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Comment by mcweaksauce | Hacker News Reader

I think it is totally reasonable that a blind person could code, but how does a blind person learn how to code initially? Did he become blind later on after learning how to code?

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Hi everyone! Thanks for the support and reply. Wasn't expecting this kind of response when we wrote the article.

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. :)

I saw that you said you do video interviews, have you considered running "blind" interviews like how orchestras do? Applicants to orchestras play from behind a screen so that the judges selecting the candidates cannot see the candidate, and the only metric by which they can judge is the quality of the performance. Determining sex/age/race/etc through voice could be eliminated through audio filtering.

Here's a post from a year ago about how a blind person interacts with computers: https://medium.freecodecamp.com/looking-back-to-what-started...

(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

This question came up on StackOverflow a number of years ago and sparked an insightful conversation. I recommend reading through the thread to anyone interested.

http://stackoverflow.com/questions/118984/how-can-you-progra...

Irwin "Whistler" Emery would like to have a word with you.

I really enjoyed that movie! For reference http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0105435/

"I want peace on Earth and good will toward men." -- Whistler

I used have a blind colleague, I didn't work closely with him but did have a few interactions with him. This was maybe 20 years ago. So people have been doing this a long time. He was working on speech codecs when I worked with him. Anyway he just went to engineering school. At least in California they have people who help you and the school is legally required to make an "accommodation" if needed. That could be a reader, or more time on exam, etc. Here is a brief article on the guy

http://www.calit2.net/newsroom/article.php?id=350

Same as anyone else, I assume. There was a completely blind student in the year below me at University, he did just as well as anyone else. His screen reader read at a ludicrous speed.

"Ludicrous speed? Sir we've never gone that fast before. I'm not sure the ship can take it!"

Sorry. I had to. :P

I can't imagine what it would be like to use a computer in general, without sight. However, most programming resources are in text form, so I guess it wouldn't have been too difficult (in relative terms).

I've done a little commercial web dev so have used freely available audio-browsers. A very interesting experience.

YouTube has examples of people programming using audio output. That should help to imagine it.

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