in my day to day work.

- Terminal. It's often much quicker to do things like text manipulation, version control and devops administration there, since you don't have to waste so much time going through information that you don't need. I've found git gui's to be particularly useless. Web browsers and editors/ide's are basically the only gui tools that I use.

Feel free to hit me up if I could be of any help.

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

#249

Post by cormacrelf » Mon, Apr 20, 2020, 7:51 AM UTC

anonytrary wrote: post #242

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…

> you'll be bumping the speech rate up to 1.75-2X normal speech 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. > Typos will be easily spotted as they just won't "sound right". Really good way to descri…

> My blind friend was doing law, but I'm sure she did something similar to help her map the dependencies between laws.

Nobody calls them dependencies, but yes, you would be able to hear if `Re Estates Croft, deceased [2018] NSWSC 1303` were wrong.

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

#250

Post by WalterBright » Mon, Apr 20, 2020, 7:53 AM UTC

egd wrote: post #210

kendallpark wrote: post #190

Earlier quoted context omitted.

A while back I worked for a team that had wired up Jenkins to a speaker in the office. Each type of event would trigger a different Zelda sound effect. Victory music for successful deployments, game over music for breaking the build, etc. Notably, dev server exceptions were connected to sword clashing sounds. It led to debugging situations like this: "Okay, so that's two clanks when we click on this button, but if we…

At a previous gig, we had a lot of systems named after animals, and I'd joked about wiring our alerting system up to emit the animal sound for the system that was paging, but I think I'm actually going to do that at my next gig. Outside the land of software, engineers debug systems using sound all the time - I think we're underutilizing our senses and our pattern recognition.

I always wonder at the madness of elevator design. Most of them "ping" as they pass a floor for accessibility. But that means the blind rider must first know the floor he is on, then count the pings to the right floor.

It should simply announce each floor as it passes. I know from experience that you can make quite comprehensible voice sounds by connecting a 5V I/O pin to a speaker, so there is no excuse. (All you do is digitize the speech, then turn the pin on and off as the wave crosses 0.)

Ditto for every device that comes with a chart saying which LED blink pattern means what status. Like the "fast blink" and "slow blink". The LED is blinking, is that "fast" or "slow"?