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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?

#321

Post by jhgb »

sky_rw wrote: post #202

Unrelated to the question: > "I'm a 24 y/o full stack engineer (I know some of you are rolling your eyes right now..." As a 35 year old full stack engineering manager I can say that anybody rolling their eyes at that statement needs to check themselves. Lately I've been getting smoked by a 21 year old software dev. She's constantly teaching me things and improving my code. Frameworks and technologies evolve so fast t…

Is that really a matter of age, or of experience? Surely your own code didn't deteriorate since you were 21 year old yourself. Or is this largely about newfangled things that didn't exist back then?

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

#322

Post by zeveb »

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.…

> I also use VIM because it feels like the best case of voice integration or braille integration

Check out Emacsspeak: http://emacspeak.sourceforge.net/

It’s written by T.V. Raman, a blind engineer at Google by way of Cornell.

Among other things, with it you can just use the built-in Emacs browser!

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

#323

Post by sheinsheish »

Start learning a musical instrument. This will give you something for the soul and heart to look forward to. Especially because developing is exclusively a mind activity and also because playing music activates and connects both sides of the brain.

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

#324

Post by ddevault »

innocentoldguy wrote: post #198
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…

Which do you prefer, screen-readers or braille readers? Also, how long did it take you to be able to feel the braille effectively?

I don't like screen readers, but I liked teaching applications to speak themselves based on text commands. I like to combine this with a braille reader and use both in different contexts. For example, a braille reader is more unambiguous with punctuation, capitalization, etc, but speech synthesis is necessary to catch my attention for a notification from a non-active application, and is more comfortable for reading natural language. It's worth reiterating, though, that I don't need these tools (yet), so people who depend on them daily may have a different opinion.

Braille is easy, I could read it reasonably well with just a couple of days of study.

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

#325

Post by whitehouse3 »

TriNetra wrote: post #270

Legally blind, I'm a full stack engineer (and a solution/security architect) with extensive experience in building both backend and frontend (web) systems. I work on Windows with Jaws screen reader. I use autohotkey extensively to super charge my productivity. I had worked as employee with Microsoft (and others) in the past and have been running my consultancy cum product company since 2016. Email in profile - You ca…

> Programming is mostly a mental job (no pun intended)

I'm drawing a blank. What's the pun here?

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

#326

Post by woodrowbarlow »

vidarh wrote: post #297
WalterBright wrote: post #250

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

A fun demonstration of getting comprehensible sound via one bit sampling is that you can use a tight loop on a C64 to read from any number of input pins (such as the tape input) to sample sound, and play it back either by writing to any number of outputs and connect it to a speaker, or indirectly by using the signal to toggle the sound chip volume up and down. So not only can you get comprehensible voices from a 5V I…

my c64 is sitting right next to me, and i think i'll play with this after work. thanks!

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

#327

Post by ddevault »

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.…

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's pretty straightforward. I was working on an Alpine Linux spin which was more accessible out of the box, but I got discouraged by various circumstances and shelved it.

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

#328

Post by jaywalk »

zeveb wrote: post #319
WalterBright wrote: post #250

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 …

Hey, let's leave hair color out of this.

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

#329

Post by LouisSayers »

roganartu wrote: post #255
hnick wrote: post #112

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> You'll be amazed how good your memory will get without the crutch of sight That's all really interesting. I personally have a problem with my thoughts in that I need to "sound out" or read them aloud in my head. This sometimes really slows me down, I mull over a thought until it sounds right. Especially when I'm tired I can get stuck in a loop. And it applies when reading too, I can force myself to read faster but…

I can’t speak to physical blindness, but I have aphantasia[0] which basically means I cannot voluntarily invoke my minds eye. Up until I found out about it last year, I thought that “visualizing” things was a metaphor for thinking, as I didn’t realize people could actually see things without looking at them. There are varying degrees of aphantasia. For context, I am completely unable to “see” anything in my mind. I d…

hmmm... this is interesting.

I think I must have this too. E.g. if I close my eyes and try to visualise the face of someone that I hang out with every day, I can't do it.

If I try really hard, the best I can do is a flash of bits of some photographs I remember. It also starts to give me a headache. I think though, if I want to remember how something physically looks it helps to have my eyes open. Even then it's more like flashes than being able to actually see something.

Mostly when I "visualise" something e.g. the house where I live, I think in terms of how things are spatially connected to one another. It's more like a scene from the matrix - where what I'm remember are more the concepts of things and where they are spatially, rather than what things actually look like. This is pretty much also what happens when I'm coding - thinking in terms of concepts and how things are connected together spatially.

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

#330

Post by svilen_dobrev »

24y only? hm. comeon. Have u ever tried getting out of the rat-racing wheel for a while (7-8 months to 1 year maybe)? Apart of physicaly not-doing-that, some physiology actualy depends a lot on psychology. But u need, really, away.. in more aspects than just geographical. (btw Human eyes have evolved for looking far, not close. Which we keep ignoring, progressively)

here some maybe related occurence to me...

20y ago, i had been given a 24 inch tube (no lcd's then), which had very thick glass upfront, for some reason, wasn't very flat.. and guess, one eye on mine kept focusing on the image painted by electrons on the inside of the glass but the other eye kept focusing on the outside on the glass (on whatever reflection there was or wasn't). It took only a week and i could not drive a car anymore - one eye focused on the landscape, the other focused on the windshield glass...

Fixing things back took me 1 month, every day sitting for 1-2 hours on the beach looking into the sea. Or equally far away things (apart of getting rid of that tube, and anything resembling that).

have fun and dont give up, a diagnose isn't a sentence.. unless u make it so..

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