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One 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 onsi

One 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 ago
If 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 ago
  Actually...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 ago
    it'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
    - chgs 3y ago
      You can change tabs to show up as a single character. Of course if people are forcing spaces then you’re stuck, you need to hope that space isn’t significant and then collapse multiple spaces.
  - RobMurray 3y ago
    Yes, in my opinion indentation is essential. Screen readers can tell you the indentation level which definitely helps keeping track of where you are when reading nested blocks. It is also important to make the code readable to others.

zdragnar 3y ago

If 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 ago
Actually...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 ago
  it'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
  - chgs 3y ago
    You can change tabs to show up as a single character. Of course if people are forcing spaces then you’re stuck, you need to hope that space isn’t significant and then collapse multiple spaces.
- RobMurray 3y ago
  Yes, in my opinion indentation is essential. Screen readers can tell you the indentation level which definitely helps keeping track of where you are when reading nested blocks. It is also important to make the code readable to others.