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Comment by spr-alex | Hacker News Reader

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.

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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).

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.

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.

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.

I can’t see why that would be a Mac specific issue. I use both platforms, and it would be on the Developer to support screen readers on either platform. Microsoft Office didn’t support voiceover until 2016 for example, and you can’t really report that to apple accessibility.

Where I found a lot of bugs is when it comes to supporting web standards like mathML, and this is where I will usually switch to windows since the screen reader tends to be more flexible, and you have a lot more software focused on assistive tech.

I think what you just mentioned here, at the time there was a lot more software for windows for assistive tech which was a much better experience, where mac os x's screenreader became difficult and buggy.

previously macos just worked way better given that the apps were developed with apple's framework and polish, and accessibility was part of that

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