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There’s a chap in another office, someone i’d never met but interacted with occasionally. A productive guy, a good guy, competent and effective. 2 years go by a

There’s a chap in another office, someone i’d never met but interacted with occasionally. A productive guy, a good guy, competent and effective. 2 years go by and I only need to interact with him once a month or so but i know he’s good. Fast forward to a change of role which means i interact with this chap a lot more frequently. All good. Randomly one day while pairing with another colleague on something, he says “yeah when i found out XXX was blind i nearly fell off my chair”. Come again? He’s blind, you didn’t know? Ahh i think we’re talking about different people, i meant XXX in the X office. Yeah, he’s blind. Cue 40 mins of “no wait, that can’t be possible, i know this guys work, it’s physically impossible that he’s blind”. I try not to make a deal out of him but now that i know, i can’t help but see him as anything other than superhuman. I still struggle to comprehend deep down that viewed remotely through textual interaction someone can appear not just unimpared but actually one of the top N% of performers. He’s always switched on and remembers everything.

blunte 7y ago
If you consider the human ability to process sensory information in whole - all senses, it's not so surprising that someone with one fewer sense might perform at a higher rate with the other senses. Or to put it the other way, there's a LOT of mental energy spent managing (especially filtering/categorizing) visual sensory information. Remove that distraction, and other senses get more processing power. This is not to minimize the high performance of the essay author nor developer XXX, especially given the fairly sight-biased state of computing. But if you were to find some new change in your capabilities, with time and effort you could greatly enhance your performance in other ways.
- tuukkao 7y ago
  Two points, neither of which is a disagreement to the OP's comments: 1. Listening to speech at 450 WPM is a totally attainable skill for the sighted. It is not some kind of magical superpower that only the blind are blessed with. It's learnt by gradually increasing the speech rate and stopping just before the speech gets incomprehensible. For the record, I can't listen to text at 450 WPM and fully concentrate for long periods of time. Novels and other long pieces of writing I read at a much slower rate. 2. Processing visual information does take processing power. However, so does inventing and using coping mechanisms in a world that has been mostly made by and for the sighted. In most cases I rarely get any advantage of being blind. I just think of new approaches of performing as equally to the others as I possibly can.
  - blunte 7y ago
    Oh I'm not suggesting that you have an advantage, per se. But I'm speaking only about human speech audio processing (translating sound into words in your head) vs having a full screen of visual elements, plus all the other static and moving visual elements all around in one's field of view. For an audio only analogy, I would liken it to being in a room full of people at a party and trying to listen to one person vs being in a room alone with headphones. You should be able to process speech audio better and faster with the isolated input compared to the literally noisy one.
seanmcdirmid 7y ago
Is this a case where there is a difference between legally blind (which can mean vision very impaired but some vision still occurs) and completely blind? If it is the former, you might not notice unless they had to use a screen reader/vision enhancement in front of you.

blunte 7y ago

If you consider the human ability to process sensory information in whole - all senses, it's not so surprising that someone with one fewer sense might perform at a higher rate with the other senses. Or to put it the other way, there's a LOT of mental energy spent managing (especially filtering/categorizing) visual sensory information. Remove that distraction, and other senses get more processing power. This is not to minimize the high performance of the essay author nor developer XXX, especially given the fairly sight-biased state of computing. But if you were to find some new change in your capabilities, with time and effort you could greatly enhance your performance in other ways.

tuukkao 7y ago
Two points, neither of which is a disagreement to the OP's comments: 1. Listening to speech at 450 WPM is a totally attainable skill for the sighted. It is not some kind of magical superpower that only the blind are blessed with. It's learnt by gradually increasing the speech rate and stopping just before the speech gets incomprehensible. For the record, I can't listen to text at 450 WPM and fully concentrate for long periods of time. Novels and other long pieces of writing I read at a much slower rate. 2. Processing visual information does take processing power. However, so does inventing and using coping mechanisms in a world that has been mostly made by and for the sighted. In most cases I rarely get any advantage of being blind. I just think of new approaches of performing as equally to the others as I possibly can.
- blunte 7y ago
  Oh I'm not suggesting that you have an advantage, per se. But I'm speaking only about human speech audio processing (translating sound into words in your head) vs having a full screen of visual elements, plus all the other static and moving visual elements all around in one's field of view. For an audio only analogy, I would liken it to being in a room full of people at a party and trying to listen to one person vs being in a room alone with headphones. You should be able to process speech audio better and faster with the isolated input compared to the literally noisy one.

seanmcdirmid 7y ago

Is this a case where there is a difference between legally blind (which can mean vision very impaired but some vision still occurs) and completely blind? If it is the former, you might not notice unless they had to use a screen reader/vision enhancement in front of you.