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Interview with a blind developer on how he works (2017)
- lioeters 3y agoRelated: How A Blind Developer Uses Visual Studio (2017) - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=94swlF55tVc https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=94swlF55tVc - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14347908 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14347908
- hinkley 3y agoUnfortunately that video is gone. Is that the one where he was using sped up audio cues to analyze code?
- lioeters 3y agoThat's odd, the YouTube URL still works for me. Here's another link to the same video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wKISPePFrIs https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wKISPePFrIs I think it's the same one you mean, his screen reader's audio is so fast it sounds like electronic blips.
- somethingsright 3y ago"The answer of course is Visual Studio", pun intended.
- hinkley 3y agoIf he can perceive bright light I wonder if he can detect color? Because I’m mostly normally sighted I use audio cues for extremely low bandwidth data, like chat or build status. I wonder if someone with a text to speech tool would be better off getting visual cues for low bandwidth data. For example one or more color panels on the wall in front of you to indicate chat status or unread email or failed builds. Four pixels in three colors can encode a lot of status.
- jareds 3y agoI refer to my vision as "no useful vision" I can see enough light to sometimes tell if the lights are left on in a room or if the son is out. I can not see color, it's either bright, neutral, or dark.
- Nashooo 3y agoThat's interestingly exactly the case for me if I close my eyes. Through the eyelids I can tell dark, neutral and bright.
- hinkley 3y agoAt best I can tell the direction of a light source with my eyes closed. That still seems like it could encode four states. But the light intensity might make my skin uncomfortable. Better perhaps to use tactile.
- selimthegrim 3y agoI wonder if there’s a disability friendly version of the famous Apple Pascal poster
- pants2 3y agoI wonder how much multimodal LLMs are changing the game for blind developers. I imagine if used the right way it could be a huge productivity booster.
- jareds 3y agoWhy do you think this? I'm totally blind and find Chat GPT to be useful for quick answers to questions instead of searching through SEO spam and low quality tutorials. I find Copilot to be sueful for better code completion and helping to write basic unit tests. I don't find that it can actually write complex code for me. I very well may be using the tools wrong though.
- peddling-brink 3y agoMultimodal LLMs can take images and describe them as text, which I imagine could be useful in some cases, for the vision impaired.
- RobMurray 3y agoIt can be useful, although the usual caveats with LLMs apply. for example I can get a description of the contents of a window or control with one keystroke. Here is what it says about this HN page: The image shows a screenshot of a text-based discussion on an online forum. The discussion involves several users exchanging thoughts on various topics related to accessibility for visually impaired individuals, multimodal language models (LLMs), and coding. It features typical forum elements like usernames, timestamps, and reply links. [... summary of the comments] The color scheme is predominantly white with text in black, usernames in blue, and links in light blue, creating a contrast that's commonly seen in web-based forums.
- decide1000 3y agoThat's a nice post to read. Thanks for sharing.
- jareds 3y agoMicrosoft has done a lot of good work with VSCode for blind developers. I'm totally blind and used Eclipse for many years. I started using VSCode when I was learning Go. I watched audio queue's be added and thought it was a thing I'd never use because I am set in my ways. Now that I'm using VSCode to do Go programming professionally I'm glad they exist. It's not a game change but it is a nice quality of life improvement.
- miki123211 3y agoI definitely second the VS Code recommendation. I'm doing a lot of work with Jupyter these days, and Jupyter's accessibility really sucks. The VS Code Jupyter plugin is just as good as the rest of the app. I'm also a fan of the IndentNav[1] addon. It essentially allows you to navigate code like a tree, using indentation levels for hierarchy. This is very useful to skip over functions or blocks of code you're not currently interested in, get a quick overview of what a large function is doing without getting into the nitty-gritty details, or quickly figure out what if statement an "else" belongs to. [1] https://marketplace.visualstudio.com/items?itemName=TonyMalykh.indent-nav https://marketplace.visualstudio.com/items?itemName=TonyMaly...
- Reefersleep 3y agoOff topic, and I hope it doesn't cause offense, but Im very curious; what do you find to be good domains to work with as a blind developer? As a nonblind web developer whose domain is highly visual, I'm sometimes irrationally worried that I'd be out of a job if my vision went for one reason and another, and it gets me speculating about what the programming life is like for blind developers. Other visual aspects that I'd maybe worry about are graphical presentations made by other parties in my org.
- sebtron 3y agoInteresting. I thought blind developers would be working 100% on a UNIX command line, using tools like ed for text editing (no GUI or TUI). Related: "Command Line Programs for the Blind", by Karl Dahlke [1] [1] http://www.eklhad.net/philosophy.html http://www.eklhad.net/philosophy.html
- robin_reala 3y agoThose don’t expose semantics and state in the same way that well coded GUIs do.
- jareds 3y agoThis may have been a better option in the early 90's when GUI screen readers were not as good. I did z/OS Assembly programming for several years using ISPF as a text editor and submitting jobs to compile my code. I"ll gladly take an IDE with features from 1995 like renaming variables, moving to the next error, and jumping to a function definition.
- sneed_chucker 3y agoIf you don't mind me asking, what kind of Mainframe stuff were you working on where writing assembly was the best way to go about it?
- jareds 3y agoI was working on profiling and crash analysis software. The software had existed since the late 70's or early 80's. It was written in assembler so that's what was used to update it. If it was written from scratch it's unlikely the majority of it would be written in assembly.
- asvitkine 3y agoDid IDEs in 1995 actually support renaming variables? I thought that was a more modern thing like 2000s.
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- commenter48445 3y agoLink where you can hear the audio samples: https://boingboing.net/2017/08/28/this-blind-software-developer.html https://boingboing.net/2017/08/28/this-blind-software-develo...
- epr 3y agoWow, the fact that he can understand what's being said at that speed is incredible. His brain must've repurposed most of those visual processing neurons for audio.
- pxc 3y ago> His brain must've repurposed most of those visual processing neurons for audio. Maybe! Blind people's visual cortices do light up a lot more than you might think, apparently. Some blind people even experience visual synesthesia. But I think a big part of it is just ordinary practice. My mom is in the process of learning screenreaders on her iPhone and Windows PC right now, and she's still working her way up to speeds like that. It takes a lot of time to reach that level.
- Pathogen-David 3y agoIt looks like the audio samples have disappeared since 2017, but they're available on the Wayback Machine for those who want to listen: https://web.archive.org/web/20170831162900/https://www.vincit.fi/en/blog/software-development-450-words-per-minute/ https://web.archive.org/web/20170831162900/https://www.vinci...
- chilling 3y agoThank you good man!
- sgu999 3y agoThanks a lot! I expected the samples to be hard to understand, but this is absolutely mind blowing. Any sighted around here who managed to improve their ability to understand fast speech?
- rcarmo 3y agoI routinely listen to podcasts at 2x while doing other things, and can go up to 3x if it's quiet enough (or a slow enough task) to focus. I'm willing to bet I could do it faster if I was doing nothing else.
- xyst 3y agoIt’s like when I’m speed running a podcast or YT video.
- ufmace 3y agoThanks, very interesting. Those samples sound like total gibberish to me. I'm a native english speaker, and if I really concentrate, I can sometimes pick out a word or two, maybe a phrase with the written text right there too. Maybe I could get to understanding speech that fast if I worked my way up to it.
- IndrekR 3y agoPrevious coverage from 2019 where the author commented as well: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21898537 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21898537 Related topic from 2020 (Ask HN: I'm a software engineer going blind, how should I prepare?): https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22918980 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22918980
- dang 3y agoThanks! Macroexpanded: Blind software development at 450 words per minute (2017) - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21898537 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21898537 - Dec 2019 (53 comments) Ask HN: I'm a software engineer going blind, how should I prepare? - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22918980 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22918980 - April 2020 (473 comments)
- redbell 3y agoThanks for the references, especially the 2nd one. I came here to post it as a comment, but here on HN, there will always be someone who will outperform you :). For me, the mentioned post (Ask HN: I'm a software engineer..) is a true classic, at least for me. The first/top comment is legendary as well. Also, the above story was the highest voted Ask HN submission of all time until a few months ago where it was beaten by Ask HN: I’m an FCC Commissioner proposing regulation of IoT security updates https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37392676 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37392676
- rmast 3y agoThat second thread is really interesting — I don’t think I have to worry about blindness, but I’ve wondered how I’d adapt to working if I couldn’t see, or didn’t have use of one or both hands.
- paul_mark 3y ago[flagged]
- spr-alex 3y agoI once worked with a blind malware analyst. I was skeptical because of the working memory requirements for reverse engineering being hard in general... until we worked together and his screen reader gave him hex and assembly. He was beyond fast at reversing and generally excellent at his job.
- miki123211 3y agoBlind person here, do you remember what tools they used by any chance? I find modern IDA pro to be pretty inaccessible, same with Ghidra (though I only tried that one on Mac, and the Windows version is apparently somewhat better).
- generalizations 3y agoTBH, hex and assembly sounds like a sufficiently specific domain that they may have written their own tools/plugins. Maybe even a custom pronunciation library for reading off the symbols. With something like feisal that could be pretty feasible.
- BobbyTables2 3y agoAs GUI application, I find they are pretty challenging and deviate from normal application design. Ghidra’s multi window design is both powerful and a royal mess, many things aren’t intuitive. Resizing columns in the listing window deserves some sort of inauspicious award. Ghidra has a “headless” mode where it will just run without the UI. Or have you tried Binary Ninja? Its UI is simpler and a bit more primitive, but it is designed more programmatic analysis, less manual/interactive usage. It’s GUI is more for debugging scripts, not so much for manual reversing. Programmatic analysis can be powerful for automated taint analysis and such.
- spr-alex 3y agoso they had long been a mac user, but the screenreader support started to slip around ~2014 so they actually switched back to windows because it was just a much better experience since apple who used to rock had dropped the ball. i tried to get him in touch with some cupertino people but we got snubbed, sadly. anyway, it was IDA Pro, and they had spent some upfront time on tuning the layout to optimize their flow. I do not remember specifically but yes their IDA looked very different than the default setup.
- kgp7 3y agoI work with an engineer who is visually challenged and uses emacs with dictation to code. He is a pretty phenomenal engineer.
- Hnrobert42 3y agoThis makes me realize it must suck to be a mediocre blind developer. The average person is just average. Unless there is something about visual impairment that makes them better at development, then I would expect them to be on average, just average developers. Yet I would guess that visually impaired developers get more scrutiny. If nothing else, just because they are a novelty. Anyhow, I guess I am just reminding myself to treat each person as an individual.
- jesterswilde 3y agoI feel I'm a mediocre blind developer and it does suck, mostly just the blind part though. I do my best not to let my coworkers know I'm blind (I work remotely.) Mostly to avoid either 'cripple porn' or being disregarded. Either way, it's easier.
- cies 3y agoQuite bizar you can hide the fact your blind at work. But yeah, why not, fuck pity.
- bitwize 3y agoI'm "on the spectrum" as they say, and I don't talk about it much; I'm quite concerned with what's called "passing". I want people around me to focus on the things I can do, rather than the things I can't do. Can totally empathize with that someone with a more acute disability than mine, such as blindness, would want to do the same.
- Terr_ 3y agoTo me, this brings up all sorts of anxieties around how I could possibly function (professionally) if I lost my eyesight... and what I would practice in advance if I have reason to expect problems.
- mywacaday 3y ago10,000% respect for anyone able to develop or work productivility and being blind. I lost the use of my dominant right for a few months three years ago, so difficult to adapt even for a few months. Respect!
- denvaar 3y agoI'm surprised at the number of commenters here that are blind, or commenters who work with someone who is blind. Maybe this is more common than I thought, and that's awesome. Goes to show that we should try to make accessibility more than just an afterthought.
- halfcat 3y agoBlind leading the sighted
- pxc 3y agoOne time when I was a kid, I rode with my dad while he gave a blind guy from our local Linux users group a ride home. With the windows rolled down and an occasional question, he gave us turn-by-turn directions to his house, based on the map he had in his head of the route between the venue and his house, plus the way traffic sounded as it echoed off of various key buildings and streets that were landmarks for him.
- kjellsbells 3y agoI'm sighted but goshdarnit some of the little accessibility features that microsoft have worked into their products are super useful. Readaloud for example in Edge, a lifesaver when you have to trawl thru azure docs at doublespeed. My biggest beef with Microsoft around accessibility is how keyboard shortcuts are slowly dying out as apps move to becoming embedded webapps. Excel on windows for example has great keyboard navigability. Teams does not.
- leosanchez 3y agoExcel on windows is an javascript application too right? No ?
- kjellsbells 3y agoNot to my knowledge. The 365 apps can be run in a browser or as native windows desktop apps. I avoid the former as they seem slow to me. And their keyboard shortcuts clash with those of the containing web browser.
- colund 3y agoVery interesting article and it was interesting to see his desk without a display and mouse. I posted a long and very moving story the other day about a software developer who was getting blind on an eye in six hours. https://elye-project.medium.com/i-became-blind-within-6-hours-e2ccebb71dcc https://elye-project.medium.com/i-became-blind-within-6-hour... It made me think about how much time we spend in front of screens these days and that eyesight can't be taken for granted. This article was a nice contrast describing the possibilities to do work as a blind developer.
- bw86 3y agoIf anyone wants to read the linked article without dealing with mediums paywall, here it is: https://pastebin.com/Jyw04xJV https://pastebin.com/Jyw04xJV
- jonathankoren 3y agoOne time I phone screened a blind engineer. I had no idea he was blind at the time. He did the coding exercise with no problems, and I forwarded him to the onsite. The only thing that was unusual, was that all his code was flush left. It was perfectly fine code, just formatted oddly. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯ Nothing autoformat couldn’t fix. When someone else interviewed him at the onsite and saw my comment in the packet, they told me. We guessed it was some artifact of using a braille display or something. If anyone is familiar with this technology, I’d be curious to know if my hypothesis is correct.
- zdragnar 3y agoIf my limited knowledge is correct, many braille displays are fairly loud, and you'd hear the clacking when the engineer wasn't typing (if you used a live coding website). None of the blind engineers I've worked with used them- too slow to refresh, too limited number of characters that can be displayed at once, and/or too expensive. Some are better than others, but they're all expensive. If I had to guess, the usual tool the engineer used for coding had voiceover support for tab stops, but not in the browser editor.
- filleduchaos 3y agoActually...is there even a reason for a blind developer to indent their code (outside of languages like Python where whitespace is significant)? Sighted people do that so that the code is easier to read, but if you aren't reading visually, then the extra whitespace is useless (the nested context information is already conveyed by curly braces and the like). It's possible that this developer normally writes without stopping to insert or adjust indentation, and then runs a formatter to pretty up the code before sharing it with others - but simply forgot to do so in this instance (or didn't have one available in the coding exercise editor)
- joelanman 3y agoit's also possible they had very limited vision and used very high magnification, where indentation might be actively unhelpful since you'd just see lots of blank space at times
- fortran77 3y agoI've known this to be true, as the subject of the article states: > "Windows is the most accessible operating system there is" and people don't believe me when I tell them.
- _HMCB_ 3y agoWonderful article. I see it’s a few years old. Wonder if VS Code has improved vastly in accessibility and what the author’s take is now.
- pugworthy 3y agoReally interesting. One thing jumped out at me was whether some of my own coding process as a sighted developer overlap. I’m sure I’m not the only developer who talks about “Seeing the code in my head” before type it out. Not literal lines but I craft a mental map before hand, which guides the process more on a subconscious level.
- bitwize 3y agoA mentor of mine now has very poor eyesight due primarily to age. It's affected his ability to use a computer significantly and even his ability to concentrate on a task for sustained periods of time. Also, a friend of my wife's has macular degeneration, and at time of writing has 30% or less of his eyesight remaining. I find my own eyesight is starting to deteriorate (though with prescription lenses it's still pretty good), so in light of this and the above I'm definitely interested in how blind programmers work; accordingly, I've started experimenting with Emacspeak so that, if I ever go totally or effectively blind, there's still a pathway that I can use so that I can continue to computer effectively (including programming) without sight.
- schneems 3y agoOne of the best talks I saw was by a blind dev in India. About half way through I realized “holy crap, this guy had to memorize all his slides and talking points” and then it was even more impressive. Also to add: we are all temporarily disabled at some time in our life one way or another. It’s never a bad day to try out an accessibility tool and explore how well your work functions with it.
- snvsn 3y agoRelated: How a Completely Blind Manager/Dev Uses Emacs Every Day - Parham Doustdar - https://emacsconf.org/2019/talks/08/ https://emacsconf.org/2019/talks/08/
- SunghoYahng 3y agoIf blind people can do things primarily with their sense of hearing, then I believe I can learn to do the same with practice. This would allow me to work with both my visual and auditory senses. Alternatively, I could switch between working with my sight and hearing during different sessions, giving each sense a break. It sounds like a wonderful productivity hack. What do you think of this idea? I wonder if there are any blind training services for non-blind people.
- lupusreal 3y agoI had the same thought and learned how to comprehend TTS at very high speeds (~5x plus or minus a bit depending on how alert or tired I am.) I recommend it, it allows me to "read" for longer/more than my normal fatigue limit would permit.
- SunghoYahng 3y agoThanks for sharing your case. But what do you do with the parts you miss while listening to TTS? Do you just read fiction or light reading that you don't mind missing?
- lupusreal 3y agoMy headphones have a button which I mapped to seek backwards 10 seconds. Sometimes I still can't make something out (often because TTS is butchering the pronunciation) and have to read it visually. I read both fiction and nonfiction like this. Books, news and technical articles, etc. I turn it off when I run into things like tables of numbers since that just turns into a wall of noise for me.
- pxc 3y ago> I wonder if there are any blind training services for non-blind people. Blind people generally get mobility (i.e., navigating with a cane) and technology accessibility (i.e., using your phone and computer with screenreaders) training through social programs that are for blind people, but the individual teachers often offer private tutoring beyond the scope of those programs. Presumably some of those instructors are also willing to teach sighted people. If you call around, I bet you'll find one.
- bilater 3y agoOne of my biggest fears as a frontend dev is to build UIs that are inaccessible for people. It's easy to take so many things for granted. The good news is you get a lot of accessibility out of the box using native html. For higher abstractions I love working with accessibility first libraries like HeadlessUI or Shadcn (which is built on top of Radix).
- parkerhdeb 3y agoI sure wish I could read this..
- prakhartiwari0 3y ago[dead]