61–70 of 105 posts
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 wonder if any blind coders could comment on how they see programmatic flow in their minds eye?
It's all about the structure. I think of it like reading a novel with a complex plot - you meet some of the characters, learn facts about them, and then you get introduced to new characters, and later in the book you find out how they relate to each other, and much later on, you may find out through some twist of the plot that the relationship isn't quite what you thought it was, and you have to recreate your mental model.
As a result, I find that sometimes I'm slower at ramping up on complex codebases (especially if it's poorly written with no structure), but once I have my mental model, I'm potentially faster than someone who has to have things in front of them to refer to. This is purely based on my personal experience.
> How do big companies that love doing white boarding interview blind people?
I've always turned up with my laptop, and proposed that I use it, plugged into a monitor the interviewer can see. The interviewer reads me out the question, and I take notes. I always do the coding in Notepad, so I don't have access to code completion or syntax highlighting.
> I think it is totally reasonable that a blind person could code, but how does a blind person learn how to code initially?
The same way a sighted person would - since most information in this field is text-based. Read the tutorials, do the exercises. In fields where mathematical notation or diagrams are prevalent (e.g. machine learning), some sighted help or adapted material is probably required.
> Why the hell would you hire a blind coder to ship your feature by next week when you can find an equal or better (white/Asian male) engineer to do the same thing? By definition, the blind coder is limited compared to non-disabled people. It's a purely business decision. No hard feelings, but I'd rather not have a blind person on my team or organization. Unless it is for PR.
I respond to this comment purely because, whether I like it or not, such thinking is not uncommon. Let's rephrase the question as "why would you hire a {foo} engineer to ship your feature by next week when you can find an equal or better ({bar}) engineer to do the same thing?". Put this way, I accept that smaller companies who need someone next week will always choose the {bar} engineer, because they're better, not because they're {bar}. But here there is an assumption that every single {bar} engineer is better than every single {foo} engineer, which simply can't be true. Make sure your biases don't prevent you from hiring the awesome {foo} engineer, who out-performs every {bar} engineer. In a larger company, I'd go further and say that you need to have an inclusive work culture, not only because it's the right thing to do, but also because if your customer-base is diverse (which on the internet, it probably is), then a really good way to make awesome products is to have a diverse workforce.
Prior to that, I also got 2 disabled interns - they are hard of hearing and verbal speaking. I got them working for 6 months, after which they got full-time jobs elsewhere. They were usually present in the 30+ team workshops and meet-ups that I do. I had to slow down, express more expressively with hands, etc. and things went pretty good. They did always comes back to me at the end, picking on few missing parts that I need to elaborate.
I also had a selfish motive - I wanted to learn sign language. I was able to understand them better but I think I need professional training to be proficient doing the sign language myself.
btw, this is all in India, a place where accessibility, disability-enabled stuffs are an after-thought, sometimes totally ignored.
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…
How do big companies that love doing white boarding interview blind people. I am guessing due to ADA they have to give them some other test?
I've done it, and it's not that hard. Anything that you would normally write or draw on the whiteboard to explain the problem, you just explain verbally instead. I found it helpful to write everything out on paper anyway to keep my explanation organized. The candidate brought along their own laptop with a screen reader and a nifty Braille display, so when it was time to actually write some code, they just fired up Em…
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…
> 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…
This sort of thing could be approached more generally, so that it would work for kids who aren't paying attention, for travelers who don't speak the loudspeaker's language even when it's working, adults who see and understand the language just fine but need an alarm because of a tendency to fall asleep and miss their stop, and so on.
Which then tells me that the big tech companies should all have whole divisions of employees with various "features" (very short, tall, blind, speech problems, etc.) who would not only test ideas like these but design, prototype, and build them. They would not only be experimenting with products and services for customers but with how to get their own work done, looking into questions such as whether you could design a programming language with a syntax optimized for hearing instead of looking, which would then be transpiled into something more mainstream, or creating alternatives to keyboard & mouse for those with muscular disorders, or countless other things.
My guess is that many of the ideas they come up with for helping some small niche of the population will be discovered to be of great value to many other groups in ways that weren't anticipated. Of course the dev tools they come up with for blind coders would be made available to all, but the "audio-optimized syntax" might just prove to be popular with programmers with no vision problems, and the keyboard/mouse replacement might be a big hit with cooks, surgeons, and musicians.
I'm sure there are many such things already going on that I haven't heard of, but I'm thinking it could become a very rich source of innovative technologies and products with big markets and should be such a big push that everybody knows about it.
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…
Interview processes are quite cold/inhuman, but if you're blind, you really need to create a 'human connection' with your prospective employer in order to offset the 'perceived risk' that your disability brings.
If a blind person is competing with other fully-able applicants, it's easy for the employer to subconsciously fallback to a 'safe option' (it's a natural human instinct to avoid unknown risks) - That's why the 'frantic' follow-up communications are so important for a blind person - It's to make sure that the employer doesn't fall back to making 'subconscious' decisions.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
I've done it, and it's not that hard. Anything that you would normally write or draw on the whiteboard to explain the problem, you just explain verbally instead. I found it helpful to write everything out on paper anyway to keep my explanation organized. The candidate brought along their own laptop with a screen reader and a nifty Braille display, so when it was time to actually write some code, they just fired up Em…
What does )))))))) feel like in Braille?
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.
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…
The battery would last so much more, cool idea!
When I was 17 or so (about five years ago) I bought an old laptop for 65 bucks to run as a server. It had 128MB RAM, ran Windows XP and had a Pentium 3 I think (might have been P2). A piece of shit, basically, and Windows XP took at least 30-40MB of that precious 128MB RAM.
Nevertheless, I could run Apache2, Mysql, Filezilla Server, hMailServer, BIND DNS, VNC/TeamViewer (I forgot which), µTorrent with a webinterface, and probably something else I'm forgetting. All of this software ran perfectly fine together. I think my website (self-written php blog which did a few database queries on every pageload) even hit the HN frontpage once and it survived just fine.
The point? Non-graphical applications rock in performance compared to something that has to render stuff. Removing the screen probably does nothing to stop applications from trying to render fonts, images, etc. Doing that would probably increase laptop's battery lives to a full work week (I mean, look at phones, and they have more than enough processing power for this, with a fifth or tenth of a laptop battery because of their size).