Blind since birth, writing code at Amazon since 2013

https://blog.aboutamazon.com/working-at-amazon/blind-since-birth-writing-code-at-amazon-since-2013

by dominotw • 8 years ago

349 96 8 years ago

blog.aboutamazon.com

melling• 8 years ago

I have a few links on blind programming.

https://github.com/melling/ErgonomicNotes/blob/master/blind_...

And a lot more on programming by voice:

https://github.com/melling/ErgonomicNotes/blob/master/progra...

The section on Silvius seems to be a more recent project.

lgregg• 8 years ago

I found this video, it's pretty insightful. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iWXebEeGwn0&feature=youtu.be

Thanks for sharing.

rectang• 8 years ago

Hi-speed screen readers seem to unlock the potential of talented visually-impaired programmers. Forzano and others train up to shockingly fast rates. The plasticity of the human brain has so many uses!

VectorLock2• 8 years ago

How does that work anyways? Do the screen readers just speak ultra-fast? Do they say things like "parenthesis" or "right bracket?" Is there some kind of audio coding of whats on the screen?

thedirt0115• 8 years ago

Yes, they speak ultra fast and literally say the punctuation verbatim. See https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iWXebEeGwn0&vl=en for an example ("How a Blind Developer uses Visual Studio"). You can hear it saying "right brace", etc.

edit: typo and clarify what I'm linking to.

bob_theslob646• 8 years ago

That was an amazing story!

I just hope that he is being payed fairly. Here is an example of someone who is disabled and not being payed fairly in my opinion.

Kandu Industries can pay Chris and roughly 150 other workers substantially below the federal minimum wage of $7.25 an hour because of a 1938 provision in the Fair Labor Standards Act that permits employers, who apply to the Department of Labor for a waiver, to pay lower wages to people with disabilities.[1]
According to the department, about 20 percent of people with disabilities participate in the workforce, and of that group, about 3 percent, or approximately 195,000 workers, are being paid subminimum wages. These workers typically make well below the minimum wage, sometimes as low as “pennies per hour,” according to the Department of Justice.[1]

(Many People With Disabilities Are Being Paid Way Below the Minimum Wage, and It’s Perfectly Legal)[https://www.motherjones.com/politics/2017/08/many-people-wit...

Anderkent• 8 years ago

Why is minimum wage fair, and why is it better for people with disabilities severe enough that no one wants to pay them above minimum wage to not earn anything?

jacquesm2• 8 years ago

That's totally disgusting. Not only do they start out with a bad hand, this is then used to exploit them with the blessings of the government.

__s• 8 years ago

The idea is to offset a bias against hiring them. But ideally in these situations taxes would fill the gap, justified as having the disabled in the workforce keeps them off welfare programs

brightball• 8 years ago

Don’t they receive disability assistance money as well though?

maxerickson• 8 years ago

They often advertise themselves as providing opportunities (and ask for donations and such).

There is certainly great potential for exploitation, but many such operations do provide opportunities that would not otherwise exist.

ars3• 8 years ago

Maybe you should educate yourself more before posting full of outrage.

A good place to start would be in the other comments in this thread.

But I'll summarize for you: The companies are only hiring them as a community service. They cost more than a regular person and do less. Force companies to pay full wage, and they won't hire them at all. Even at the lower wage it's not really worth it to them.

Maybe they shouldn't bother, since people like you interpret helping people as exploiting them......

wildmusings• 8 years ago

The idea is that some people with disabilities are going to be unable to find work where they can produce value higher the federal or state minimum wage. It’s possible such work exists, but maybe not where they live or maybe not in something they’re trained in. A job is better than no job, for more reasons than just money. Work gives people the feeling of earning their way, like they are valuable to others in their own right.

Whether such a policy is actually fair depends on specific empirical facts, not some a priori judgment. You’d need to know the economics of labor by people with different disabilities, the ability of companies to accommodate those disability, and so forth.

CamTin• 8 years ago

I'm not sure what the original intent of the 1938 law was, or how it's being abused now, but I did participate in an organization that helped the severely mentally handicapped. The charity provided them with a place to stay (a house in a neighborhood with neighbors, not an institution) including 24/7 care for things like helping with medications, cleaning, etc. Part of the program was that they spent some time each week (definitely not 40 hours) in a work environment (in our case, packing plastic bags into boxes for Johnson and Johnson), also fully supervised by caretakers.

Johnson and Johnson certainly weren't making out on the deal, given the limitations of the work that could realistically get done versus what a non-disabled employee would be able to do. I suspect the whole program was more headache and expense than they saved. In other words, the point was not for these people to earn enough money to support themselves (their housing, meals, clothes, were taken care of), and only partially about earning some spending money (there was already a budget for that too, things like movie tickets, coffee at Tim Hortons, etc), but more trying to lead a normal life -- seeing peers at work, waving to the other workers in the plant, going to the company barbecue, etc.

Again, I'm basically 100% sure that abuses exist of this provision, but I would really like to see any reform done in such a way that it doesn't eliminate programs like this.

toomanybeersies• 8 years ago

They have a similar law in New Zealand, but there is a debate around abolishing it so that disabled people would have to be paid normal minimum wage.

The flip side to this was that a whole bunch of workers basically stood to be made redundant, because the companies employing them could't afford to pay them minimum wage. The reason that a lot of companies were hiring these people was a as community service.

The coworking space I used to work at does this. They have a special needs guy who is the community assistant, he'd come in like 3 days a week and help with keeping the kitchen clean and other stuff. It was great, we loved him and he loved being there. It would've been cheaper and easier to hire a fully-abled person to do the job, but that's not why they hired him.

It's common for supermarkets in New Zealand to hire people with learning disabilities to do things like collecting trolleys. To be honest, they look like the most satisfied employees in the whole store.

The sad thing though is that people do abuse the system and use them as a cheap source of labour, which is disgusting.

Bahamut• 8 years ago

I always love reading stories like this - even with such a disability, he has been able to accomplish a feat that is relatively difficult to accomplish for most devs. I have heard my own company has blind developers as well, and accessibility is a first rate concern for us.

I do wish more companies invested in being accessibility friendly - not doing so automatically shuts a portion of population away from the product(s) by default.

hi412• 8 years ago

This story is very inspiring. How is he able to do his work without looking at block diagrams, complicated entity relationship diagrams, writing on paper to clarify among other things which I as a sighted person normally do?

JonnyNova• 8 years ago

I wonder how much that can get in the way. I'm sure he adds insights into the development team from likely conceptualizing data and architecture vastly different than most people.

aje403• 8 years ago

F$@? diagrams

coldtea3• 8 years ago

I thought you were being sarcastic, but apparently not.

Well, programmers have been doing their job for half a century without BS Entity-Relationship-Diagrams, UML and the like.

cup-of-tea2• 8 years ago

I don't think he's talking about the BS but merely scribbling down notes on paper which very often helps when trying to figure out complicated processes.

hi412• 8 years ago

No, I was not sarcastic at all. I admire the programmer. I was just trying to understand something which was far outside my own experiences. I couldn't fathom how he was able to a successful programmer without the tools most of us use during the normal course of the day.

wccrawford• 8 years ago

I worked at a company where a coworker insisted that we created a huge printout of all the database relationships. He spent a long time at it, and it took tons of paper. I glanced over it, realized it didn't do anything for me, and then promptly ignored it.

I've spent my entire programming career ignoring those kinds of charts and diagrams. I "see" the connections in my head without any visual representation at all. I simply know where things are, what they connect to, and how things work.

I'm not blind. I just don't get anything from those tools. It doesn't surprise me that this blind coder doesn't need them.

ssalazars• 8 years ago

I know this guy, he lives, or used to live in the same apartment complex as I did, and I would see him almost every day at the bus stop. He is a real warrior. Whenever the Front seats were busy he will encourage people to stay seated and he would find an empty seat.

It's very nice to see Amazon wrote the article about him!

misiti3780• 8 years ago

damn that is incredible! i had a hard time understanding the function names they were being spoken so fast, i wonder if his ears have adjusted and tuned to that speed?

burritofanatic• 8 years ago

Here is another video about Michael Forzano from SUNY Binghamton, where he attended to study computer science:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MWF8SDFju4M

orliesaurus• 8 years ago

What an inspiring story, shows that true passion overcomes every barrier.

And yet, sadly, I have to add this to this beautiful story: is it just me or does this feel like Amazon marketing at its finest?

lobotryas• 8 years ago

Of course it's amazon PR. They are trying to rehabilitate their less than flattering image as both an engineering shop and how they treat their warehouse employees (the latter: terribly, like something out of a Dickensian novel).

mlevental• 8 years ago

of course it's Amazon or: it's on their site

akhilcacharya• 8 years ago

As an engineering shop? In what way?

Disclosure: I interned at Amazon

Who8282• 8 years ago

Even if it's done for marketing, I think it's a small price to pay if it can inspire even one visually challenged person to take up programming professionally.

Perhaps someone who loved computers might be wondering around the world if he/she can ever work as a programmer. He/She might not have explored how to go about it or he/she might not be confident enough to try.

So if this story can change one person's mind, I think it's a sin worth committing.

mindfulplay5• 8 years ago

Again if it is about the person I'd agree. This is a fluff piece FOR amazon.

decebalus1• 8 years ago

is it just me or does this feel like Amazon marketing at its finest?

Not just you. Also, there have been some other 'heartwarming' stories on Reddit today about dogs at Amazon and the 'amazing' perks employees have. The PR machine is trying to balance out the latest developments.

coldtea3• 8 years ago

Yes, it is. For every such story, there are tens of thousands of people working in fear and peeing in a cup covertly. This is a PR story intended to whitewash that.

But hey, it's their best option, else they would have found another job, so all is well in the best of all possible worlds. /s

mindfulplay5• 8 years ago

This is Amazon milking the story to the fullest amount. I had the same feeling with the Microsoft marketing for the AI camera thing.

They really don't give a shit about employee happiness or anything because the 99.99% cases you hear from Amazon employees lack even the basic dignity or respect. This is just a nice marketing story to portray Amazon in a positive light.

joering22• 8 years ago

I feel important replying: all the stories you heard are about ground-level employees that are packing stuff in Amazon Warehouses.

I have four friends working on different levels of profession in Amazon and I can assure you not even junior programmers need to pee in the bottle without bathroom breaks.

I am in no way defending Amazon they deserve all criticism, but I think it is unfair to put everyone in the same basked within one organization. You really believe people that built then and manage AWS cloud now are treated so badly that they can't even go pee?

lucio• 8 years ago

Is there any way to do it without some people suspecting marketing? If the history is real, which it is, then it's OK in my book, there's no way to tell the history without some people suspecting marketing

opportune• 8 years ago

Yes of course there is, the article could not mention his workplace or at the very least not place it in the title. Plus the article was published on aboutamazon.com. That is blatant marketing/branding unnecessary for the actual story

Who8282• 8 years ago

This reminded me of RubyConf India talk I attended back in 2013 titled “Turning blind eye to rails development by Siddhant Chothe”, that was also quite inspiring.

It made me realize, how rarely we think about accessibility when developing software.

Here is the link to the talk, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WqL89VcYd6g

chongli• 8 years ago

Question for anyone who knows:

How do they accommodate blind students for university math exams? Calculus in particular seems like it would be crazy hard to do without a pencil.

notyourwork• 8 years ago

My understanding is they give a proctor and provide assistance. How a student declares their solution is an interesting question though.

throwawayjava• 8 years ago

You might be interested in this overview of strategies: http://itd.athenpro.org/volume1/number4/article3.html

Although in practice the answer is that instructors have to lean heavily on the learner and the university's resource center.

andy-wu• 8 years ago

I'm a disabled student, not blind, but I work extensively with my university's Student Disability Center. For a blind student, common accommodations are extra time on the exam and a scribe to note the answers down.

blindgeek• 8 years ago

When I was studying math, a lot of times, I got to take tests at home. Prof would email me a copy of the test in LaTeX (they used it anyway), and I'd mail my answers back in LaTeX or PDF. Worked well for us. I'd just slip out the door on test days, walk the three blocks to my apartment, type up my answers, and mail them back.

In one case, one of my profs actually wrote his own textbook. It was for an intro to theorem proving / symbolic logic class. He also used LaTeX. While everyone else got a printout of the course text, I got a copy of the source code that I could read with a screenreader.

fouc• 8 years ago

I think it would be very interesting to spend some time doing my development from audio only.

Any idea on the easiest way to get going? My environment is osx, iTerm, vim, and safari mainly.

tetha• 8 years ago

Yeah, I've been thinking about that too. I'm doing a lot of work in grafana with timeseries data, so how would you this kind of work and trend discovery non-visually? I guess now I'll need to experiment if you could do something by mapping the graph into an audio signal with changing pitches or something.

kolanos• 8 years ago

1. To turn on VoiceOver: CMD+F5

2. To turn on screen curtain: Right Option+C

3. For VoiceOver help: Ctrl+Option+H

4. For keyboard help: Ctrl+Option+K

Ctrl+Option is your VoiceOver key combo as well. Good luck.

daenz• 8 years ago

Sometimes I imagine how I would cope with writing software if I lost my eyesight, and I don't have an answer so far. The fact that this man is able to overcome that kind of obstacle and work in software is extremely inspiring.

kahlonel• 8 years ago

As a guy who writes code for a living, one of my biggest fears is losing eyesight. Looking at this guy, I fear a little less now :) There is definitely a need for the tech to evolve for blind programmers.

ThrustVectoring• 8 years ago

Get disability insurance.

themodelplumber2• 8 years ago

For real, insurance is an afterthought to many but you are looking at a little money spent for peace of mind.

softawre• 8 years ago

My brother had a stroke at 30 years old and became blind. It's just so unfair. I've always had this fear but it's gotten much worse since this has happened to my family.

taeric2• 8 years ago

I have had one real migraine in my life. It was the kind you lose vision before the headache.

It was truly terrifying to have my vision quickly go away. To the point that I was so happy to be seeing when the headache hit.

pcnix• 8 years ago

I have migraines regularly, and the vision problems are definitely the worst part of it. The pain I can handle, but the aura usually makes me incapable of even moving somewhere safely, and puts my life at a standstill.

cryptozeus• 8 years ago

That screen reader speed is insane !

cup-of-tea2• 8 years ago

Yeah, the difference in human ability between trained and untrained is always amazing. What's funny is I'm sure this blind man is more efficient than people who use mouse-driven software to work. When you use keyboard-driven software like emacs or vim it gives you the ability to develop similar speed.

VectorLock2• 8 years ago

I wonder what his development environment looks like. How does the audio reader work when reading code? What language does he work in? I'd be fascinated to get some insight into how he mentally models the code. I can get a lot of information just looking at the way a bloc k of code is structured.

maxmaxmax2• 8 years ago

There is a video that shows how is environment looks like and what his screen-reader sounds like. It reads very fast. To the untrained ear it is unintelligible.

harshulpandav• 8 years ago

Curious about his mental map for code/software. Often times when I 'visualize' mapping between modules in a software, I observe a latency in visualization because in my mind I navigate through squares or blocks, literally. Obviously he does it differently, and faster. He has an unique ability which probably most of us don't.

davidu3• 8 years ago

Great story. The curious part of me would love to see a video of how he codes and how fast / accurate / contextual the screen-reading software is. Yes, I see the irony in wanting to see a video of that. Still, want to see what the experience is like for him, at least to the degree I could understand.

Link_Cable• 8 years ago

Looks like Amazon made a supplementary video about this, but it's pretty short:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=57P_dCEPtRw

davidu3• 8 years ago

That little vignette was actually perfect.

Mind blown.

Barrin92• 8 years ago

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iWXebEeGwn0

Here's a video of another blind dev. What I find fascinating in both cases is the speed at which they use voice assistance. I can barely make anything out.

davidu3• 8 years ago

Wow. This is amazing. Makes me want to make my software way more accessible to users.

ybrah• 8 years ago

Used to work with a blind programmer at my old job. He was an interesting fellow

egocentric• 8 years ago

For anyone interested:

How Blind People Type and Dial Numbers on a Touchscreen: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16897415

baruchthescribe• 8 years ago

I did a large project with a blind programmer many years ago. He was the sysadmin of a server I had in the Bahamas. When on the phone with him, I could always hear the speech software gabbling out directory listings and stuff. He was really good too - always been very inspiring to me.

nickthemagicman• 8 years ago

How do they use Stack Overflow?

jareds• 8 years ago

Articles like this make me worried about my future as a blind programmer. I enjoy back-end database and web services development, not accessibility work. A lot of the I'm a blind programmer articles I've scene appear to be blind developers who work on accessibility. I hope they work on accessibility do to interest not because everyone assumes if you a blind programmer accessibility must be the type of work you want to do.

mindfulplay5• 8 years ago

I would take this article with a huge grain of salt. Amazon doesn't give two shits about blind or deaf or gay programmers. This is a nice fluff piece. The programmers there are under absolute stress and high-stakes programming. I doubt that this one story about one nice programmer can be generalized to Amazon. I would bet if you are a blind programmer you would have a much harder time even getting past the interview loop given how biased the whole company is with their Ayn Rand-ish tactics that would obviously not give two shits about diversity or disability.

GabrielF00• 8 years ago

I worked with one person at Amazon who had a significant physical disability. I can't speak for him, but he is highly valued by the organization because of the quality of his work.

ars3• 8 years ago

People naturally assume you would be interested in accessibility work, but I suspect if you simply say that's not what you are interested in, and demonstrate normal levels of ability in other work you'll be fine.

What could happen though, is if your ability is not in line with other programmers. For accessibility work people will hire you anyway (since you have unique experience), but for other work you'll have a hard(er) time.

And since there is an implied assumption that a blind programmer will be less productive, you are probably right about being pushed toward accessibility work.

The solution is of course obvious (and typical for any kind of disability): Show that your productivity is in line with others. People aren't malicious usually, just unaware.

sdrothrock2• 8 years ago

People naturally assume you would be interested in accessibility work

This is the problem. It's like going to a black person and saying "oh man, I assume you must like fried chicken!"

Show that your productivity is in line with others.

This also doesn't compute -- I can't think of a link between "you must be interested in accessibility work" and "we'd like you to work on that because your productivity is probably low."

I've faced both of these problems as a mostly deaf developer -- people always assume I want to work on hearing-related things.

lifthrasiir• 8 years ago

And since there is an implied assumption that a blind programmer will be less productive, you are probably right about being pushed toward accessibility work.
The solution is of course obvious (and typical for any kind of disability): Show that your productivity is in line with others. People aren't malicious usually, just unaware.

Should be enough in theory, not in practice. There are many factors affecting productivity and that are not personal; disabled people (among others) are rather prone to poor non-personal factors. In the other words, productivity is a function of the person in question and everything else surrounding that. We typically approximate this by assuming personal factors and non-personal factors are independent---of course, not in reality.

bitwize• 8 years ago

A lot of the blind programmer articles I've seen are of the "l33t hax0r who can root your box by whistling into the phone" variety. So... the press is not entirely uniform.

balls187• 8 years ago

Whistler was one of the best characters in Sneakers.

chroem-• 8 years ago

As someone with vision loss, this is a wonderful feel-good story, but I think the reason why Amazon PR picked it up in the first place is because it's a surprising exception that proves the rule. I've interviewed with quite a few tech companies, some in SV, and was turned down for a combination of "culture fit" and the gaps on my resume caused by my vision loss. I think the fact that everyone, even Amazon, is so amazed that they hired a blind programmer is indicative of a real problem here.

RickJWagner• 8 years ago

Awesome story. More power to this guy, he's an inspiration.

alkonaut• 8 years ago

I literally can't shut off my machine with my eyes closed. And the screen reader is even worse, I can't even shut that off with my eyes open when I accidentally enable it.

fizixer• 8 years ago

I have this weird idea of an experiment, actually two experiments:

- I want to use my computer with my eyes closed (or blindfolded). Because I'm really interested in exploring the limits of my sense of hearing combined with my speech, plus my ability to use keyboard and mouse. It's like learning to ride a bike. I have not used any accessibility features of any of my OSes (linux, and windows) mainly because of my bias that those features are more like "lip service" than making sure that they are a full fledged replacement of visual user interface (well I have many gripes with the state of visual user interfaces, and by extrapolation, non-visual UIs can only be equal or worse, not better). So a big part of my experiment would be to explore, from first principles, what an ideal non-visual UI would look like, and then develop that software. The funny thing is that my interest in this experiment is not fueled primarily by the desire to help others, sorry to say, but by the fun and the thrill of being able to efficiently use a computer with eyes closed, almost like getting a new mini-superpower. (Surprisingly, my interest in this experiment came about as a result of thinking about going from mouse/keyboard based GUI usage, to keyboard-only vim and tiling window managers and touch typing, while your four fingers of each hand are constantly in the home row and move away only to carry out a specific task. It's almost as if restricting yourself makes you more efficient in some sense).

- As an extension to this, I'm interested in being able to live in my apartment for a few days blindfolded (including leaving-the-apartment in the experiment would make it too open-ended/challenging). I'm allowed to plan as much as I can beforehand, to memorize what is where in my rooms, kitchen, restroom, etc, and also make a list of strict rules about where a certain thing should be placed after it has been used (e.g., a toothbrush, etc), and then I blindfold myself and see how far I can get. I would need to know where each thing is, but there are too many things in my apartment, so maybe I would want to reduce the number of things I have, and this way it connects to the idea of minimalism, another interest of mine. And again part of the reason for this experiment is the fun, but also to learn what changes can be made in typical apartment indoor so a person doesn't have to rely on his/her sense of sight to live fully (e.g., cook, clean, move around, etc). I guess this is the kind of experiment that vsauce gets to conduct. I think it would be interesting if he creates an episode based around this. (Though I'm ignoring the biggest effect of being in this experiment, the psychological effect of not being able to see).

(edit: It also appears to me that there is a connection between trying to carry out operations blindfolded, and trying to code up something by imagining what that code would do in run-time, because a piece of code running on a computer is almost like a blind/blindfolder agent carrying out operations based on values of variables, etc. So does such an experiment make you a better programmer in some way? or give you a new perspective about running code?).

latchkey• 8 years ago

https://www.channelnewsasia.com/news/cnainsider/giang-the-ad...

Blind since birth, writing code at Amazon since 2013

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