[HN Gopher] Interview with a blind developer on how he works (2017)
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Interview with a blind developer on how he works (2017)
Author : agomez314
Score : 307 points
Date : 2024-04-04 10:47 UTC (2 days ago)
(HTM) web link (www.vincit.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (www.vincit.com)
| lioeters wrote:
| Related:
|
| How A Blind Developer Uses Visual Studio (2017) -
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=94swlF55tVc -
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14347908
| hinkley wrote:
| Unfortunately that video is gone. Is that the one where he was
| using sped up audio cues to analyze code?
| lioeters wrote:
| That's odd, the YouTube URL still works for me. Here's
| another link to the same video:
| 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 wrote:
| "The answer of course is Visual Studio", pun intended.
| hinkley wrote:
| If 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 wrote:
| I 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 wrote:
| That's interestingly exactly the case for me if I close my
| eyes. Through the eyelids I can tell dark, neutral and
| bright.
| hinkley wrote:
| At 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 wrote:
| I wonder if there's a disability friendly version of the famous
| Apple Pascal poster
| pants2 wrote:
| I 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 wrote:
| Why 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 wrote:
| Multimodal LLMs can take images and describe them as text,
| which I imagine could be useful in some cases, for the vision
| impaired.
| RobMurray wrote:
| It 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.
| cies wrote:
| Thanks for this. Pretty useful I'd say!
| bitwize wrote:
| > It features typical forum elements like usernames,
| timestamps, and reply links.
|
| God, that's so on-brand for AI.
|
| "The image shows a group of humans. They are engaged in
| human-like activities like talking, eating, and hiding
| their insecurities. They feature typical human elements
| like hands, ears, and nipples."
| jareds wrote:
| That's a good point. This may have been useful when I was
| working on internal webapps to determine if the UI looked
| like I expected it to. That was in 2010 though when it was
| more common to use plain HTML instead of single page
| frameworks. I'm glad I moved into back-end development.
| miki123211 wrote:
| Not much, though I use GPT Vision (through a Mac app[1])
| occasionally, especially for screenshots and sometimes plots.
|
| [1] https://github.com/chigkim/VOCR
| decide1000 wrote:
| That's a nice post to read. Thanks for sharing.
| jareds wrote:
| Microsoft 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 wrote:
| I 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=TonyMaly...
| Reefersleep wrote:
| Off 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.
| jareds wrote:
| I've done a lot of web API development in both legacy
| applications and micro services. It's pretty accessible since
| I don't need to rely n a UI and can use CURL.
| delduca wrote:
| I know a blind man who works at Google and sometimes does 3D
| graphics programming.
| sebtron wrote:
| Interesting. 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
| robin_reala wrote:
| Those don't expose semantics and state in the same way that
| well coded GUIs do.
| jareds wrote:
| This 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 wrote:
| If 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 wrote:
| I 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 wrote:
| Did IDEs in 1995 actually support renaming variables? I
| thought that was a more modern thing like 2000s.
| usr1106 wrote:
| IDEs where mostly non-existing in 1995.
|
| I believe Smalltalk could have been considered an IDE? Just
| vague memories from people using it those days, I have
| never used it.
| igouy wrote:
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Integrated_development_envi
| ron...
| miki123211 wrote:
| I actually tried using Ed and didn't like it very much. My main
| gripe with it is that you strictly have to operate on a line-
| by-line basis, there's no way to go word-by-word, do
| option+backspace to erase the word that you just went past and
| then replace it with something else. Sure, there's the s
| command, but then turning "Eric" into "Daniel" also turns
| "American" into "Amdanielan", and you have to be extra careful
| around that sort of thing.
| RobMurray wrote:
| I would hate to have to do any editing in ed. Just reading a
| file line by line would be painful.
|
| GUI programs are actually often easier for blind people in the
| same way they are for everyone else as long as they have good
| keyboard navigation and use a toolkit with good accessibility
| support.
|
| I currently mainly use VSCode for development; they are putting
| a lot of effort into accessibility.
| MrVandemar wrote:
| Unfortunately, accessibility under Linux at least is considered
| lagging and problematic. Microsoft Windows seems to have better
| accessibility support all round than Linux.
|
| See:
|
| https://scribe.rip/@r.d.t.prater/linux-accessibility-an-unma...
| anthk wrote:
| Unix people can just use Emacspeak for everything.
| commenter48445 wrote:
| Link where you can hear the audio samples:
| https://boingboing.net/2017/08/28/this-blind-software-develo...
| epr wrote:
| Wow, 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 wrote:
| > 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 wrote:
| It 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.vinci...
| chilling wrote:
| Thank you good man!
| sgu999 wrote:
| Thanks 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 wrote:
| I 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 wrote:
| It's like when I'm speed running a podcast or YT video.
| ufmace wrote:
| Thanks, 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 wrote:
| Previous coverage from 2019 where the author commented as well:
| 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
| dang wrote:
| Thanks! Macroexpanded:
|
| _Blind software development at 450 words per minute (2017)_ -
| 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 -
| April 2020 (473 comments)
| redbell wrote:
| Thanks 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
| rmast wrote:
| That 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.
| spr-alex wrote:
| I 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 wrote:
| Blind 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 wrote:
| TBH, 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 wrote:
| As 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 wrote:
| so 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 wrote:
| I work with an engineer who is visually challenged and uses emacs
| with dictation to code. He is a pretty phenomenal engineer.
| Hnrobert42 wrote:
| This 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 wrote:
| I 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 wrote:
| Quite bizar you can hide the fact your blind at work. But
| yeah, why not, fuck pity.
| bitwize wrote:
| I'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_ wrote:
| To 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.
| denvaar wrote:
| I'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 wrote:
| Blind leading the sighted
| pxc wrote:
| One 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 wrote:
| I'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 wrote:
| Excel on windows is an javascript application too right? No ?
| sensanaty wrote:
| My greatest realization with a11y came when I sat down and used
| screen reader software on my work project and realized how
| unusable it was for anyone visually impaired. Even tiny things
| like font sizes take on a different perspective once you
| realize what it can be like.
|
| It also made me realize that making an accessible site, such as
| all the gov.uk ones, means that the site will almost by default
| have a great UX flow and be easy to use. You have to make some
| decisions that can limit you, but at the same time you achieve
| _so much_ in usability once you design things with a11y in
| mind.
| wombat-man wrote:
| Yeah, and what's more frustrating is not getting time to work
| on those bugs. My current place is a little better, but my
| last place was a joke. We spent time and hired consultants to
| evaluate our product, logged the a11y bugs, and dove right
| into our next feature work. Those bugs are probably still
| there years later, if they haven't aged out.
| mywacaday wrote:
| 10,000% 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!
| colund wrote:
| Very 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-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.
| jonathankoren wrote:
| 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. -\\_(tsu)_/- 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 wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| 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.
| fortran77 wrote:
| I'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_ wrote:
| Wonderful 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 wrote:
| Really 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 wrote:
| A 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 wrote:
| One 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 wrote:
| Related: How a Completely Blind Manager/Dev Uses Emacs Every Day
| - Parham Doustdar - https://emacsconf.org/2019/talks/08/
| SunghoYahng wrote:
| If 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 wrote:
| I 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 wrote:
| Thanks 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 wrote:
| My 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 wrote:
| > 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 wrote:
| One 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 wrote:
| I sure wish I could read this..
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