Ask HN: Do you know any Blind Person Who Can Code?

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7838329

by ekianjo • 12 years ago

8 8 12 years ago

news.ycombinator.com

I am genuinely curious if anyone here on HN have ever met blind or visually impaired people who can actually code. I am sure it's far from impossible but I can think of many reasons why the hurdles would be very high - the absence of proper tools, the difficulty to read code through voice, etc... On the other hand, visually impaired people may be strong at abstraction.

So, I'm just looking for examples out there from your own experience, and maybe some suggestions on how to make coding more approachable or enjoyable to people who suffer from such impairments.

zachlipton• 12 years ago

Sure (in my limited experience, the answer to "is there a blind person who does X?" is virtually always yes). I've met engineers with varying degrees of visual impairment. Obviously, it's not for everyone, but coding isn't for anyone to begin with. Like everything else, they find the tools they need to make things work for them. Several that I have met have been involved in the open source accessibility movement, which means they've been working on developing those tools to give themselves and others more control.

One anecdote. My team had done some work with a contractor, who was blind, to do QA around accessibility features and screen reader compatibility, his specialty. He came into town for an all-hands meeting, and after a brief orientation to the physical layout of the office, was perfectly self-sufficient and resourceful. Until one point a day or two into his visit when he called me over to his desk asking for help. He was rather frustrated because his screen reader had completely stopped talking to him, even though he could feel from the fans that it was still on. He asked if I could see anything obviously wrong on his screen. I failed to suppress a bit of a chuckle as I realized the screen in front of him was the least accessible in all of Windows: a BSOD!

ekianjo• 12 years ago

Nice story, thanks for sharing it :)

pestaa• 12 years ago

I didn't know so I looked it up: BSOD stands for blue screen of death.

ig1• 12 years ago

I believe most blind programmers use braille displays, because much programming is command line rather than UI based it's probably easier than many other occupations.

nekopa• 12 years ago

If you do a quick search on HN's comments, you'll find a few blind programmers who hang out here. Some interesting insights...

chrisBob• 12 years ago

West Point has (had in 2004) a blind programmer that I think worked in the foreign language department. His story was that he was an olympic swimmer that lost his vision in an accident with a rowing machine.

I am not sure how he read the code, but I know the computer said the keys out loud as he typed.

cafard• 12 years ago

I worked with a fellow, since retired, who was legally blind. As I recall, he used some text to speech, and also magnification software that displayed characters at a size of may be 10" square.

GSA is a good source for information about tools.

murz• 12 years ago

One of my first mentors was a blind programmer. He's actually one of the smartest and most productive programmers I know.

The main tool he used was some screen-reading software called JAWS, which apparently is pretty sophisticated these days. You can see some of the other tools available here: http://www.freedomscientific.com/products/fs/blindness-produ...

Ask HN: Do you know any Blind Person Who Can Code?

Related Stories