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?

#311

Post by mresposito » Mon, Apr 20, 2020, 12:09 PM UTC

bad_user wrote: post #265

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.

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…

I switched to Dvorak after I got RSI about 10 years ago. It was so bad that I couldn't type anymore. So I taught myself Dvorak because I did some research and it seemed it could have been helpful. I was pretty desperate to solve my problem, and it seemed Dvorak could help since your hands travel less than Qwerty.

Fortunately, I haven't had RSI ever since I switched to Dvorak.

Switching to Dvorak is quite tedious, and I wouldn't recommend it unless you have a good reason to do so.

Regarding internationalization, I write in English, Spanish and Italian in Dvorak with no problem. It really doesn't any difference to me as compared to Qwerty.

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

#312

Post by james_s_tayler » Mon, Apr 20, 2020, 12:10 PM UTC

PureParadigm wrote: post #221

richardw wrote: post #164

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

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…

Can vouch for colemak being hard to type correctly with on a phone. Normally with qwerty I felt I didn't rely so much on autocorrect, but with Colemak I make certain mistakes quite frequently. Especially given eio are all next to each other a lot of times when I want to type o I type "i" instead. I think it's gotten better in recent months but certain combinations on Colemak just seem to be very sub optimal for a phone. Especially the placing of the vowels.

I'm used to it now and it doesn't quite bother me enough to relearn qwerty on mobile. Kinda stuck in this weird limbo of relying on autocorrect for every 5th word. Hahaha.

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

#313

Post by lexicality » Mon, Apr 20, 2020, 12:10 PM 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.

Amusing story - when I was in uni I decided to learn dvorak and since I'd just got a shiny new smartphone I set the keyboard in it to dvorak too.

I was never able to get over my qwerty touchtyping skills and gave up very quickly but I left my smartphone keyboard that way as I thought people's reactions when they tried to use it was funny.

Six years later, I bought a kinesis advantage and discovered to my horror that my touchtyping skills were useless with the alien key layout and I couldn't remember where any of the keys were because I'd not looked at them for so long.

However - the kinesis had a "dvorak" button and after having used it on my phone for so long I found it easier to learn that then re-learn qwerty. 4 years later and I get hopelessly lost every time I try to use qwerty.

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

#314

Post by koisti » Mon, Apr 20, 2020, 12:10 PM UTC

Moiboy

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

#315

Post by lexicality » Mon, Apr 20, 2020, 12:13 PM UTC

adrianN wrote: post #225

richardw wrote: post #164

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Wow doing that would make so little sense. The benefit of dvorak is less finger movement when touch typing. It would be interesting to optimize the keyboard layout on a phone for less finger movement while swiping, but that probably looks a lot different than Dvorak.

I remember seeing a finger movement optimised keyboard a few years back, it was incredibly alien and based on gestures

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

#316

Post by officemonkey » Mon, Apr 20, 2020, 12:26 PM UTC

kolanos wrote: post #305

anonytrary wrote: post #242

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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…

> 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.

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

#317

Post by andrewshadura » Mon, Apr 20, 2020, 12:34 PM UTC

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.

Interesting you say that, literally every lift in a public space that does any sound at all around here announces each floor with proper spoken speech, not just a ping.

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

#318

Post by tapia » Mon, Apr 20, 2020, 12:40 PM UTC

RobMurray wrote: post #271

ddevault wrote: post #173

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>On the days that you turn your monitor off, how do you do email? Poorly. I want to improve aerc in this respect. For the time being, I use a mix of my braille reader (brltty) and piping emails into vipe so I can use my vim plugin to read them.

I would strongly recommend switching to Windows - the screen readers are just so much better than anything on Linux. I agree with the other person who said that GUI programs are easier to use with a screen reader. At least on windows, this is definitely the case.

You know that Drew is the maintainer of sway, right? I don't think switching to Windows is an option here :P

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

#319

Post by zeveb » Mon, Apr 20, 2020, 12:40 PM UTC

WalterBright wrote: post #250

egd wrote: post #210

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

The one edge case is that the bells work for all blind folks, not just those who understand the language spoken by and announcement. Of course, a blond person in that case could just count announcements …

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

#320

Post by andrewshadura » Mon, Apr 20, 2020, 12:45 PM UTC

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.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YzCdkkG4Gnk