8 ms·
We Hired a Blind Coder
- mcweaksauce 10y agoI 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?
- virtuallynathan 10y agoSame as anyone else, I assume. There was a completely blind student in the year below me at University, he did just as well as anyone else. His screen reader read at a ludicrous speed.
- cyphar 10y ago"Ludicrous speed? Sir we've never gone that fast before. I'm not sure the ship can take it!" Sorry. I had to. :P
- Retr0spectrum 10y agoI 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).
- pbhjpbhj 10y agoI've done a little commercial web dev so have used freely available audio-browsers. A very interesting experience. YouTube has examples of people programming using audio output. That should help to imagine it.
- im_down_w_otp 10y agoIrwin "Whistler" Emery would like to have a word with you.
- emeraldd 10y agoI really enjoyed that movie! For reference http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0105435/ http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0105435/ "I want peace on Earth and good will toward men." -- Whistler
- sillysaurus3 10y agoHere's a post from a year ago about how a blind person interacts with computers: https://medium.freecodecamp.com/looking-back-to-what-started-it-all-731ef5424aec https://medium.freecodecamp.com/looking-back-to-what-started... (Discussion: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8965048 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 https://soundcloud.com/freecodecamp
- su_yuen 10y agoHi everyone! Thanks for the support and reply. Wasn't expecting this kind of response when we wrote the article. Herwin is visually impaired since birth so he definitely picked up coding with a screen reader. I have notified him of the comments here so he can share more of how he initially picked up coding himself. :)
- garrettgrimsley 10y agoI saw that you said you do video interviews, have you considered running "blind" interviews like how orchestras do? Applicants to orchestras play from behind a screen so that the judges selecting the candidates cannot see the candidate, and the only metric by which they can judge is the quality of the performance. Determining sex/age/race/etc through voice could be eliminated through audio filtering.
- msb 10y agoThis question came up on StackOverflow a number of years ago and sparked an insightful conversation. I recommend reading through the thread to anyone interested. http://stackoverflow.com/questions/118984/how-can-you-program-if-youre-blind http://stackoverflow.com/questions/118984/how-can-you-progra...
- mcshicks 10y agoI used have a blind colleague, I didn't work closely with him but did have a few interactions with him. This was maybe 20 years ago. So people have been doing this a long time. He was working on speech codecs when I worked with him. Anyway he just went to engineering school. At least in California they have people who help you and the school is legally required to make an "accommodation" if needed. That could be a reader, or more time on exam, etc. Here is a brief article on the guy http://www.calit2.net/newsroom/article.php?id=350 http://www.calit2.net/newsroom/article.php?id=350
- SwellJoe 10y agoOne 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.
- busterarm 10y agoWe 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.
- phamilton 10y agoHow does this affect the bottom line? Is this a financially good practice? Or merely a socailly good practice?
- busterarm 10y agohttp://www.duanemorris.com/alerts/ada_website_cases_filed_federal_court_pittsburgh_more_likely_to_follow_0815.html http://www.duanemorris.com/alerts/ada_website_cases_filed_fe... http://www.fredlaw.com/internet_technology_trademark__advertising_alerts/2015/12/28/1091/lawsuits_rise_blind_plaintiffs_sue_additional_retailers_for_website_accessibilityada_claims/ http://www.fredlaw.com/internet_technology_trademark__advert...
- ChristianBundy 10y agoFor those that don't want to read two articles just to get the answer to the above question, both of these articles are cases where people are being sued for having websites that are inaccessible to those with disabilities -- the same way you could be sued for lacking a wheelchair-accessible entrance in a brick and mortar business.
- GabrielF00 10y agoI 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.
- pkrefta 10y agoGreat and very inspiring story. Made my Saturday 200% better - seriously :)
- rusabd 10y agoI was hired by blind developer once. He didn't discriminate me by my sight.
- dudul 10y agoNice 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?
- charlieflowers 10y agoThe readers would not have to be rotten human beings ... merely non-naive. He didn't suggest we readers _wanted_ him underpaid. Just that we might wonder if they did. Many _would_ underpay him, so it's a reasonable thing to wonder.
- macspoofing 10y agoNot just you. That jumped out to me immediately as well. The whole article felt too self-congratulatory as it was.
- Rapzid 10y agoI find it interesting that they pay everyone at the same level the same amount. Unless that's an even more ambiguous statement than it reads; "level" being extremely subjective and analogue.. Their answer about pay is very open to interpretation. It has been a sellers market for a while now. I also agree with you about the feel of the article. Something just doesn't sit right with me about it.
- DanBC 10y agoI 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.
- stevetrewick 10y agoQuite distressingly common. >"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/key-statistics/ https://actionforblindpeople.org.uk/about-us/media-centre/ke...
- insteadof 10y agoSpeaking of, The Changelog #206 https://changelog.com/206/ https://changelog.com/206/ just put out one with a blind programmer as well, "This week on the show we talk with Parham Doustdar, a blind programmer. We talked about the advantages of being a blind programmer, the tools he uses, quitting school, carving your own path, and more."
- andrewjl 10y agoThanks for sharing this. It's very inspiring and interesting to read about solutions to the very unique problems visually impaired coders face. Does make me wonder about non-text based input / code display methods that can help here.
- Avalaxy 10y agoMost be a good employer to publicly praise their employees like this! ;) Interesting read, glad he's doing well!
- ethomson 10y agoWhen I was in high school, I had a part time job/internship doing QA and writing some software. I was recruited there by my friend, who was blind, a programmer, and also in high school. He was a great programmer, and very adept at using his screen reader. As far as I know, it only ever gave him one serious complication: since he was a minor, it was set to safe-for-work mode, and it read his coworker's name, a Mr Livshits, as Livsugars.
- bby 10y agoI am a virgin programmer.
- samfisher83 10y agoHow 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?
- teraflop 10y agoI'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 Emacs and we were good to go.
- samb1729 10y agoWhat does )))))))) feel like in Braille?
- robin_reala 10y ago⠶⠶⠶⠶⠶⠶⠶⠶⠶⠶⠶⠶⠶⠶⠶⠶ http://www.brl.org/intro/session03/punctuation.html http://www.brl.org/intro/session03/punctuation.html
- kewball 10y agoI started a new job and the sysops guys works remotely. I had been communicating with him for over a month via email and chat before a colleague told me that sysops guy was blind. He is quite brilliant.
- filleokus 10y agoNice 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 it on). Just imagine how mind boggling it would be to see someone working at a coffeshop with just headphones on and the bottom part of a laptop, or at a desk with no screen on it! I get that it probably don't make sense to manufacture a product like this, but still, would be really cool I think! :)
- eccfcco15 10y agoI actually took a laptop, and took it apart (for other reasons). Putting it back together, I purposely didn't put on the screen. It works just fine. I usually use it over ssh, but I can plug in a monitor, and it does think that the internal monitor is still connected. So, I think you can do that on regular hardware. I'm not blind, so I wouldn't know how to operate it without the display, though.
- alisson 10y agoThe battery would last so much more, cool idea!
- lucb1e 10y agoNot enough though. I always notice how little memory and processing power non-graphical applications use. 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).
- backlava 10y agoI 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.
- macspoofing 10y agoYou are a strange duck.
- busterarm 10y agoNot so strange. We talked about getting blindfolds for accessibility testing and talked about maybe trying to program with them so we can empathize better with users. VoiceOver is pretty good. If you're already a touch typist and no-mouse person it's not as big a stretch as you think. Hearing your code read back to you helps with some things.
- CarVac 10y agoCould you share any details of a) how you code blindfolded and b) how you learned to code blindfolded?
- Ericson2314 10y agoAnd refactoring?
- brobinson 10y agoIf any blog post deserves to be submitted to HN, "Wearing A Blindfold Made Me A Better Programmer" is it.
- deleted 10y ago[deleted]
- lucb1e 10y agoI tried this once as an experiment. I can't say it worked very well or would try it in production, but then again, I tried only once as a random idea. I've always wanted to try it a second time to improve some things I did wrong, but never got around to. Sounds like I should!
- whitenoice 10y agoNice post, this reminded me of an article/video I had seen recently - Srikanth Bolla - http://spectrum.mit.edu/spring-2011/living-his-dream http://spectrum.mit.edu/spring-2011/living-his-dream - http://www.dogonews.com/2016/6/9/visually-impaired-srikanth-bolla-sees-no-challenges-just-opportunities http://www.dogonews.com/2016/6/9/visually-impaired-srikanth-...
- danielmorozoff 10y agoI 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?
- Cuuugi 10y agoI wonder if he saw it coming.
- spoiledtechie 10y agoWhats the screen reader this coder uses? Is there a best screen reader for us software developers?
- su_yuen 10y agoHe uses this screen reader: http://www.freedomscientific.com/Products/Blindness/JAWS http://www.freedomscientific.com/Products/Blindness/JAWS It doesn't have Linux support though so if he needs to work in the Linux OS, he uses Windows with a Linux VM It's not built specially for software developers but just all visually impaired users in general
- chronic80 10y agoWhy 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.
- TheCoelacanth 10y agoWhat makes you think that you can find an equal or better engineer? When you're hiring you don't just get to order an engineer who precisely fits your specifications; you have to choose from real people who are all imperfect in one way or another.
- dang 10y agoOne of the best things about HN is that by the time I see comments as horrid as this, they've almost always already been flagged by community members. It would be better if they didn't exist in the first place, but that's too much to ask. To all the users who flag toxic comments like this one: thank you. HN has improved a lot because of you. (We banned this account for trolling and detached this subthread from https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11886308 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11886308 and marked it off-topic.)
- ghrifter 10y agoHoly shit laughing my ass off. 10/10
- saqibs 10y agoI thought I'd give my $0.02 worth on some of the questions raised. > 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.
- Brajeshwar 10y agoRecently, I tele-interviewed a developer and got him as a consultant, judged based on his skills and his work. I didn't realize he was blind until it came to light that the blind developer in the team was the one I interviewed! Good Developers are good, no matter what. 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.
- fit2rule 10y agoOne of the most brilliant coders I've ever worked with was 90% blind. He had a gigantic monitor, and his term setup was such that the gigantic screen showed big chars, 3 at a time. He'd scroll through code like lightning, reading it 1 or 2 chars at a time, and despite this limitation was one of the best kernel hackers of my professional experience. (We bonded as the only vi users in the dev group..) To this day, I doubt I'd have the temerity and courage to work in this field as he did, and I have to say that I have immense respect for the disabled who overcome these disabilities and nevertheless remain extremely productive. It says something of a persons resolve that they are willing and able to write and debug kernel code, 1 char at a time .. I really don't think I could do it.
- carlob 10y agoI work remotely as well, but at our company we do a lot of screen sharing meetings. I wonder if someone should build some sort of VNC (or zoom, or adobe connect) that plays well with screen readers and doesn't just send a video feed. Or maybe it already exists. 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.
- kendallpark 10y agoAt a previous company I worked at, we had a blind dude supporting our web apps (i.e. on the phone with customers). I was pretty shocked (and a little ashamed) to learn this because didn't have any ARIA features built in.
- herwin_haliman 10y agoHi, 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 https://www.dropbox.com/s/h9dxozsrxz7wuqf/mystory.txt?dl=0 Sorry for the inconvenience, and thanks all ;). Warm regards -- Herwin
- satori99 10y agoThankyou for posting your story!
- sleepychu 10y ago"A question going through your head is probably: Did we underpay him?" That was not going through my mind, I'm kind of concerned you thought it would be...