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We Hired a Blind Coder

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Re: We Hired a Blind Coder

#31

Post by Bahamut »

busterarm wrote: post #10

We contract a blind accessibility consultant to help us evaluate all of our websites (and we have a lot...) and educate us on best practices for making our sites easier to navigate. One of the best choices that we ever made. We spend a lot of time on getting it right in our sites and have spent many hours in NVDA & VoiceOver with our eyes closed. It's unfortunate how poor the experience still is on most websites and…

As a maintainer of a major UI library for the web, I sympathize, but I also find that it also takes significant time to get accessibility done right as well. There is a lot of research involved for most people, precisely because they are not blind. I find that it is time consuming and doesn't offer as much bang for the effort, which is a shame & something I know I need to work on.

I wish there is a better solution here, but I don't know what it is. It does offer a good opportunity to make an impact though for any aspiring developers.

Re: We Hired a Blind Coder

#32

Post by jacalata »

mahmud wrote: post #29
SwellJoe wrote: post #8

One of my friends is a blind coder (and he sometimes comments here on HN), and he's had a very hard time getting regular work as a coder, even for things that seem obvious (like testing and fixing apps and sites for accessibility). He's bright and built his own screen reader for Android, among other things. But, I think that's a common experience for folks with disabilities; they begin to feel like they have to apolo…

Blind devs would be perfect for certain problem spaces, like security-sensitive work or expert-witness type research.

Why?

Re: We Hired a Blind Coder

#33

Post by GabrielF00 »

phamilton wrote: post #16
busterarm wrote: post #10

We contract a blind accessibility consultant to help us evaluate all of our websites (and we have a lot...) and educate us on best practices for making our sites easier to navigate. One of the best choices that we ever made. We spend a lot of time on getting it right in our sites and have spent many hours in NVDA & VoiceOver with our eyes closed. It's unfortunate how poor the experience still is on most websites and…

How does this affect the bottom line? Is this a financially good practice? Or merely a socailly good practice?

I have heard of cases where increasing contrast to meet accessibility standards resulted in significant boosts to sales. Proper contrast is beneficial to people with vision impairments, but it also seems to help people without vision impairments navigate a UI. I would guess that you could also see a big sales boost when you make your site fully accessible to the colorblind - something like 10% of males are colorblind.

When it comes to screen readers, the percentage of customers who use them is much smaller, but there are lots of business reasons to have a good experience for blind customers: it's important in markets like education and government, and it avoids bad PR.

Re: We Hired a Blind Coder

#34

Post by hueving »

Bahamut wrote: post #31
busterarm wrote: post #10

We contract a blind accessibility consultant to help us evaluate all of our websites (and we have a lot...) and educate us on best practices for making our sites easier to navigate. One of the best choices that we ever made. We spend a lot of time on getting it right in our sites and have spent many hours in NVDA & VoiceOver with our eyes closed. It's unfortunate how poor the experience still is on most websites and…

As a maintainer of a major UI library for the web, I sympathize, but I also find that it also takes significant time to get accessibility done right as well. There is a lot of research involved for most people, precisely because they are not blind. I find that it is time consuming and doesn't offer as much bang for the effort, which is a shame & something I know I need to work on. I wish there is a better solution he…

>that it is time consuming and doesn't offer as much bang for the effort

This is true for many types of disabilities. Unless people are personally affected, the vast majority will put in minimal effort.

I wonder if you could find some grant money to help fund work on it.

Re: We Hired a Blind Coder

#36

Post by danielmorozoff »

I wonder if any blind coders could comment on how they see programmatic flow in their minds eye? I am curious how this shapes the way you write code as well. As a demonstrative example, i imagine very long / complex functional methods would be difficult to worth with as they would require more movement back of the screen reader and may reduce your efficiency.

Maybe people who work with blind devs could also chime in.

Many blind musicians and artists develop heightened perceptions in their respective art and generate some unique, original works. I wonder if this is true for coders/ mathematicians?

Re: We Hired a Blind Coder

#37

Post by macspoofing »

backlava wrote: post #30

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.

You are a strange duck.

Re: We Hired a Blind Coder

#39

Post by macspoofing »

dudul wrote: post #15

Nice post, but I was kind of shocked by this part: "A question going through your head is probably: Did we underpay him?" Seriously? What kind of human beings do you think your readers are? Did anyone here really think about that while reading the story?

Not just you. That jumped out to me immediately as well.

The whole article felt too self-congratulatory as it was.

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