81–90 of 105 posts
I myself have macular degeneration, which while not disabling right now, has started a bit too early in my life. One day I might be almost blind myself and I will definitely need this.
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…
Yes, it must take a massive amount of internal strength and drive to be able to become a good software engineer while blind. They deserve the highest respect. Not only do they have to be good at programming, but they have to be excellent salesmen too (in order to convince potential employers). Interview processes are quite cold/inhuman, but if you're blind, you really need to create a 'human connection' with your pro…
Unconscious bias often limits your potential opportunities. I remember when I was looking for a job change one of the interviews I had was with a subsidiary of SAIC in India, the telephonic technical interview went very well and they invited me for in-person round. I did have mentioned visual impairment on the resume in the beginning but guess they didn't understand it or likely never bother to read resumes carefully.
When I reached there the HR got confused–they didn’t know what to do – so they asked me to give a written aptitude test (this was specifically mentioned not to happen as I’d already qualified the technical round). Good that I went with my brother who assisted me as scribe and then another technical interview happened with a team lead which also went well. They informed me that their dept. head would take a decision and get back to me.
If you're wondering whether they got back no that line of response meant that they didn’t expect person like me and weren’t interested.
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.
As PG once wrote in an essay [0]: “A good programmer working intensively on his own code can hold it in his mind the way a mathematician holds a problem he's working on.” So this is how I or every other blind programmer works IMO.
Only UI is something a challenge, though still manageable if one wants (personally I delegate styling part and focus only on the frontend/backend development part as that’s where I can be the most productive.)
The other challenge is the tooling, often especially in enterprise settings, tools of the trade which are GUI-based, not much accessible and this can have a big hit on the performance of a blind developer. Luckily I’ve often able to find an alternative in such situations (or rather opted me out of such activities as it was usually related to non-dev related processes). If everything under the hood is based on API (or command-line like in Linux), finding alternatives won’t remain a challenge.
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…
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…
IN office, people did used to get curious I think but they mostly preferred not to ask me :)
Even more, some constant robot-like sound (of low volume) coming from the computer make them more curious as I usually do not prefer headphone.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Blind devs would be perfect for certain problem spaces, like security-sensitive work or expert-witness type research.
In my experience programming is a mental job (no pun intended) and blind devs are equally suited or if I may dare to say, somewhat better equipped to do it as eyes are sometimes a big distraction. I could do programming without getting distracted by people moving around in the cubical for example. As PG once wrote in an essay [0]: “A good programmer working intensively on his own code can hold it in his mind the way…
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Not just you. That jumped out to me immediately as well. The whole article felt too self-congratulatory as it was.
I started reading it from a UK perspective. I couldn't get past the "we didn't break the law!" self-congratulatory feel. But then I realised that discrimination is common in the UK, and there are absolutely employers who pay people less because those people have disabilities; so I switched into enjoying reading about a company learning that employing someone with a disability isn't a big thing.
>"9 out of 10 employers rate blind and partially sighted people as either 'difficult' or 'impossible' to employ" (DWP, 2004) [0]
Which is stupid beyond belief to anyone who spends much time with folks who have a visual impairment. Just off the top of my head I can think of a barrister, a librarian, a bunch of IT and development types and several qualified and practicing tennis coaches who are VIPs. And that's just out of my personal acquaintances.
So while I almost bounced off this for the tone, in the end the tl;dr is 'we overcame our bias and it turned out to be no biggie'. As someone who spends a lot of time working to generate positive PR for VI I'll take this as a net gain.
[0] https://actionforblindpeople.org.uk/about-us/media-centre/ke...
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…
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.
What line did it segfault on, did the tests pass or fail, what state is the program in when it hits this breakpoint?
I suppose I could detect test pass failure with "echo \a" but it's just so terribly simple to view the results.
I rarely go more than 20 minutes worth of coding without recompiling/re-running tests.