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We Hired a Blind Coder

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Re: We Hired a Blind Coder

#101

I think most programmers don't realize how much vision holds them back. I've been coding blindfolded for over a month and I'm never going back. If you are a touch typist what do you need to see ? Not looking at things helps me to focus. I do take the blindfold off while checking my work an during some parts of debugging.

(I posted the following in a reddit discussion of this, but am reposting here because your comment seems relevant to some of the speculation I raised)

Not to take anything away from this, because it is impressive, but a lot of people overestimate how much you need to look at your code while writing it. That's because we've gotten used to (if we are older programmers) or grown up with (if we are younger programmers) editors on big screens or in big windows that always show us a lot of our code.

There was a time when that was not the norm. Many programmed on teletype terminals or on 24x80 character CRTs that did not have cursor addressing (AKA "glass TTYs"), usually connected to the computer over a slow serial line (300 baud for a hardcopy terminal was typical). Text editors worked a line at a time. You could see whatever previous lines had not scrolled off the top yet. Best case, that would show you the line you were typing and 23 prior lines, although usually some of those lines would be showing editing commands you typed rather than lines of your code. If you wanted to see more lines, you had to type a command to tell the editor to show them, and they would come in from the bottom, scrolling prior stuff off the top.

In that kind of environment programmers tended to do a lot more of their work in their heads than we do now. Not as much as a blind person has to do, of course, but a lot more than seems feasible to the average programmer nowadays. Heck, it often seems infeasible nowadays to many of us who programmed back then. I know I wrote a lot of code in such environments, but nowadays I cannot figure out how the heck I actually was able to do that.

I'm not sure if we are actually better off now or not. We don't have to keep track of us much in our heads because our editors do it for us, so perhaps that frees up some brainpower to concentrate on more important things. On the other hand, maybe by keeping more of our code in our heads back then, we were able to understand it better.

Re: We Hired a Blind Coder

#102
post #101

I think most programmers don't realize how much vision holds them back. I've been coding blindfolded for over a month and I'm never going back. If you are a touch typist what do you need to see ? Not looking at things helps me to focus. I do take the blindfold off while checking my work an during some parts of debugging.

(I posted the following in a reddit discussion of this, but am reposting here because your comment seems relevant to some of the speculation I raised) Not to take anything away from this, because it is impressive, but a lot of people overestimate how much you need to look at your code while writing it. That's because we've gotten used to (if we are older programmers) or grown up with (if we are younger programmers) e…

    but nowadays I cannot figure out how the heck I actually was able to do that.
I think without the adversity, overcoming it seems stupid/difficult/impossible.

Re: We Hired a Blind Coder

#103

Hi, I'm Herwin, the person who is on the article. I just finished read all the comments above, and would like to share my story and my thoughts. But since the comment is too long, I put it on my dropbox, you can found it here : https://www.dropbox.com/s/h9dxozsrxz7wuqf/mystory.txt?dl=0 Sorry for the inconvenience, and thanks all ;). Warm regards -- Herwin

Thankyou for posting your story!

Re: We Hired a Blind Coder

#104
post #66

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I've seen so many interesting/disappointing behaviors from people when it comes to people with disabilities. The city I live in had a systematic problem with loud speakers announcements on trains. Blind people rely on these announcements to know which station they are at. And trains speaker systems were mostly broken or heavily distorted on nearly every carriage. The remarkable thing about this was that the only bl…

It seems to me that one thing we could do would be to use some updated version of our existing technologies to provide people with personalized notifications of such things as what station they're entering via personal technologies such as a phone. Your phone (or alternative device) tells you, in a language or visual or tactile cue of your choice, where you are, what station you are entering, how much more time to yo…

This is a super cool way to think of it, and I think some good companies probably already do it this way.

It also makes me wonder what the "best" programming language would be for blind coders. I know my friend has talked about Java and Python, and I think Python has problems for blind folks because of the significant white space; but I believe even that is surmountable.

But, your mention of a syntax optimized for hearing is probably something we want to build, anyway. I just noticed a while back that there's a whole generation of kids who don't type to interact with their devices. They talk to them; I guess they still read the screen for replies, but I would guess there will come a time when even reading is optimized out of the system...already lots of folks interact primarily with their device through an earbud. Things like Google Glass will eventually happen.

In short, optimizing for other abilities seems like a future-friendly direction for exploration.

Re: We Hired a Blind Coder

#105

Nice story! One thing I have been thinking about, for completely blind (English isn't my native language, so sorry for not using the correct/polite terminology) users, (that have 0% vision on both eyes) it would be possible to use a laptop without a screen, I guess. Essentially simulating the screen for the screen reader to work with, but not rendering the output anywhere (or even having the screen hardware to render…

That's how a blind friend and coworker of mine works on a plane. Raspberry Pi + headphones + battery + keyboard. So you pretty much put your computer and battery in your pocket, and have the keyboard on your lap. Pretty fantastic.

Damn that's cool.
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