We Hired a Blind Coder

I think it is totally reasonable that a blind person could code, but how does a blind person learn how to code initially? Did he become blind later on after learning how to code?

I can't imagine what it would be like to use a computer in general, without sight. However, most programming resources are in text form, so I guess it wouldn't have been too difficult (in relative terms).

Here's a post from a year ago about how a blind person interacts with computers: https://medium.freecodecamp.com/looking-back-to-what-started...

(Discussion: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8965048)

From the comments there, here's a fascinating example of how quickly a blind person can absorb information. 525WPM in this case: https://soundcloud.com/freecodecamp

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 apologize for their disability, even in cases where it does not inhibit them from doing the work.

Even worse, there begins to be a notion that hiring someone with a disability is a charitable act, rather than just making a hiring decision based on their competence for the task. It seems like that would be kinda soul-crushing to always wonder if you were chosen for reasons other than your abilities.

I've seen so many interesting/disappointing behaviors from people when it comes to people with disabilities. Once I was helping with an event that was organized and led by a woman with cerebral palsy and in a wheelchair. Media showed up to cover the event...and kept trying to talk to me about it (the able-bodied white guy who was mostly there to handle technical stuff and had very little interesting to say about what the event was about), even when the organizer was right next to me and clearly bossing people, including me, around. She also has had difficulty finding regular work in the past, despite being really impressive in a lot of areas.

I'm kinda just ranting here, as I don't have good solutions, but I do think it'd be cool for folks to stop assuming that just because someone can't work the way most folks work they can't do the same kind of work. There have been blind developers (that I've been aware of) for about as long as I've been using computers (and that's a long time). We should stop being shocked by it; though it's cool and impressive, it tends to lead to thinking they might not be able to do the job as well, just because they're doing it in such a different way.

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 I wish our industry would spend a little more time trying to get this right. If you aren't using Semantic markup and ARIA, please start now.

You can't imagine how much worse the user experience is on mobile vs a computer.