We Hired a Blind Coder
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Even worse, there begins to be a notion that hiring someone with a disability is a charitable act, rather than just making a hiring decision based on their competence for the task. It seems like that would be kinda soul-crushing to always wonder if you were chosen for reasons other than your abilities.
I've seen so many interesting/disappointing behaviors from people when it comes to people with disabilities. Once I was helping with an event that was organized and led by a woman with cerebral palsy and in a wheelchair. Media showed up to cover the event...and kept trying to talk to me about it (the able-bodied white guy who was mostly there to handle technical stuff and had very little interesting to say about what the event was about), even when the organizer was right next to me and clearly bossing people, including me, around. She also has had difficulty finding regular work in the past, despite being really impressive in a lot of areas.
I'm kinda just ranting here, as I don't have good solutions, but I do think it'd be cool for folks to stop assuming that just because someone can't work the way most folks work they can't do the same kind of work. There have been blind developers (that I've been aware of) for about as long as I've been using computers (and that's a long time). We should stop being shocked by it; though it's cool and impressive, it tends to lead to thinking they might not be able to do the job as well, just because they're doing it in such a different way.
As PG once wrote in an essay [0]: “A good programmer working intensively on his own code can hold it in his mind the way a mathematician holds a problem he's working on.” So this is how I or every other blind programmer works IMO.
Only UI is something a challenge, though still manageable if one wants (personally I delegate styling part and focus only on the frontend/backend development part as that’s where I can be the most productive.)
The other challenge is the tooling, often especially in enterprise settings, tools of the trade which are GUI-based, not much accessible and this can have a big hit on the performance of a blind developer. Luckily I’ve often able to find an alternative in such situations (or rather opted me out of such activities as it was usually related to non-dev related processes). If everything under the hood is based on API (or command-line like in Linux), finding alternatives won’t remain a challenge.
The city I live in had a systematic problem with loud speakers announcements on trains. Blind people rely on these announcements to know which station they are at. And trains speaker systems were mostly broken or heavily distorted on nearly every carriage.
The remarkable thing about this was that the only blind person making complaints was an Australian Disability Discrimination Commissioner, who made a written complaint (to himself) each time he found it hard to get off at the right station while going to his job [1].
I share a house with my physically disabled sister who deals with similar problems nearly everyday. My sister was lucky enough to find employment with a government agency that takes it's responsibilities towards disabled people seriously, but many disabled people still disengage from society because of the extreme hassle involved in something so simple for the rest of us, like getting to work.
[1] http://www.smh.com.au/nsw/blind-rage-over-railcorps-silent-s...
I was going to ask whether there was then a civil service ethics rule that required him to recuse himself from investigating his own complaint. But the article already addressed that:
> Each complaint, which will have to be addressed by others within the commission [...]
This sort of thing could be approached more generally, so that it would work for kids who aren't paying attention, for travelers who don't speak the loudspeaker's language even when it's working, adults who see and understand the language just fine but need an alarm because of a tendency to fall asleep and miss their stop, and so on.
Which then tells me that the big tech companies should all have whole divisions of employees with various "features" (very short, tall, blind, speech problems, etc.) who would not only test ideas like these but design, prototype, and build them. They would not only be experimenting with products and services for customers but with how to get their own work done, looking into questions such as whether you could design a programming language with a syntax optimized for hearing instead of looking, which would then be transpiled into something more mainstream, or creating alternatives to keyboard & mouse for those with muscular disorders, or countless other things.
My guess is that many of the ideas they come up with for helping some small niche of the population will be discovered to be of great value to many other groups in ways that weren't anticipated. Of course the dev tools they come up with for blind coders would be made available to all, but the "audio-optimized syntax" might just prove to be popular with programmers with no vision problems, and the keyboard/mouse replacement might be a big hit with cooks, surgeons, and musicians.
I'm sure there are many such things already going on that I haven't heard of, but I'm thinking it could become a very rich source of innovative technologies and products with big markets and should be such a big push that everybody knows about it.
It also makes me wonder what the "best" programming language would be for blind coders. I know my friend has talked about Java and Python, and I think Python has problems for blind folks because of the significant white space; but I believe even that is surmountable.
But, your mention of a syntax optimized for hearing is probably something we want to build, anyway. I just noticed a while back that there's a whole generation of kids who don't type to interact with their devices. They talk to them; I guess they still read the screen for replies, but I would guess there will come a time when even reading is optimized out of the system...already lots of folks interact primarily with their device through an earbud. Things like Google Glass will eventually happen.
In short, optimizing for other abilities seems like a future-friendly direction for exploration.
1) Whether you have a disability or not - I have always wondered if I was hired because I was young and could be 'molded' or if I was qualified. Maybe it's at the forefront of your mind if you're disabled, but I'm sure everyone wonders if they got a pass for a superficial reason.
2) It has been my experience that those with a disability overcompensate in other abilities to appear as qualified as their non-disabled colleagues.
Interview processes are quite cold/inhuman, but if you're blind, you really need to create a 'human connection' with your prospective employer in order to offset the 'perceived risk' that your disability brings.
If a blind person is competing with other fully-able applicants, it's easy for the employer to subconsciously fallback to a 'safe option' (it's a natural human instinct to avoid unknown risks) - That's why the 'frantic' follow-up communications are so important for a blind person - It's to make sure that the employer doesn't fall back to making 'subconscious' decisions.
Unconscious bias often limits your potential opportunities. I remember when I was looking for a job change one of the interviews I had was with a subsidiary of SAIC in India, the telephonic technical interview went very well and they invited me for in-person round. I did have mentioned visual impairment on the resume in the beginning but guess they didn't understand it or likely never bother to read resumes carefully.
When I reached there the HR got confused–they didn’t know what to do – so they asked me to give a written aptitude test (this was specifically mentioned not to happen as I’d already qualified the technical round). Good that I went with my brother who assisted me as scribe and then another technical interview happened with a team lead which also went well. They informed me that their dept. head would take a decision and get back to me.
If you're wondering whether they got back no that line of response meant that they didn’t expect person like me and weren’t interested.
I had been having jobs in US-based companies for about 8 years and on the side I'd been creating products/taking freelancing projects to be independent of job (not that I lacked in any job rather I almost always quickly emerged to be the most technically competent go-to person to get solutions to programming problems.)
At the moment one of my sighted friends has joined me from my last company and together we're working on consultancy-backed product initiatives.
I’ve been frequenting HN for years and this is of course not my original account. Chiefly because from the outset in my freelancing career I’ve mostly made it a practice not to reveal my disability. I always thought that if I deliver well, there’s no reason that I should reveal about my blindness. In fact IMO that would rather put me at disadvantage as work relationships over the internet are largely driven by impression – showcasing your skills and abilities.
With grace, this has worked fine and I’ve worked with clients across the world currently being as security/solution architect consultant on a project for a multi-billion dollar financial company in US.
At present I’m personally earning $10k monthly which is quite good in India and setting me up for likely never needing to go back to job again.
$10k is quite good in the rest of the world by the way ;) Good luck!
With regards to disability (I injured my knee a few years ago and use crutches to get around): It is amazing how people assume your brain is somehow also effected by and treat you differently. You see the best in people (the kindness) and the worst in people (those who either pretend you're invisible or will literally push past you to try and get the last seat). I actually find it's a pretty filter to save me time dealing with superficial people.
The worse part for me is dating, those few seconds when they first see the crutches. Especially when the date's going well and then you have to get up. Sometimes you recover, sometimes you don't..
There's also term for disabled people (don't downvote me, I didn't invent it!) a 'supercrip' - A disabled person who works hard to overcome his/her disability. While it may not be the most flattering term, it is prefixed with the word super!
One of the best choices that we ever made. We spend a lot of time on getting it right in our sites and have spent many hours in NVDA & VoiceOver with our eyes closed.
It's unfortunate how poor the experience still is on most websites and I wish our industry would spend a little more time trying to get this right. If you aren't using Semantic markup and ARIA, please start now.
You can't imagine how much worse the user experience is on mobile vs a computer.
When it comes to screen readers, the percentage of customers who use them is much smaller, but there are lots of business reasons to have a good experience for blind customers: it's important in markets like education and government, and it avoids bad PR.
I wish there is a better solution here, but I don't know what it is. It does offer a good opportunity to make an impact though for any aspiring developers.
This is true for many types of disabilities. Unless people are personally affected, the vast majority will put in minimal effort.
I wonder if you could find some grant money to help fund work on it.
Essentially simulating the screen for the screen reader to work with, but not rendering the output anywhere (or even having the screen hardware to render it on). Just imagine how mind boggling it would be to see someone working at a coffeshop with just headphones on and the bottom part of a laptop, or at a desk with no screen on it!
I get that it probably don't make sense to manufacture a product like this, but still, would be really cool I think! :)
When I was 17 or so (about five years ago) I bought an old laptop for 65 bucks to run as a server. It had 128MB RAM, ran Windows XP and had a Pentium 3 I think (might have been P2). A piece of shit, basically, and Windows XP took at least 30-40MB of that precious 128MB RAM.
Nevertheless, I could run Apache2, Mysql, Filezilla Server, hMailServer, BIND DNS, VNC/TeamViewer (I forgot which), µTorrent with a webinterface, and probably something else I'm forgetting. All of this software ran perfectly fine together. I think my website (self-written php blog which did a few database queries on every pageload) even hit the HN frontpage once and it survived just fine.
The point? Non-graphical applications rock in performance compared to something that has to render stuff. Removing the screen probably does nothing to stop applications from trying to render fonts, images, etc. Doing that would probably increase laptop's battery lives to a full work week (I mean, look at phones, and they have more than enough processing power for this, with a fifth or tenth of a laptop battery because of their size).
IN office, people did used to get curious I think but they mostly preferred not to ask me :)
Even more, some constant robot-like sound (of low volume) coming from the computer make them more curious as I usually do not prefer headphone.
He was a great programmer, and very adept at using his screen reader. As far as I know, it only ever gave him one serious complication: since he was a minor, it was set to safe-for-work mode, and it read his coworker's name, a Mr Livshits, as Livsugars.
Prior to that, I also got 2 disabled interns - they are hard of hearing and verbal speaking. I got them working for 6 months, after which they got full-time jobs elsewhere. They were usually present in the 30+ team workshops and meet-ups that I do. I had to slow down, express more expressively with hands, etc. and things went pretty good. They did always comes back to me at the end, picking on few missing parts that I need to elaborate.
I also had a selfish motive - I wanted to learn sign language. I was able to understand them better but I think I need professional training to be proficient doing the sign language myself.
btw, this is all in India, a place where accessibility, disability-enabled stuffs are an after-thought, sometimes totally ignored.
Seriously? What kind of human beings do you think your readers are? Did anyone here really think about that while reading the story?
The whole article felt too self-congratulatory as it was.
I also agree with you about the feel of the article. Something just doesn't sit right with me about it.
But then I realised that discrimination is common in the UK, and there are absolutely employers who pay people less because those people have disabilities; so I switched into enjoying reading about a company learning that employing someone with a disability isn't a big thing.
>"9 out of 10 employers rate blind and partially sighted people as either 'difficult' or 'impossible' to employ" (DWP, 2004) [0]
Which is stupid beyond belief to anyone who spends much time with folks who have a visual impairment. Just off the top of my head I can think of a barrister, a librarian, a bunch of IT and development types and several qualified and practicing tennis coaches who are VIPs. And that's just out of my personal acquaintances.
So while I almost bounced off this for the tone, in the end the tl;dr is 'we overcame our bias and it turned out to be no biggie'. As someone who spends a lot of time working to generate positive PR for VI I'll take this as a net gain.
[0] https://actionforblindpeople.org.uk/about-us/media-centre/ke...
Maybe people who work with blind devs could also chime in.
Many blind musicians and artists develop heightened perceptions in their respective art and generate some unique, original works. I wonder if this is true for coders/ mathematicians?
The candidate brought along their own laptop with a screen reader and a nifty Braille display, so when it was time to actually write some code, they just fired up Emacs and we were good to go.
> I wonder if any blind coders could comment on how they see programmatic flow in their minds eye?
It's all about the structure. I think of it like reading a novel with a complex plot - you meet some of the characters, learn facts about them, and then you get introduced to new characters, and later in the book you find out how they relate to each other, and much later on, you may find out through some twist of the plot that the relationship isn't quite what you thought it was, and you have to recreate your mental model.
As a result, I find that sometimes I'm slower at ramping up on complex codebases (especially if it's poorly written with no structure), but once I have my mental model, I'm potentially faster than someone who has to have things in front of them to refer to. This is purely based on my personal experience.
> How do big companies that love doing white boarding interview blind people?
I've always turned up with my laptop, and proposed that I use it, plugged into a monitor the interviewer can see. The interviewer reads me out the question, and I take notes. I always do the coding in Notepad, so I don't have access to code completion or syntax highlighting.
> I think it is totally reasonable that a blind person could code, but how does a blind person learn how to code initially?
The same way a sighted person would - since most information in this field is text-based. Read the tutorials, do the exercises. In fields where mathematical notation or diagrams are prevalent (e.g. machine learning), some sighted help or adapted material is probably required.
> Why the hell would you hire a blind coder to ship your feature by next week when you can find an equal or better (white/Asian male) engineer to do the same thing? By definition, the blind coder is limited compared to non-disabled people. It's a purely business decision. No hard feelings, but I'd rather not have a blind person on my team or organization. Unless it is for PR.
I respond to this comment purely because, whether I like it or not, such thinking is not uncommon. Let's rephrase the question as "why would you hire a {foo} engineer to ship your feature by next week when you can find an equal or better ({bar}) engineer to do the same thing?". Put this way, I accept that smaller companies who need someone next week will always choose the {bar} engineer, because they're better, not because they're {bar}. But here there is an assumption that every single {bar} engineer is better than every single {foo} engineer, which simply can't be true. Make sure your biases don't prevent you from hiring the awesome {foo} engineer, who out-performs every {bar} engineer. In a larger company, I'd go further and say that you need to have an inclusive work culture, not only because it's the right thing to do, but also because if your customer-base is diverse (which on the internet, it probably is), then a really good way to make awesome products is to have a diverse workforce.
Wut.
One could equally argue "by definition, an ex-vi user is limited compared to an IDE user" (I mean ex-vi.sf.net and that's what I actually use) - so much of development is about thinking, and the interaction method to provide the solution to the computer once you've figured it out is often almost incidental.
(on the upside, it appears the original comment asking that has been flagged to death, but FFS basic logic fail)
- http://www.dogonews.com/2016/6/9/visually-impaired-srikanth-...
I just finished read all the comments above, and would like to share my story and my thoughts.
But since the comment is too long, I put it on my dropbox, you can found it here :
https://www.dropbox.com/s/h9dxozsrxz7wuqf/mystory.txt?dl=0
Sorry for the inconvenience, and thanks all ;).
Warm regards -- Herwin
To this day, I doubt I'd have the temerity and courage to work in this field as he did, and I have to say that I have immense respect for the disabled who overcome these disabilities and nevertheless remain extremely productive. It says something of a persons resolve that they are willing and able to write and debug kernel code, 1 char at a time .. I really don't think I could do it.
Sorry. I had to. :P
YouTube has examples of people programming using audio output. That should help to imagine it.
"I want peace on Earth and good will toward men." -- Whistler
(Discussion: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8965048)
From the comments there, here's a fascinating example of how quickly a blind person can absorb information. 525WPM in this case: https://soundcloud.com/freecodecamp
Herwin is visually impaired since birth so he definitely picked up coding with a screen reader. I have notified him of the comments here so he can share more of how he initially picked up coding himself. :)
http://stackoverflow.com/questions/118984/how-can-you-progra...
I myself have macular degeneration, which while not disabling right now, has started a bit too early in my life. One day I might be almost blind myself and I will definitely need this.
It doesn't have Linux support though so if he needs to work in the Linux OS, he uses Windows with a Linux VM
It's not built specially for software developers but just all visually impaired users in general
Does make me wonder about non-text based input / code display methods that can help here.
Did we underpay him?"
I do take the blindfold off while checking my work an during some parts of debugging.
VoiceOver is pretty good. If you're already a touch typist and no-mouse person it's not as big a stretch as you think. Hearing your code read back to you helps with some things.
What line did it segfault on, did the tests pass or fail, what state is the program in when it hits this breakpoint?
I suppose I could detect test pass failure with "echo \a" but it's just so terribly simple to view the results.
I rarely go more than 20 minutes worth of coding without recompiling/re-running tests.
Amateur. Real programmers don't even own a monitor.
Not to take anything away from this, because it is impressive, but a lot of people overestimate how much you need to look at your code while writing it. That's because we've gotten used to (if we are older programmers) or grown up with (if we are younger programmers) editors on big screens or in big windows that always show us a lot of our code.
There was a time when that was not the norm. Many programmed on teletype terminals or on 24x80 character CRTs that did not have cursor addressing (AKA "glass TTYs"), usually connected to the computer over a slow serial line (300 baud for a hardcopy terminal was typical). Text editors worked a line at a time. You could see whatever previous lines had not scrolled off the top yet. Best case, that would show you the line you were typing and 23 prior lines, although usually some of those lines would be showing editing commands you typed rather than lines of your code. If you wanted to see more lines, you had to type a command to tell the editor to show them, and they would come in from the bottom, scrolling prior stuff off the top.
In that kind of environment programmers tended to do a lot more of their work in their heads than we do now. Not as much as a blind person has to do, of course, but a lot more than seems feasible to the average programmer nowadays. Heck, it often seems infeasible nowadays to many of us who programmed back then. I know I wrote a lot of code in such environments, but nowadays I cannot figure out how the heck I actually was able to do that.
I'm not sure if we are actually better off now or not. We don't have to keep track of us much in our heads because our editors do it for us, so perhaps that frees up some brainpower to concentrate on more important things. On the other hand, maybe by keeping more of our code in our heads back then, we were able to understand it better.
but nowadays I cannot figure out how the heck I actually was able to do that.