
Ask HN: I'm a software engineer going blind, how should I prepare? - zachrip
I&#x27;m a 24 y&#x2F;o full stack engineer (I know some of you are rolling your eyes right now, just highlighting that I have experience on frontend apps as well as backend architecture). I&#x27;ve been working professionally for ~7 years building mostly javascript projects but also some PHP. Two years ago I was diagnosed with a condition called &quot;Usher&#x27;s Syndrome&quot; - characterized by hearing loss, balance issues, and progressive vision loss.<p>I know there are blind software engineers out there. My main questions are:<p>- Are there blind frontend engineers?<p>- What kinds of software engineering lend themselves to someone with limited vision? Backend only?<p>- Besides a screen reader, what are some of the best tools for building software with limited vision?<p>- Does your company employ blind engineers? How well does it work? What kind of engineer are they?<p>I&#x27;m really trying to get ahead of this thing and prepare myself as my vision is degrading rather quickly. I&#x27;m not sure what I can do if I can&#x27;t do SE as I don&#x27;t have any formal education in anything. I&#x27;ve worked really hard to get to where I am and don&#x27;t want it to go to waste.<p>Thank you for any input, and stay safe out there!<p>Edit:<p>Thank you all for your links, suggestions, and moral support, I really appreciate it. Since my diagnosis I&#x27;ve slowly developed a crippling anxiety centered around a feeling that I need to figure out the rest of my life before it&#x27;s too late. I know I shouldn&#x27;t think this way but it is hard not to. I&#x27;m very independent and I feel a pressure to &quot;show up.&quot; I will look into these opportunities mentioned and try to get in touch with some more members of the blind engineering community.
======
kolanos
You can definitely continue as a software engineer. I'm living proof. It won't
be easy, especially at first. For a while it will feel like you're working
twice as hard just to keep up with your sighted peers. But eventually, the
better you get with your tools, you'll find you have some superpowers over
your sighted peers. For example, as you get better with a screen reader,
you'll be bumping the speech rate up to 1.75-2X normal speech. You'll be the
only one who can understand your screen reader. You'll become the fastest and
most proficient proof reader on your team. Typos will be easily spotted as
they just won't "sound right". It will be like listening to a familiar song
and then hitting an off note in the melody. And this includes code. Also,
because code is no longer represented visually as blocks, you'll find you're
building an increasingly detailed memory model of your code. Sighted people do
this, too, but they tend to visualize in their mind. When you abandon this two
dimensional representation, your non-visual mental map suffers no spatial
limits. You'll be amazed how good your memory will get without the crutch of
sight. Good luck. If you're a Mac user you can hit me up for tool
recommendations. My email is my username at gmail dot com.

~~~
jedberg
> you'll be bumping the speech rate up to 1.75-2X normal speech. You'll be the
> only one who can understand your screen reader

Huh. I already listen to most podcasts and recorded presentations at 2x. Now
you make me wonder if I could process information faster with a screen reader
even though my sight works just fine...

~~~
Drakar1903
As someone who also does this, I find that the problem becomes not processing
the information, but retaining it, and I haven't found a solution to that yet.

~~~
ramraj07
I doubt regular folks can reach 5x or even 2x with good retention. Perhaps if
it's a podcast of people chatting about random things, it's possible, but any
intellectually stimulating content you probably will have problems. Visually
impaired people probably have an advantage on account of having their entire
visual cortex freed up and possibly able to help with this (not sure if it
does, neuroscience majors here?)

~~~
saagarjha
(As a sighted person) I watch all my videos or podcasts at 2x. Depending on
how new or dense the content is, I might have to occasionally dial it back,
but I think I do fairly well at 2x (usually, this is only the case if I'm
distracted or the slides are going by too quickly as well). Often I can even
up it to 3x.

------
ddevault
I recommend using a tiling window manager - they allow you to organize windows
logically, rather than spatially.

I have also written some plugins for using Vim (text editing) and Weechat (IRC
chat) with speech synthesis:

[https://git.sr.ht/~sircmpwn/dotfiles/tree/master/lib/vim/vim...](https://git.sr.ht/~sircmpwn/dotfiles/tree/master/lib/vim/vimspeak.vim)

[https://git.sr.ht/~sircmpwn/dotfiles/tree/master/.weechat/py...](https://git.sr.ht/~sircmpwn/dotfiles/tree/master/.weechat/python/talkative.py)

And I have a script for Sway (a tiling window manager) which also gives you
audible cues:

[https://git.sr.ht/~sircmpwn/dotfiles/tree/master/bin/swaytal...](https://git.sr.ht/~sircmpwn/dotfiles/tree/master/bin/swaytalk)

All of this is somewhat incomplete, but it's a good starting point if you want
to get used to them and work on improvements while you're still sighted. Good
luck, and let me know if I can be of service.

~~~
hatsunearu
Are you sighted?

~~~
ddevault
Not perfectly, and not for long. I wear glasses, but they only do so much, and
my vision worsens every year. I use some light assistive technologies on the
daily - higher contrast, large fonts, zooming in on things. To test the tools
I linked to, I spend the occasional workday with all of my monitors turned
off, relying on these tools to get work done. I also have a braille reader
that I occasionally pull out.

I have a different philosophy and approach to using computers than most, and
that affects my views on accessibility. Stapling a screenreader onto a
graphical application, for example, to me seems like the wrong approach. Text-
based applications are much more accessible, and these are my bread and
butter. To this end, my work on accessibility involves making more information
available as text, organized logically rather than spatially, and making it
easier to access and manipulate that information with vision impairments (and
other sorts of impairments, too).

~~~
cookiengineer
As someone preparing for this, too, I still have no clue on how to rasterize
the code quickly. Voice always feels inefficient and braille feels like a joke
when it comes to the amount of information being displayed. Do you have
suggestions? Do you transpile code?

I also use VIM because it feels like the best case of voice integration or
braille integration...but I have no source for how to actually do this
properly. Are there good reading materials on this?

Currently I am trying to build a semantic web browser, also with the intention
to filter out all legacy crap CSS that prevents interaction with the content
[1] and the idea of being able to train CNNs with the content... but when it
comes to code, my memory of it seems to suck so hard that I always have no
clue of what I wrote the day before.

[1] still alpha as hell:
[https://github.com/cookiengineer/stealth](https://github.com/cookiengineer/stealth)

(Also a long time observer of your work here. You are one of the good guys.
Stay awesome!)

~~~
ddevault
Even with the aid of sight, I don't read an entire codebase at once. I follow
the logic, a few lines at a time, as it moves through the parts I'm interested
in. I use grep to find the things I ought to read. With this approach, I build
a mental model of the codebase quickly, with lots of blanks - but with detail
in the areas I'm focusing on.

As for how to actually rig up braille readers on Linux, check out BRLTTY. It's
pretty straightforward. I was working on an Alpine Linux spin which was more
accessible out of the box, but I got discouraged by various circumstances and
shelved it.

~~~
mwcampbell
I think your use of the term "braille reader" might be causing some confusion.
I know you use brltty. But do you use its text-to-speech output, or do you use
a refreshable braille device that moves little pins up and down to form
braille cells? If the former, I'd suggest referring to brltty as a screen
reader.

Also, do you run brltty on a Linux text console, or in a terminal window in
your Sway session?

~~~
ddevault
I use a refreshable braille display. I use it mainly on the Linux console, but
I've been thinking about rigging something up for use with Sway.

~~~
mwcampbell
Wow, I underestimated your seriousness about adapting to alternate output
methods. Did you have to buy that braille display at your own expense? As I'm
sure you know, they're expensive. How recently did you start learning braille?
Has it been a challenge for you to learn to read it with your fingers?

~~~
ddevault
I bought a cheap used one off of eBay, it wasn't too expensive - a few hundred
bucks. I know that nicer ones can get up there, though. Learning braille was
an unusual challenge, but I didn't find it especially difficult. It only took
a couple of days to become reasonably proficient with it. The braille display
I ended up with is pretty nice despite its price tag, it has a good finger-
feel to it and has a nice set of basic features.

The most difficult thing for me would be learning advanced levels of braille,
which involves memorizing shortened forms of many words, but I reckon I can
get away with just using long-form for a good long while.

------
zw123456
I started my career at Bell Labs in the 80's and one engineer there made a
huge impact on me. I learned more from him that any other single person I have
worked with since. He suffered from progressive myopia so he had a rig with a
camera and a big screen and a huge monitor. He coded slower than everyone
else, but in a way, that was his secret power because his code almost never
failed in testing. Also, he was brilliant and I learned more about hardware
and software from him that I did in Masters EE program. Also, he had this
insight about the balance between when to use hardware and when to use
software that I think is somewhat lacking today (discussion for another day).
A lot of people have said that he was the inspiration for the character in the
movie Sneakers (Whistler) could be he was really well know but passed away
some time ago. I recall a time when we had a big meeting with a lot of
executives and he had long hair and a beard and after the meeting one of the
big wigs said to me "who is the guys that looks like Jesus, he is a genius".
Sorry that I am going on a bit, I cannot even begin to understand what you are
going through, but I can tell you that you should not underestimate the impact
you can have on others. I wish I had better words here, I wish I knew more
about what to suggest to help you technically, but all I know is that someone
dealing something with something similar to you meant a great deal to me
personally and professionally. Best wishes.

~~~
Endlessly
Meat of your comment to me is this phrase, “he had this insight about the
balance between when to use hardware and when to use software that I think is
somewhat lacking today” - would you attempt to clarify what you’re expressing
he would have said about balancing the design of how software & hardware work
together? Thanks.

~~~
Vinceo
I'm interested in hearing more about that as well.

~~~
gautamcgoel
Me too.

------
RobMurray
I have been blind since birth. I recommend downloading NVDA, a free screen
reader for windows, and getting used to using it for basic computer use.
Getting used to hearing the speech as fast as possible is key to being able to
use it efficiently.

You said you have hearing loss. Is it bad enough to make speech output
useless? If so you would need to learn braille.

I would never try front end design as I have no idea what it should look like,
but you may still be able to do it if you have an image in your head of what
you are trying to achieve. You would just have to ask someone to check it.

Python is not a problem with screen readers, contrary to what someone else
said. The screen reader can be set to report the indentation level. In fact I
can't think of any text based language that wouldn't be usable with a screen
reader. Tools are a different story. Some work and some don't.

Feel free to contact me if you would like any more information, weather it's
about computers or not. rob at mur.org.uk

~~~
mwcampbell
Not only is Python not problematic when using a screen reader, but there are
blind programmers who gladly choose Python over other languages. The NVDA
screen reader, mentioned in the parent comment, is developed primarily by
blind programmers, in Python. The Orca screen reader for GNOME was written by
a blind friend of mine, in Python. I have another blind friend who wrote and
sold several accessible apps for Windows and Mac using Python. And those are
just a few anecdotes that I'm aware of.

~~~
warent
I've come to understand that this is actually a very powerful reason to
actually use tabs instead of spaces for indentation. I used to have the
irrational preference of using spaces, but once I learned that screen readers
work better with tabs, it was a no-brainer from then on.

~~~
RobMurray
I don't mind weather it is tabs or spaces, as long as they are not mixed.

~~~
warent
Are you telling me a programmer used their blindness to trick me into thinking
their personal preference was absolutely necessary!? Man this war is ruthless!

~~~
RobMurray
I don't know, maybe it made a difference to them, but NVDA just says for
example "4 space" or "1 tab".

------
istorical
Biggest advice, start programming with your monitor covered up by a sheet or
turned off now while you still have the option to turn it back on to figure
out what you just did.

Gradually have it turned off for longer periods without turning it on to see
what's happening until you can do it without seeing it at all.

~~~
kolanos
On Macs, there's a screen curtain feature that can be turned on and off. The
shortcut is FN+CTRL+OPTION+SHIFT+-. It might be different on older versions of
OSX, used to use the right option key, but I've forgotten the keystrokes.

~~~
ValentineC
It looks like the shortcut depends on what one's VoiceOver triggers key are.

Here's the Apple doc for anyone interested: [https://support.apple.com/en-
us/HT201443](https://support.apple.com/en-us/HT201443)

------
mburst
I would recommend trying to study up on Section 508 compliance
[https://www.hhs.gov/web/section-508/index.html](https://www.hhs.gov/web/section-508/index.html).
It's a set of rules that all government orgs in the US must follow for making
sure their content is accessible. If you do end up becoming visually impaired
you'll end up with a unique perspective on building accessible websites.

~~~
iandanforth
Are there consulting firms that specialize in 508 audits? Seems like a
potentially lucrative field given the activist lawsuits that happen in this
area.

[https://www.natlawreview.com/article/ada-website-
litigation-...](https://www.natlawreview.com/article/ada-website-litigation-
likely-to-increase)

~~~
Endlessly
Yes, there have been professionals offering all types of services for 508 ever
since it came out. Might be wrong, but none of the companies I have seen
offering these services seems notably successful as a result of their 508
services. Compliance based services are rarely a money maker, though in some
situations given predictable need and clients, compliance based services are
frequently a way to build relationships that lead to more lucrative deals.

------
simonebrunozzi
I don't have any answer for Zach (the poster), but I feel a big need to share
my feelings about this.

I'm sipping a decent morning coffee, I'm in Japan, whereas my home is San
Francisco. I've been here for ~5 weeks, trying to escape the coronavirus
disaster that is unfolding in the US, and trying to enjoy spring in Japan as
well. I'm lucky enough to be able to afford a few weeks abroad without too
many money worries.

Work is a disaster. The last ~4 years of my life have been both unlucky (e.g.
recently I was offered a highly lucrative executive job in SF, only to see the
CEO change his mind on the whole operation - not on me specifically - at the
last moment) and badly handled by me.

My professional career essentially came to a halt and so far didn't recover. I
still keep my cool, but I am a bit worried about what's going to happen in the
future, especially given the current situation with the virus.

And now, in all of this, few minutes ago I've read "I'm going blind, how to
prepare", and my perspective suddenly changed. It's as if something clicked,
and I can now "see" the world as it is.

I'm incredibly lucky. Most of us here are incredibly lucky. Zach, you probably
didn't mean it, but today you somehow triggered a very positive reaction in
me. I wanted to let you know.

I also wish you best of luck with your condition, and hope that you will
manage to have a great life despite a deteriorating health.

~~~
zachrip
This experience has been so humbling. I grew up in a rough household and when
I had barely scraped myself past high school graduation and gotten work as a
SWE and eventually made it to some fortune 50 companies I thought I had life
figured out. Then I started bumping into things and struggling playing my
favorite games. My eye doctor casually telling me I have RP and discovering
I'd be going blind in the parking lot post appointment really knocked me on my
ass.

But there are silver linings. I was born with severe hearing loss but it's
stable and corrected with hearing aids. I don't have any balance issues (I
have USH2A, which only results in hearing/vision loss). I'm so fortunate to
have experienced all that I have and all that I will. Thank you for the kind
words.

~~~
nzealand
> discovering I'd be going blind in the parking lot post appointment

That is devastating.

Did you get a second opinion?

~~~
zachrip
Yes this was 2 years ago, I ended up at Columbia Ophthalmology in NYC and they
were able to get me DNA tested after another local doctor failed to assist me
in doing so. USH2A is the name of the specific condition if you're curious.

~~~
dundercoder
I have two mutations on USH2A. It would be spectacular if someone could repair
the whole gene.

~~~
advectus
Really appreciate both of your stories. Any chance you could share the
specific mutation? Such a difficult to understand condition given that both of
you have one or more mutations in USH2A but have different stories around
hearing loss

------
TriNetra
Legally blind, I'm a full stack engineer (and a solution/security architect)
with extensive experience in building both backend and frontend (web) systems.
I work on Windows with Jaws screen reader. I use autohotkey extensively to
super charge my productivity. I had worked as employee with Microsoft (and
others) in the past and have been running my consultancy cum product company
since 2016. Email in profile

\- You can do frontend coding but certainly some assistance is needed for
verifying the UI design. In any decent sized project, Personally I prefer my
sighted colleague to handle look and feel (mainly the CSS part - though I know
CSS) as I feel it's not a productive use of my time. It's always better to
have a UI specialist anyway. FE devs have lot of other things to do especially
when it is SPA based.

\- Visual studio is good for development and debugging (for .net related
languages at least). If you're on windows use autohotkey and setup shortcut
keys and hotstrings to automate repetitive actions and text. For instance I
prefer bash for using Git and have setup commands like 'gtcom' which expands
to 'git add . (newline) git commit -am ''. I just have to type the comment
then. Since you'd be working exclusively via keyboard it's important you do
more with less hits to reduce strain on your wrists.

\- Another important thing is to be able to find alternatives to UI tools your
colleague are using but which could be highly inaccessible. Your programming
skills and knowledge of system internals will help you with that. Do not
settle with any tool which decreases your productivity considerably just
because the team is using it, as you'll be judged based on your deliverable
and not what tools you used.

I second what @kolanos has written. Programming is mostly a mental job (no pun
intended) and everybody has to load a representation of the program in head
before one can start fleshing out good code. PG has also written about it

~~~
whitehouse3
> Programming is mostly a mental job (no pun intended)

I'm drawing a blank. What's the pun here?

~~~
TriNetra
The term mental is often used in the region I live to indicate psychologically
disturbed person. So clarifying that I didn't mean anything other than the
literal meaning of mind related job.

------
ilamont
Seek out HN user CAMLORN. Quoting from a response in an old thread about
screen readers:

 _I 'm the blind dev who refactored a huge chunk of the Rust compiler [0]. I'm
at roughly 800 words a minute with a synth, with the proven ability to top out
at 1219. 800 or so is the norm among programmers. In order to get it we
normally end up using older synths which sound way less natural because modern
synthesis techniques can't go that fast. There's a trade-off between natural
sounding and 500+ words a minute, and the market now strongly prefers the
former because hardware can now support i.e. concatenative synthesis._

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20883169](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20883169)

------
EnderMB
I'm very sorry to hear that.

I'm not sure where you're based, but I've heard of Usher's Syndrome after
hearing a talk from someone named Molly Watt, who also has Usher's Syndrome.
It might be worth dropping her a line, as in her line of work she might be
able to either give some advice, or point you towards someone in your
situation that can help.

[https://www.mollywatt.com/](https://www.mollywatt.com/)

------
taywrobel
I’m not sure if you’re willing to consider a change of employer, but when I
worked at Apple, their accessibility team never ceased to amaze me. They have
several blind, as well as deaf and paralyzed engineers on their A11Y team. I’d
argue that’s a large part of why the accessibility story on iOS is as good as
it is. Having engineers that have various disabilities work on the
accessibility of their products helps ensure that solutions genuinely solve
problems in an effective way.

I know you may not want to have your disability define your career, but if
working to help others that have the same affliction appeals to you, let me
know. I’m not there any more, but still have connections I could reach out to
for you.

~~~
xenadu02
Apple definitely has blind employees both working in accessibility and in
other groups.

I only mention that to say don't discount yourself even if you're blind (or
deaf, etc). There are plenty of engineering teams at Apple that would be happy
to have you.

~~~
AlexCoventry
> don't discount yourself even if you're blind

One of the strongest programmers I've ever met was blind, and they were
working on security software, not accessibility issues.

------
dundercoder
I have just the visual component of Ushers, I’ve got about 5 degrees left of
my visual field. I never really did front end work, but I still regularly do
back end, and project management.

I haven’t moved to non visual coding yet. Instead I have optimized for the
vision I have left. I have a very bright monitor, very bright lights in my
office (overhead) and have learned to make a place for everything, and always
put things back in their place.

Never underestimate the amount of time you can lose from looking for something
that is only slightly out of place. Be it a pen, your glasses, or a USB stick.

So long as you are able, don’t disclose your impairment to anyone in an
employment situation during the interviewing or new hire phase. Discrimination
is awful and frustrating and illegal, but it is still the norm and it’s
easiest to just avoid it if you can.

~~~
Endlessly
Curious, while I agree discrimination is wrong, deeply impacts everyone in a
number of ways, why at the very least would you not want to know prior to
interviewing, being hired, etc - if a company was biased?

If it’s not clear, there are ways to detect this, it’s legal, and if I thought
there was any opportunity to easily detect biases that might impact me, I
would do so.

~~~
dundercoder
Because I honestly think that most discrimination is unconscious. Many people
conducting interviews have never met a legally blind person and it can make
them uncomfortable. Generally, I have found people don’t hire others who make
them uncomfortable, or at the least, would put other candidates ahead of them.

Once hired and able to demonstrate ability, people are less likely to let that
initial uncomfortableness get the better of them.

------
isidorn
Hi,

My name is Isidor and I work on VS Code. Here's some hopefully useful advice:

* Join a screen reader mailing list and get to know the commnity: Program-L is the name of the general list and there is one list for Orca Screen Reader in case you are a Linux user

We try hard to make VS Code accessible so in case you decide to use VS Code:

* We have a gitter channel for accessibility which you can join [https://gitter.im/Microsoft/vscode-a11y](https://gitter.im/Microsoft/vscode-a11y)

* You can file issues and provide feedback as we try to improve continously [https://github.com/microsoft/vscode](https://github.com/microsoft/vscode)

* Feel free to ping me @isidorn on either of those or on Twitter. And let me know if we can help more.

I wish you all the best

------
oaabhilash
I am a Software Engineer and my spouse has limited vision. These is based on
my experience 1\. Use your remaining time with vision to be really really good
at touch typing. I mean, you should be able to any character without looking
at the keyboard. 2\. My spouse finds these magnifiers really useful to read
small text. Hoping you can use these if you can retain some vision.
[https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B01EV0XP8S/ref=ppx_yo_dt_b...](https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B01EV0XP8S/ref=ppx_yo_dt_b_search_asin_title?ie=UTF8&psc=1).
3\. Learn how to use the Accessibility features in Windows, Mac, Android,
Linux and ios. Learn the shortcuts. You should think about how to use the
tools for low vision (magnifier) and no vision (Audio aids and other stuff)
4\. Learn the ADA standards for applications and be an advocate for visually
impaired. At my own work, I try to use every opportunity to push for more
accessible applications. However there so many software applications deployed
to Enterprise every day, without any accessibility considerations. Being a
software engineer, I implore you to be a champion for this cause. 5\. People
who grew up using computers from the 90s are turning older now. Next 10 to 20
years they will demand the applications they use to be accessible. As an
industry, we will need to change the way we do business. 6\. Know that this is
going to be Mental Health / emotional challenge as well. Get help if needed

------
acdha
I’m really sorry that you have to face that and wish I had better advice.

My employer is the U.S. federal government and I would highly recommend
considering looking at government (or contractor) jobs: we take very seriously
the need to serve ALL of the public and front-end engineers who deeply
understand and value accessibility are extremely valuable contributors since
they can provide the subjective guidance which no level of automated tool or
guideline can provide.

The GSA’s 18F has a great guide to building accessible websites:

[https://accessibility.18f.gov/](https://accessibility.18f.gov/)

(The BBC guide is also good:
[http://www.bbc.co.uk/guidelines/futuremedia/accessibility/](http://www.bbc.co.uk/guidelines/futuremedia/accessibility/))

I’d treat that as both an area to learn the tools for personal reasons - e.g.
get comfortable with the accessibility tools in your favorite operating system
- and as an area to learn more. There’s a pretty good story for web
accessibility these days but a lot of people do not make much use of it and
someone who can make an entire team more efficient has a somewhat uncommon
selling point.

------
bramd
No time to read the whole thread right now, but feel free to get in touch
(email is in my profile). I'm blind since birth and have had various software
development jobs. These days I shifted a bit and started my own company doing
digital accessibility consulting.

If you'll become totally blind (e.g. need to transition to a screen reader
some day), I would advise you to leave the Mac platform. The built-in screen
reader seems good at first, but falls down in complex work. Support for web
browsing is suboptimal (Firefox is a no go) and the screen reader is only
updated in the regular OS X release cycle. This means bugs will stick around a
long time and it's totally unclear what the status of a bug is. Also,
hackability of VoiceOver is limited. I find that a must for a tool that I am
100% reliant on.

I'm very sympathetic to Linux and run it in many places (Raspberry pi, home
server, some stuff on VPSs), but I think Windows is a better accessible
desktop experience now. Microsoft is trying tu push accessibility hard in most
of their projects, this is often lacking in open source projects. Even if OS
projects want to do a good job at accessibility, they usually miss the
manpower of knowledge to do so. Especially given Docker and WSL (Windows
subsystem for Linux), it is easy to run Linux-based development workloads on a
Windows box.

My editor of choice these days is VS Code. That team is also very active on
the accessibility of their editor. I use the free and open source NVDA screen
reader. If something in NVDA is broken, I can at least look at their Github if
any work is being done and if needs be throw in a few patches myself.

So, summing up I would say: find out a set of accessible tools to do your job,
learn them before you get blind. Relying on vision until the very latest
moment will give you an enormous productivity hit when the switch to 100%
screen reader use comes (based on my experience training low vision and blind
users in a previous job).

From what I've seen from the thread, others have already touched on some
advantages of being a blind coder. You'll get a better mental model of your
code out of necessity and depending on your team/employer you can be a more
valuable team member because you also bring knowledge of software
accessibility.

Hope this helps and good luck!

------
csdreamer7
Please watch this video on the i3 desktop environment. The windows are managed
and can be controlled by keystrokes.

[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=b_RL_Q8CR78](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=b_RL_Q8CR78)

From 2015, a blind engineer uses emacspeak to write C++.

[https://www.businessinsider.com/how-blind-google-engineer-
wr...](https://www.businessinsider.com/how-blind-google-engineer-writes-
code-2015-5)

I have read some HN comments in the past from blind engineers. Not sure if
they are frontend.

~~~
vharish
I would like to second this. Any tiling window manager could be of great help.

------
tuukkao
Blind since birth full stack software developer here. I might not be able to
relate to your situation completely but here are some of my experiences:

>Are there blind frontend engineers?

I don't think so. It's not that you can't do frontend at all, just that you
can't do it completely. Something like copying the layout from a visual mockup
doesn't really work unless someone describes the mockup to you, and even then
it might not be 100 % correct, though i'd say your experience as a sighted
frontend developer would definitely help there. Thankfully (in this case
anyway) SPA's tend to be so complex these days that there is plenty of work to
do without touching the actual layout. My frontend work has consisted mostly
of refactoring and writing various integrations. Occasionally I've written
some complete features where I've laid out a rough version of the UI and
someone sighted in the team has finished it off for me. This strategy has
worked out relatively well for me in the past. However I'd say doing solo
frontend work is sadly a no-go.

> What kinds of software engineering lend themselves to someone with limited
> vision? Backend only?

Basically anything non-visual works out. Backend, yes, but also the business
logic of SPA apps as well as devops work.

> Besides a screen reader, what are some of the best tools for building
> software with limited vision?

\- A good editor which is accessible and has an extensive set of keyboard
shortcuts. Visual Studio Code and Eclipse are the two editors that I use in my
day to day work.

\- Terminal. It's often much quicker to do things like text manipulation,
version control and devops administration there, since you don't have to waste
so much time going through information that you don't need. I've found git
gui's to be particularly useless. Web browsers and editors/ide's are basically
the only gui tools that I use.

Feel free to hit me up if I could be of any help.

------
chrisdone2
If i went blind tomorrow I would invest heavily in:

1\. Emacs and Emacsspeak in particular. Emacs is the richest text-based user
experience out there; imagine if all Terminal apps were configurable and
scriptable under the same coherent framework. This is why Emacsspeak is an
incredibly valuable asset that I would lean heavily on in the event of vision
loss.

2\. I would invest heavily in making sure that I have a very trivial way to
deploy Chrome user extensions or similar such that I could write my own screen
readers, document explorers, etc. tailored to my own liking. The only thing
close to Emacs is the DOM with JavaScript as it’s Elisp. A lot of people gripe
about the web, but the fact that almost all my apps come under the same
pliable DOM means I can manipulate without vision almost everything. See e.g.
vimperator.

These two things mean that you could do most of your job as-is, with
assistance from colleagues.

As you’re a full stack developer, you’ll find point 2 easy. And point 1 is
hard but a worthy investment. Emacs is older than the web and will probably
outlive it.

I would probably also look at using tree sitter to make screenreading code
more efficient at the AST level, because code is parsed linearly but we read
it with random access.

I’d start working with my screen turned off or covered with paper if I knew
ahead of time, that way I could start training. Honestly, computing-wise I
wouldn’t be that worried about losing my vision. It’s the rest of life that’s
harder.

Best of luck to you! Drop me a PM if you’d like some pointers on my two bullet
points.

~~~
dannypgh
> Emacs and Emacsspeak in particular. Emacs is the richest text-based user
> experience out there;

My naive expectation is that non-visual editors like ed and ex would be easier
to use than visual editors like emacs and vi, but I'm curious to learn more
about how people work here. How well do visual editors interact with screen
readers? The screen readers would presumably need to offer an interface to
reread parts of the screen, and this seems redundant with the non-visual
editors that take commands to print like ranges.

~~~
josephkern
Emacs has a unique feature as well, it can become the entire gui for anything
you are trying to do; web browser, email client, IRC client, etc. all
converted into plain text.

I even had it setup a few years ago to send and read tweets.

------
mcv
I have no experience with being blind, and I can't imagine what it's like. I
can only wish you the best, and hope it progresses as slowly as possible.

I do know one reason why a blind front-end developer can be very valuable for
a company: there are a lot of blind people out there, and they need to be able
to use the web too. For this reason, a lot of companies care a lot about
accessibility, and so do a lot of developers. But despite those best efforts,
those developers keep dropping the ball without even noticing, because they
don't experience it. As a blind developer, you will notice when something your
team has built, doesn't work for blind people. This can be very valuable in
the right situation.

------
gostsamo
Hi, A blind python developer here. You can do the job and though it has its
frustrations with inaccessible tools, there're always alternatives. The two
best things that you can use for web development are VS Code, because
Microsoft are currently in "we love accessibility" phase of their product
cycle and doing a good job of it, and emacs because it gives you a text-based
os at the cost of a somewhat steep learning curve. People are using braille
displays though it is not unavoidable. As a screen reader, you can use emacs
speak with emacs, orca in linux, voice over on MacOs and IOs, and NVDA for
Windows. Specially for web devs, there is an NVDA addon that can help object
positions in web pages and has some other nicities if you are the type to do
front end. Developer tools in all browsers have some more work to do before
being fully accessible so there will be some issues there. If you need some
more info, program-l@freelists.org is a blind-dev community with experienced
visually impaired devs. Feel welcome anytime.

------
Waterluvian
I just want to throw this out there, just in case you haven't deeply
considered it. I'm sure others will answer your question more properly.

Have you considered that maybe you don't want to be doing software engineering
and with this precious remaining time would rather prepare for something
entirely different? Not sure what your financial situation will be or if you
live somewhere with sufficient social support, but if you're going to be blind
for life (and you're very young), optimizing for employment (ie. "I'm already
a software engineer, may as well commit to that") might not be the best way to
live a full and fulfilling life.

~~~
cortesoft
I am confused why his diagnosis makes any difference... this isn't a fatal
disease, so he has no fewer years to live than the rest of us.

If he thought being a software engineer was what he wanted to do to live a
fulfilling life before his diagnosis, why would that change now?

~~~
frosted-flakes
Because programming without sight is hard. It's definitely _doable_ and could
very well lead to a fulfilling life. Or it might not. Maybe there are other
careers that he might be better suited for and where his disability won't be
as much of a hindrance. If so, he still has time while he can see to prepare
for a career change.

Basically, the GP is telling the OP to consider all of his options and not to
box himself into software engineering just because that's what he does now.

~~~
miki123211
> Maybe there are other careers that he might be better suited for and where
> his disability won't be as much of a hindrance.

I'm blind myself, and I consider software-engineering to be one of the nicest
options out there, at least in my country. Sure, there are difficulties, but
not as many as in other fields. Computers can be accessible, and accessible
tools can usually be found.

A blind person becoming a software engineer is a realistic option. a blind
person becoming... almost anything else is not. As a blind person, career
prospects are pretty limited, and someone who already is a software engineer
has a huge advantage, compared to someone who i.e. invested n years of his
life into becoming a surgeon.

------
jimohalloranau
A couple of years ago I was staring down the barrel of giving up a 20 year
career in software development due to a degenerative eye condition.

I can't tell you how many hours I wasted chasing parse errors in PHP code
because I literally couldn't see the difference between a "." and "," anymore.

My solution ended up being transplant surgery to replace one of my corneas,
which has largely restored vision in one eye. I still use a lot of large
fonts, high contrast, etc, but I'm able to manage much easier on a day to day
basis.

I had a wonderfully supportive employer, so when it was clear to me that
unless something changed dramatically (i.e. surgery) I would no longer be able
to do my current job we sat down (at my instigation) and discussed what this
might look like in terms of both what sort of role I could continue to do, and
what I wanted to do (not always the same thing, and the latter is important).

My manager at the time said something which has stuck with me. He said that
(paraphrasing) the thing he really valued was the care, thought and attention
I paid to the work I did. And that the way that had been expressed was through
fingers on keyboard writing code. We just needed to find a way of capturing
that thought and turning it into code a different way.

We never fully made the transition into a completely different role because my
surgery meant I was able to continue (after 20 years I still love coding and
didn't want to entirely give that up). But for me, that was going to mean
spending more time with junior developers, coaching, mentoring, etc. I didn't
want to manage people, so moving up the chain into management wasn't an option
for me. But Project Management, might be an option that allows you to leverage
some technical skills, but be less dependent on your vision.

So, if your employer is amenable, don't try to do this alone. See what changes
can be made to accommodate your needs. Having a degenerative condition where
you're not going blind overnight is an advantage, because it means you can
work with your employer to adapt your role over time to suit you.

~~~
webczat
Partially sighted people are less productive than blind people. You had
problems with seeing difference between characters, but if you would have used
a screenreader it would just unambiguously tell you which one it is... From my
experience people with very low vision will generally do far more spelling
errors when typing on a phone than me (and I am not comfortable typing on a
touch screen).

------
keiferski
Try and read Borges’ essay on blindness.

Some excerpts:

 _There were the books, but I had to ask my friends the titles of them. I
remembered a sentence from Rudolf Steiner, in his books on anthroposo­ phy,
which was the name he gave to his theosophy. He said that when some­ thing
ends, we must think that something begins. His advice is salutary, but the
execution is difficult, for we only know what we have lost, not what we will
gain. We have a very precise image-an image at times shameless-of what we have
lost, but we are ignorant ofwhat may follow or replace it._

 _I made a decision. I said to myself: since I have lost the beloved world of
appearances, I must create something else. At the time I was a professor of
English at the university. What could I do to teach that almost infinite lit­
erature, that literature which exceeds the life of a man, and even generations
of men? What could I do in four Argentine months of national holidays and
strikes? I did what I could to teach the love of that literature, and I
refrained as much as possible from dates and names._

[https://www.gwern.net/docs/borges/1977-borges-
blindness.pdf](https://www.gwern.net/docs/borges/1977-borges-blindness.pdf)

------
synthmeat
There's fair amount of useful information here
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18522497](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18522497)

------
vilvadot
There is this guy who is pretty well known in the spanish dev community:

[https://twitter.com/kastwey](https://twitter.com/kastwey)

[https://www.xataka.com/otros/soy-ciego-nacimiento-asi-mi-
tra...](https://www.xataka.com/otros/soy-ciego-nacimiento-asi-mi-trabajo-como-
desarrollador-informatico)

He often talks at conferences about his situation and setup, so if you
understand spanish you might be able to find quite a lot on this. Also it
might be worth a shot contacting him for more info.

Best of luck with your new adventure.

------
esoteriq
Hello! I have Type I Usher myself and my vision tanked when I was 27 (~8 years
ago). I'm a writer, so I can't give you much programming advice but I've been
through the gamut in terms of technology and life changes. I'm happy to share
what has and hasn't worked for me. My email is in my profile.

I do want to say one thing, though: It absolutely sucks at first but you'll
adapt. One day at a time.

------
elviejo
Use a text editor such as Emacs or Vim.

Migrate from front end development to backend...

Learn to live in the command line.

Take car of your soul

~~~
shrimp_emoji
Inevitably, whatever happens, you keep on trucking

It's a circular but effective way to coupe

------
WheelsAtLarge
I recommend you work on your support network now. As you get less able you
begin to retreat more on to yourself and your family and less towards the
people outside your comfort circle. Make an effort to meet new people and make
new friends, now. Also, you will want to stay home more as you feel less
comfortable with your abilities, so create habits that will force you to go
out and interact with people. For whatever reason, many people are
uncomfortable with the disabled, they aren't trying to be jerks but it's hard
for many, so if people get used to you early then it will be so much easier on
you in the long run. One advantage of knowing what's coming is that you can
change your behavior now so you can better deal with your changing abilities.

If you haven't yet, get in contact with the local Braille Institute so they
can help you.

An interesting thing about humans is that we get used to whatever life brings
us. Problems that seemed impossible to accept and deal with when you are
facing them will suddenly be very manageable once you have to deal with them
directly.

Be strong and good luck!

------
tmnster85
My one year old daughter is a survivor of bacterial meningitis, she had to
have a bilateral craniotomy to help get the infection under control. This left
her with moderate brain sesquale. She is with us today, she has cortical
visual impairment. While my daughter situation is a little different. These
comments give me so much hope. Thank you. It really means the world after a
tough weekend.

------
nickhuh
I don't have any experience programming without visual aids; and you've
probably already thought of this aspect though I'll mention it just in-case:
if I were facing a similar situation, I would look into long-term disability
insurance and see if there's anything I can do on that front. That way, I
could still pursue being productive with blindness or deafblindness, but would
have less economic pressure while doing so.

Many employers offer a combination of short-term and long-term disability that
will provide income (in some cases until you retire) in the event that you can
no longer work.

------
sn
My company (prgmr.com) gave a presentation about hiring our first blind
engineer at SCALE last year:

[https://www.socallinuxexpo.org/scale/17x/presentations/accid...](https://www.socallinuxexpo.org/scale/17x/presentations/accidentally-
accessible-mostly-foss-workflow)

[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FvrQPdt1X30&feature=youtu.be](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FvrQPdt1X30&feature=youtu.be)

We hired another blind developer who occasionally does some frontend work. If
any sort of visual layout is involved, that obviously needs review, but he's
able to add on to existing pages. He's also trying selenium for testing the
visual layout.

It will probably be more of a challenge for you since you're having to learn
to deal with lack of vision as an adult rather than having been blind since a
young age. In your position I'd seek out advice specifically from others who
have gone through the same process.

------
tibbydudeza
I have a colleague who has RP (Retinitis pigmentosa).

He is a SAP front end developer and uses normal laptop/ keyboard running
Windows 10 with the addition of a screen reader called Jaws and an IPhone.

He lives close to work and lives on his own and walks to the office unassisted
or uses uber further out ... the only issue is when there is a crowd and then
we help him get to the canteen for example.

Obviously his audio acuity is way above the norm , his screen reader is
probably set at over 300 words per minute.

Also another thing is we make sure the office layout remains the same as he
has memorized the layout.

------
jka
While I don't yet know a ton about the accessibility software development
community, I've discovered Deque Labs[1] while looking into some accessibility
tooling.

They have really good resources and training around accessibility for the web,
and some of the software they develop[2] is incorporated into Google
Lighthouse.

Their guides and videos might help you get a sense for how other people use
alternative access methods to interface with the web.

With both the skills to write software and a deeper understanding of the use
cases you'll be well-positioned to help improve things for a lot of people -
I'm sure it could be tough at times, but stick with it, and best of luck to
you.

[1] - [https://www.deque.com/services/accessibility-empathy-
lab/](https://www.deque.com/services/accessibility-empathy-lab/)

[2] - [https://github.com/dequelabs/axe-
core](https://github.com/dequelabs/axe-core)

------
smanatstpete
I work with many engineers who became blind in a variety of ways. If you
provide your email address, I can introduce you to them. Here is my temporary
email (docesar172 at lagsixtome dot com) if you do not want your contact to be
published.

------
schoen
You might want to check out some things like

[https://www.reddit.com/r/emacs/comments/bh0vm0/emacspeak_how...](https://www.reddit.com/r/emacs/comments/bh0vm0/emacspeak_how_the_blind_use_emacs/)

[https://stackoverflow.com/questions/118984/how-can-you-
progr...](https://stackoverflow.com/questions/118984/how-can-you-program-if-
youre-blind)

and also contact some individual programmers with visual impairments.

I don't have particular expertise in this area but I remember meeting a
completely blind software developer in 1995 or 1996 (when presumably the tools
available were much more limited!). He said that he had successfully pursued
this career for a number of years already at that time. However, I think the
things he was working with would be things that you'd consider more to be
backend engineering.

I also know a computer scientist who is blind and who has continued
researching, publishing, and teaching, but as he works in theory, his work
might also feel more backend-like.

> \- Besides a screen reader, what are some of the best tools for building
> software with limited vision?

If you decide to learn Braille well, Braille terminals are still a thing:

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Refreshable_braille_display](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Refreshable_braille_display)

(You might have seen one used in the movie _Sneakers_!)

Some fluent Braille readers can use these terminals at _very_ high speeds
(although people who use screen readers also often get used to using their
screen readers at extremely high speeds).

> \- Are there blind frontend engineers?

I know you might not want to pigeonhole yourself and work specifically on
disability-related projects, but a lot of companies are trying to ensure
accessibility of their web sites and so are interested in having developers
with specific disabilities to help make sure that that works out properly. I
believe there are consultancies of people with specific impairments who
develop (and test) UI for accessibility to users with similar disabilities.

------
reyalteya
I am a totally blind software engineer. Was also not born blind, but our
difference is, I am already blind when I became a software engineer.

However, I made a career shift a few years back due to my frustrations to
inaccessible work tools, plus the company where I worked before is not that
inclusive. I was disheartened, but it turned out to be a blessing in disguise
because the interesting world of digital accessibility opened up for me.

Just thinking.. maybe we can collaborate. From someone who was once sighted
and became blind in a not so very young age, maybe we can collaborate. I am
very willing to teach you the ropes. not being a software engineer of course.
I believe you’re already an expert in that. But more of learning how to be
comfortable with being blind while growing in the tech world.

Hope to chat with you soon.

------
3boll
Hey, there you have a few references that could be of some help!

Google: [https://www.businessinsider.com/how-blind-google-engineer-
wr...](https://www.businessinsider.com/how-blind-google-engineer-writes-
code-2015-5?IR=T)

Visual Studio:
[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=94swlF55tVc](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=94swlF55tVc)

Forzano (Amazon)
[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=57P_dCEPtRw](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=57P_dCEPtRw),
[https://blog.aboutamazon.com/working-at-amazon/blind-
since-b...](https://blog.aboutamazon.com/working-at-amazon/blind-since-birth-
writing-code-at-amazon-since-2013)

Wishing you the best, J

------
atdrummond
I have hired blind developers in the past and would do so again. Happy to
share thoughts on an accessible workplace or discuss a position any time:
alex@gatepay.co

I would also echo the comment made regarding government positions. There are
quite a few compelling coding jobs in the public sector and the government
seems to take their responsibilities with regards to workplace needs quite
seriously.

------
fatiherikli
I'm not sure about the technical parts, but I was a member of an organization
which aims blind people to ride bicycle by using tandem bicycles. So the
concept is, non-blind person riding the bicycle and blind person pedals while
sitting on the back. I did a lot of rides like that and we became very close
friends with some of them.

They are (blind people) is very good in reading (listening) and also in
speaking. I believe being a person who's easy to communicate is very importent
in our industry and you will be a very good asset for your team.

You can email me if you'd like to hear more about that organization and maybe
you can find something like that in your city as well.

fatiherikli@gmail.com

------
coffeemug
_> Since my diagnosis I've slowly developed a crippling anxiety centered
around a feeling that I need to figure out the rest of my life before it's too
late._

I can't imagine how you must be feeling, so take what I'm about to say with a
grain of salt.

Losing your sight is undoubtedly going to be one of the top five most
important events in your life that will split everything into "before" and
"after". Maybe it will be the most important. But it's still one of the top
five. And right behind those five there will be another five that aren't quite
as important, but still pretty close. Life has a way about it like that. (Some
of us get dealt a better hand than others of course, but there are precious
few for whom all top ten life events have smooth continuity and are all
ecstatically positive).

I'm by no means telling you to take this lightly or not to prepare. It sounds
like you're throwing yourself into this thing and doing the best you can to
set yourself up for future success. That's great. But do take a long view on
these things. You have fifty years ahead of you, and crazy shit will happen
that will knock you off your horse maybe every decade or so.

It's not exactly that your anxiety is unwarranted, just that it's not telling
you the whole story. This is (hopefully) going to be a long, long road. Aiming
to have everything buttoned down at 24 (or 34, or 54) is not a reasonable
expectation, blind or not.

Anyway, best of luck to you. If you want, I can put you in touch with a friend
who's a developer with no sight. (Also happy to just talk to you for emotional
support) My e-mail is in the profile.

------
heavyset_go
I had a complication with my vision where I could have become blind, and was
in the same position as you are. There are blind engineers, and compared to 15
years ago, there are many highly configurable and powerful tools at a blind
engineer's disposal. After doing some research, I walked away slightly
relieved at what options were available. I'm just posting this to give you a
bit of hope.

I highly suggest documenting your condition, its progression and your eventual
disability, and getting your disability status recognized by the government as
soon as you can. Navigating social services and the ADA is a skill in itself.

~~~
zachrip
Here in AZ the gov vocational rehab is so understaffed just to be onboarded I
received an appointment almost a year after I called. Now with corona virus
cases will surely have been pushed back even further possibly for another
year. It's so frustrating to work with.

Even just getting diagnosed I had to fight my insurance company who said that
a DNA test was not necessary (it's a genetic condition???).

All of these things are the reason I'm trying to get ahead of all this. This
entire thread has given me a lot of hope, thank you.

------
RickJWagner
First, I'm very sorry this is happening to you. I hope to later read where you
have been very successful.

I work for Red Hat, we have a successful executive named Chad E. Foster
([https://chadefoster.com/](https://chadefoster.com/)), he has some recorded
talks that outline some of the pitfalls he's encountered and the ways he found
around them. Maybe his advice can be of use. (You might even consider reaching
out. He seems a very approachable guy.)

I worked closely with another person who went blind. He relied on big monitors
and monitor settings to help him.

Good luck, we'll all be rooting for you.

------
imutemyteam
In the meantime, I would really urge you to travel and see the beautiful
sights and places which you might not be able to later on. Splurge a bit and
see those places so you can have a memory of them and never have the feeling
that you missed out on anything in life. The Great Barrier Reef, The Grand
Canyon, visit a space observatory so you can see the other planets, other
galaxies, etc.,

Especially considering your age, I would really really urge you to do this. If
you dont have anyone to go with you; just do it solo. I hope you consider my
suggestion.

------
unfocused
I deal with duty to accommodate and I can tell from experience some of the
tools that our employees that are blind currently use. They are:

1\. JAWS screen reader. They all say this is the best 2\. Programmable keys,
such as [https://xkeys.com/xk16.html](https://xkeys.com/xk16.html) 3\. ABBY
Finereader - to digitize images so they can be read by JAWS. 4\. Large
specialized monitors (I forget which model) that could help.

And yes, like someone already mentioned, you will be listening to your screen
reader at lightning speed.

All the best!

------
eli555
I had a coworker this happened too. He was in his late 40s when this happened
and so had to use a screen reader instead of a Braille display. He used edlin
over putty on Windows. Since Jaws ran best there for him. He had to stop
working on languages like Python where a screen reader is of little help.

~~~
blondin
> He had to stop working on languages like Python where a screen reader is of
> little help.

i find this interesting. is it due to the space significance thingy?

~~~
sn
Python is totally possible with a screen reader; the screen reader just needs
to read out punctuation. It's easier with a self voicing application like
emacs.

~~~
eli555
Three spaces vs one space is punctuation?

------
exdsq
One thing to consider is to write a blog on accessibility - it’ll help expose
issues to those who develop developer tools which is great but it’ll also help
_you_ get exposure for getting work.

~~~
ashilfarahmand
I was thinking the exact same thing! It would be something I would definitely
be interested in reading just to get a different perspective on how different
people approach a site.

------
thayne
> Are there blind frontend engineers?

I have zero experience in this area, and don't actually know any blind
engineers, but I have two thoughts: 1\. A lot of frontend development isn't
necessarily tied to the UI itself. especially in more complicated apps, where
a lot of the logic is in the frontend. 2\. I think a blind developer has an
advantage when it comes to building websites that are usable by other visually
impaired people. Maybe consider looking into a11y development, if that
interests you.

------
game_the0ry
I know your situation really sucks, but you are in a fortunate position to
reposition yourself as a UI (both web and mobile) accessibility consultant,
given your experience in front end web.

A couple of folks mentioned this before - government contractors and federal
agencies are required to be compliant with WCAG 2.0 A/AA standards.

I work at a financial institution in front end web. Accessibility is a big
deal for us and I can tell you from experience that it is significant pain
point for everyone (front end developers and testers). I would estimate that
about 70% of the defects I work on are accessibility related. Also, my first
job out of boot camp was doing only web accessibility work for a company that
was trying to get their site WCAG compliant by 2017.

I toyed with the idea of starting my own accessibility consulting service,
given how frustrating it can be. Its a challenge to get a UI to work visually
consistent across browsers, operating systems, and devices. Add screen readers
and focus placement to the mix, and the work becomes very annoying and time
consuming.

I would speculate that accessibility becomes its own niche specialty, similar
to how front end and back end work is often viewed as their own specialties.
That's opportunity for you, my friend. I hope you can make the best of it.
Good luck.

------
sky_rw
Unrelated to the question:

> "I'm a 24 y/o full stack engineer (I know some of you are rolling your eyes
> right now..."

As a 35 year old full stack engineering manager I can say that anybody rolling
their eyes at that statement needs to check themselves. Lately I've been
getting smoked by a 21 year old software dev. She's constantly teaching me
things and improving my code. Frameworks and technologies evolve so fast that
age is a very poor metric of practical knowledge.

~~~
jhgb
Is that really a matter of age, or of experience? Surely your own code didn't
deteriorate since you were 21 year old yourself. Or is this largely about
newfangled things that didn't exist back then?

~~~
sky_rw
Age and on-paper experience are incomplete measures of intelligence and
capability.

------
eddieh
As I'm already an Emacs user, I'd start by looking at what Emacspeak
([http://emacspeak.sourceforge.net](http://emacspeak.sourceforge.net)) can
offer. Since Emacs itself is way more than a text editor this package is also
much more than that. It isn't just a screen reader, instead it is an audio
based desktop that does email, web, news, plays games, keeps notes, calendars,
writes computer languages, etc.

------
O_H_E
For navigation in the real world, make sure to check out echolocation. Some
blind people have been navigating the world using sound reflections like bats.
I was recently watching [1] and it blew-out my mind. You could start training
now. Apparently after much practice people could be independent to the point
of riding bikes.

[1]
[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=08smCjKWNL0](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=08smCjKWNL0)

------
cskchao
I've been blind since birth, and much of my life and work is possible through
the use of technology. I've used screenreaders on Windows, Mac, iOS and
Android (both speech and Braille output). Many blind people are employed in
various technical professions. I'm happy to answer whatever I can, and direct
you to smarter people who may be able to answer what I can't. My Twitter and
gmail username is the username on here.

------
auslegung
There is a lot of good advice here, and I know you can continue to do SE if
you’re committed. In addition to the advice here, you could consider

\- finding businesses who would benefit from employing a blind SE. I have no
idea who, but probably companies who care a lot about accessibility

\- you could become a tech project manager or another career that is
tangential to SE. I know there will be obstacles to overcome, but maybe not as
many as in SE, idk.

------
lisper
No advice, just offering moral support and letting you know that you're not
alone. I have macular degeneration so I'm not going completely blind, but I'm
losing my foveas so that still presents some significant challenges when it
comes to coding. At the moment I'm compensating with larger fonts. I don't
know what I'll do when that's not enough any more.

------
randycupertino
I used to work at a healthcare navigation (insurance contractor) company. My
biggest advice to you is to start acquiring copies of and saving all of your
medical records, and keep them filed and organized.

Years down the road, if you need disability, it can be an arduous process and
some of the doctor's visits and notes may be gone (health care companies come
and go, have mergers, lose medical records due to old out of date systems,
etc). If you need to show a history of decline over the years and don't have
that all to submit, they will use it as a reason to reject you.

Getting disability in the US isn't easy- we joked it was "like trying to join
the Jewish faith" because they reject everyone three times. Most of our
patients would apply multiple times and end up having to hire attorneys to
help them apply.

Keeping your records and building a trail of evidence will save you a lot of
grief in the long run- even if you don't think you will need it- I would say
start saving your documents just in case.

------
solarengineer
Unorthodox suggestion: build up lots of capital ASAP, so that you don’t
struggle later commuting to terms with loss of vision as well as potential
loss of revenue.

Some approaches to consider: Algo trading , creating and selling off products,
creating stuff for startups for a stake in the profits. Right now, you may
want to consider all options rather than regretting not doing so later.

I have seen two blind persons in my work life: one is a guru with emacs and
gnome programming and today runs his own Python training and also sells an
accounting package ( called GNU Khata). He was born blind.

Another is an architect and advisor at a consulting company. He lost his
vision to an accident. He was fortunate to have already built up capital, and
used that as a buffer to take a year off to learn how to cope and to continue.

Until I’d met them both, I’d thought that suicide might be the only feasible
approach were I to go blind. I am now completely positive about living even
after blindness, but I do understand the benefits of having a capital base and
being financially independent.

All the best.

~~~
dan-robertson
I’m not sure I agree with this advice though I have no experience with being
blind. Possibly creating/selling products/running a service would be a good
way to have an income stream which is reasonably sustainable but I would worry
about any graphical front end to any software product, and my general worry
would be about loss of income because my expectation would be that finding a
job while blind would be hard. I would expect working for a large tech company
would have two advantages: 1. This would likely be the most reliable easiest
way to actually build up a decent amount of capital; and 2. I would expect a
larger company would be more accommodating of your going blind because they
would be much better able to cope with a loss of productivity and adjustment
period and they may be more nervous of the legal risks of not supporting you.
If you run your own business or work for a company with little spare money, it
will be much harder to have a loss of productivity or adjustment period.

~~~
solarengineer
Building up a financial foundation as an employee can take years. The OP may
not have that much time. I therefore suggested algo trading ( their
programming skills come to use ), and creating and selling off products (
where they build things and sell them off, instead of building a SaaS business
and getting caught up in all the business building).

------
KhoomeiK
Even as someone who isn't blind, I think popularizing more screenless tools
(or even tools with just fewer visuals) could be useful for the dev community
as a whole. My eye strain is getting especially bad now that we're in
quarantine since I'm sitting in front of a monitor nearly the entire day.

Hope to see some cool suggestions, tools, and software posted in this thread!

------
mbutsk
Accessibility testing/engineering is a very important niche within software
engineering. You could very easily build a career that will enhance the lives
of others in similar situations.

~~~
kinow
Indeed, we are building a web app now to replace an existing GUI. In our
group, in at least two companies we have people with color blindness, so we
decided to incorporate WCAG design practices from the beginning.

It's quite hard for us, as we relay on browser extensions to test and tell us
whether we are doing accessibility right or not, before we send the app to be
tested by our co-workers/users.

These tools lack somewhat, they are not easy to integrate in the build
process, and instead developers have to remember to run them, and check
different things (e.g. there are multiple types of color-blindness, EU vs. USA
regulations for accessibility, ARIA roles/labels where possible for screen
readers etc).

So you could definitely start working on something in that area. Maybe more
tools, more information, services for testing, consultancy.

------
kalyan02
Sometime back, I worked with a colleague who was completely blind. As I was
introduced to this new would-be-teammate, I instinctively tried to thrust my
hand forward for a handshake, only to stop myself short with a horrifying
realization that might not be an appropriate form. Fortunately, to my great
relief, he was used to such situations and offered his hand first. This moment
particularly struck me.

The experience of working with him was exciting and as challenging as it was
enlightening, as I think I learnt a bit more about myself and all the things
around me I took for granted.

Anyway, here are some of my observations

1\. Navigating a busy open-layout office is possible, but hard. My colleague
was really great at doing so without using his stick.

2\. Often it is the sighted who would hesitate at water-cooler chat for fear
of offending or saying something untoward, but the colleague took the
initiative to put them at ease, so it was always fun. No one could slip out
unnoticed by him. The puns were mortifyingly entertaining, which I think only
a blind person can make.

3\. The written form of communication goes great lengths in bridging the
communication gap (This is applicable in general as well)

4\. ASCII diagrams and SVGs are great ways of making content such as flow
charts and architecture diagrams accessible. Tools such as PlantUML, dotviz,
mermaidjs are helpful.

5\. Statically typed languages make it much easier to work within a screen-
reader environment. We were working with Go, and he had much better success
with it than a language that was used in other parts of the company.

6\. Emacs seems to have a lot of tooling to facilitate the use of screen-
readers.

7\. Open-office chatter (in-person and chat) can become overwhelming very
quickly, so setting expectations ahead on how you'd plan to work helps your
teammates.

8\. Monitoring is hard (in a server-side environment) as the notion of "taking
a look" at the graphs doesn't translate for someone who is not sighted. I wish
there were better ways that are more accessible.

Losing sight is perhaps one of the most terrifying prospects anyone can face.
However, seeing (see what I did there) my colleague also gives me hope that
all is not futile. It is possible to live a fulfilled life. It is possible to
have a successful career as a software developer. Being blind does not have to
mean disabled but merely differently-abled.

I wish you the best of luck.

------
claytonaalves
You should really talk to Lucas Radaelli, a very tallented blind programmer
working at google. He calls himself Brazilian Daredevil (marvel character).

[https://twitter.com/lucasradaelli](https://twitter.com/lucasradaelli)

------
farazy
Hi,

What's your timeline? Is this due to a generic issue like Retinitis
pigmentosa, Choroideremia, Are you losing peripheral (10 degrees) or central
(20/200)? (You can email me directly: faraz.y at iCloud

Different companies have various groups specifically for visually impaired.
For example, at Aira.io (the entire engineering is working on software for
blinds so they are very open) Ted Drake at Intuit (I personally know him. He
is an amazing person and has so much connection specifically for visually
impaired) Rio Akasaka at Google (His team is mostly focused on disability
related projects)

Feel free to reach out to me on the email above..

------
sethx
I see you got a lot of great technical suggestions here. I am in no way able
to comprehend what you must be going through mentally, but to tackle your
anxiety, please consider meditation. If you have never done that before, there
is an excellent 10 day course that can be followed, onsite, on a donation
basis. If you're broke you don't have to pay. It's a 10 day silent retreat,
which means you don't have to talk to anyone and can just focus on "showing up
to do the work". [https://www.dhamma.org/](https://www.dhamma.org/)

~~~
takecarefnd
Can't agree more.

------
johnmarinelli
No idea on how to prepare, but one of my colleagues is blind and is one of the
most detail-oriented backend engineers we have. One thing I've learned from
him is that Apple products are MUCH less accessible than PC.

------
jitendrac
[https://clinicaltrials.gov/ct2/show/NCT03780257](https://clinicaltrials.gov/ct2/show/NCT03780257)

[https://ir.proqr.com/news-releases/news-release-
details/proq...](https://ir.proqr.com/news-releases/news-release-
details/proqr-doses-first-patient-phase-12-stellar-trial-qr-421a-usher#)

ProQR is working on some -RNA based gene editing treatment for Usher's
syndrome. Stay updated with its result,hope for best. They are recruiting new
patients for trial if interested.

------
at_a_remove
I only have a little to offer:

First, in college I knew a guy with RP. He was hands-down the most brilliant
coder I knew at the time. Aside from blowing up the screen (screenreaders did
not yet exist), he ended up simply memorizing his code. He held the whole
thing in his head.

I also knew -- internet-only -- a woman with the more severe form of Usher's
(born deaf, go blind) -- who was quite techy even in the early 1990s and now
works doing tech stuff for libraries, last I checked. She, also, had it going
on.

In short, I can tell you this: other people have done it, so you also have a
shot at it.

------
robocat
I suggest practice with voice readers without looking e.g. start with web
browsing and NVDA. When you get confused, try to resolve without looking. If
that fails, use your sight to work out why you went wrong: especially learn
what heuristic you could have used to correct yourself without needing sight?
You would need someone else to help if you try to learn after your sight went
- I found that the accessibility software had a lot of showstopper usability
bugs.

If your balance issues are manageable, perhaps start joining blind social or
support groups in your area. Potentially you could help them with their
technical issues, since maybe you would learn a lot by helping others, and
there are always people that really need help with tech!

And a supremely left-field idea: Perhaps investigate changing states or
countries if you find that your local systems are not helping you? Some places
have better infrastructure for the blind or sight impaired - do you see
pedestrian markings locally
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tactile_paving](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tactile_paving)
or are they dangerous: [https://99percentinvisible.org/article/death-tactile-
paving-...](https://99percentinvisible.org/article/death-tactile-paving-
chinas-precarious-paths-visually-impaired/) also it is rumoured that some
wealthy countries with socialised health may help you more?

Good luck. PS: I’m not sight impaired.

------
unexaminedlife
I have a relative who is blind. I have told her I think there are 2 strong
opportunities in technology that I can think of that might suit her. Granted
she is not tech savvy so may not apply for you.

1) educating other blind people in how to best utilize technology. She was
always "legally blind", but has been 100% blind since the 90's so picking up
technology has not been easy for her.

2) Accessibility QA. I know this probably could feel like a "step back" from
being a developer, but I think the world (especially large companies who are
becoming more and more dependent on their web presence) NEED more people who
can help their teams understand the world from the perspective of a blind
person. There are people in these positions obviously, but I was surprised to
learn that most of them can see, so I don't put much faith in their ability to
do justice to their jobs.

Finally, this sort of goes with #2 above, but I think there's opportunity and
a market (think government subsidies) for people who want to build
accessibility technology to make it easier for blind people to use technology.
I think this probably should start from standardization. There are a lot of
standards out there, but I think not enough.

PS. I think one of the best first steps will be to start to learn Braille. It
likely will be easier to get started while you can still see.

------
bretthowell
Late to this discussion, but witnessing the amazing community support is
uplifting and I thought I'd drop a couple of links I don't think I saw in any
other comments:

1\. Talon - Writing code by voice:
[https://www.blakewatson.com/journal/writing-and-coding-by-
vo...](https://www.blakewatson.com/journal/writing-and-coding-by-voice-with-
talon/)

2\. Gordon Gund - Blind later in life, conquered the market by speed
listening. Quote: "Meanwhile his (acquired) blindness seemed to pour gasoline
on the fire of his life, and he began to flourish in unexpected arenas."
[https://vimeo.com/296637627](https://vimeo.com/296637627) (TED-style
inspiring video, speed listening at ~8:45) [https://n-magazine.com/blind-
curing-blind/](https://n-magazine.com/blind-curing-blind/)

3\. CRISPR holds promise, never stop hoping for a cure. It's an amazing time
to be alive, keep building amazing tech for the world, and perhaps even learn
to program the big data tools used to find the solution.
[https://www.cell.com/molecular-therapy-
family/methods/fullte...](https://www.cell.com/molecular-therapy-
family/methods/fulltext/S2329-0501\(19\)30141-X) Unfortunately, can't link
directly, but search for jobs at "Broad Institute of MIT and Harvard" with the
title "Bioinformatics" or "Python" in the query.

------
nh2
Last year I did a course on learning braille, run by two blind friends.

Definitely get a refreshable braille display, and learn it and set up your
usual development workflow while you can still see.

I was amazed by how plug-and-play the braille display of my friend was. I
plugged it via USB into my Ubuntu laptop with brltty and it worked out of the
box: I could read my terminal output on it, and it even did the "blinking
cursor" of where the cursor is on screen without any configuration.

Within 2 days, I learned basic Braille (we simulated learning it fully
blindly, that is with closed eyes), could read things slowly, and also learned
typing Braille with the 6-chord keys present on the refreshable braille
display.

The blind friends that taught me can use both text-to-speech and the braille
display at insane speeds.

They can give free-standing presentations, talking at high speed for an hour
in perfectly sophisticated language while looking at the audience with the
laptop apparently closed, when in fact they are just reading it off the
braille device with a finger! Reading the braille device certainly has the
chance to give you apparently-superhuman abilities. I found that so cool that
I considered getting good at it already just for that purpose.

So, in summary:

1) I think you have very good chances of staying very proficient even if you
go fully blind.

2) Play around with the tool set already now, and fix apparent pain points
ahead of time that are easier to fix while still seeing.

------
KevNeff
Hello!

I am also a coder in the professional world with Ushers. I have Type 2A. I
have found some employers don't answer back if vision loss is mentioned. I try
not to mention in during the interview process, but I made sure to discuss it
before accepting an offer. You will likely have to quit driving at some point
with Ushers. You'll still be able to stay active, but you may decide that you
don't want to wield 2 tons of steel when you could easily miss a cyclist or
jaywalking pedestrian. Driving is something you have to prepare for exception
not the rule. Long term, you will likely have to look in cities with good
public transportation or a walkable commute to work.

Besides learning to manipulate screen readers at a rapid pace. One skill to
practice is reading braille. When I was receiving assistive training at the
Criss Cole Rehabilitation Center, I met MANY instructors who had personal
experience coding without much vision at all. While they themselves chose to
transition to a career helping others of all skill levels improve their access
to computers, they reassured me that I would be able to be productive in a
work environment with the right tools. The reason why I encourage learning
braille is that in place of or paired with a screen reader, you could use a
braille display connected to your computer. This allows you to employ more
rapid mobility parsing a document than you might with a screen reader. I have
not gotten fast enough at reading braille that I have justified the expensive
purchase of a braille display nor has the need arrived currently, however,
that is part of my long term plans for dealing with the situation.

~~~
saagarjha
> I have found some employers don't answer back if vision loss is mentioned.

That sounds illegal.

------
mattwad
I just learned how to make my website accessible to screen readers (using aria
labels, tabindex, etc). You should definitely check it out now to learn how it
works. I only did part of my website and it seems like a full-time job. I'm
not blind, so I am sure I could have done much better if I was more familiar
with tools like Mac's VoiceOver. I am sure there's a market for these skills,
especially in any company that has a decent amount of users. Best of luck!

------
wmij
First off, I'm so sorry to hear that you've been diagnosed with this
condition. I haven't read through any of the replies to your question aside
from a quick read through, so I'm sorry if any of my advice is redundant,
helpful or not.

My immediate advice to you as an engineer is to remember that your most
powerful and valuable tool is your mind. The ability to solve software
engineering problems starts with the cognitive aspects of your knowledge,
intuition, experience and who you are. An engineer's cognitive ability to
solve problems and guide outcomes is the most valuable thing that we bring to
any project we join or undertake.

Look for a team or project that values critical thinking to drive execution
over just banging out code. Don't sweat being hands on in the long run, i.e.
writing code and pushing features. Make the most of the work you're doing now
to start honing your skills to be able to drive things like architecture,
implementation choices, etc. based on experience, lessons learned, people you
enjoy working with etc.

Also, keep in mind that you have a unique albeit unfortunate set of
circumstances that can bring a perspective as you're going through this to
what works and doesn't for others in similar circumstances that want to have
careers in software technology. Be open to an awareness for areas where you
can help solve problems and be involved in building solutions for others in a
similar circumstance as you're in. Look for ways to develop products, tools,
advisory groups, training, etc. that can help engineers with similar
disabilities.

I wish you the best and again, I'm very sorry you're facing this. I hope that
my thoughts help in some way.

------
aknftech
I can't imagine how hard it is to keep positive in this situation and I think
it's great that you're asking these practical questions to help your future
self out. I hope you get some really useful answers from the rest of the
community.

I don't have the answers to those questions but I did want to drop a line of
encouragement and say this; your hard work up until now will not be wasted,
whatever you end up doing. You can — and will — find ways to continue to
stretch and apply your engineering mind, and most likely in ways that you
can't predict right now.

Later on, you will look back and find that nobody would be better placed for
whatever you're doing at that moment than you.

Finally (and I'm not saying this to deter you from continuing down the SE
route, there are plenty of examples online of partially-sighted or blind SEs
doing very well and you're attitude is indicative that you should experience
no different), but everyone of us has so much more to give to this world than
just our skillset, and you don't need a qualification for the things that
truly matter in life.

Keep going and I echo the other commenter, take car of your soul, it's
important.

------
wirthjason
While I don’t have this my grandmother became blind so there could be a
genetic disposition and I’ve wondered (worried?) about what would happen if I
did. I would focus on the things I could manipulate with my mind rather than a
keyboard and monitor. Basically this boils down to the algorithms and
mathematical aspects, they are more about thinking and logic than writing
code.

All too often we get stuck in the tools and not the thing we are trying to do.
I remember a quite about photography (sorry for a story about vision): “I
wanted to become a photographer so I took a class. We learned all sorts of
things shutter speeds, aperture, film types, etc. But of all the things we
learned, we never learned where to point the damned camera!” The computer
science take on this quote is “Computer Science is no more about computers
than astronomy is about telescopes." I try to keep these in mind when I feel
myself drifting towards the tools side of things and come back to what’s
important.

As also noted, there’s never been a better time for accessibility than now.
It’s an opportunity to advance that area and become an expert.

------
Paladiamors
I have a friend that went through this exact thing. He's helped with Facebook
to design better accessibility features at one point. He used to be a
developer and did photography and most inspiringly he still does photography
even while blind which I think is an inspiration.

Spend time now to learn about accessibility features on different systems,
iPhone, android, your PC. Look into how to navigate into them. Look up screen
readers as you may use them to have them read content from the web for you. Be
an advocate for accessibility features and their standardization as this is
often forgotten with developers.

I've posted a link below to a video of my friend, if you'd like to reach out
to him, PM me. It's a definitely challenging time. I've known him since before
and after going blind so he may give some advice from his experience.

Also reach out to other blind communities now to hear perspectives from many
other people if you can.
[https://www.facebook.com/watch/?v=2108067789479904](https://www.facebook.com/watch/?v=2108067789479904)

------
shakkhar
When I interviewed at Google a few years ago, my lunch buddy was a blind
software engineer (sounded like L5). He navigated multiple floors, guided me
to the cafeteria, checked his emails completely on his own. It was impressive
to see him navigate hallways, going through doors and taking stairs up and
down effortlessly. It can definitely be done by anyone with training and
effort. Best of luck!

------
profitor
I don't know if this is helpful to you, but recently I stumbled across this[1]
post by a blind developer. He's touching briefly on his setup of choice and
what tools he chose and why.

[1][https://www.vincit.fi/en/software-development-450-words-
per-...](https://www.vincit.fi/en/software-development-450-words-per-minute/)

I wish you the best of luck.

------
martinbooth
At the company I work for UI accessibility issues are automatic high priority
bugs. You'll be an asset (as a frontend developer) to any company that values
accessibility (and I'm certain that many do).

Contrary to your concerns, I think that being visually impaired and being a
frontend developer will most likely open up opportunities rather than close
them down.

------
EndingCredits
I'm in a similar boat to you as I'm about your age, also have Ushers (type II,
which is what I'm assuming you have), and programming features heavily in my
work (although I'm not in SWE).

I'd interested to chat with you; you can drop me an email at (awwoof)
(hotmail) (com) To be honest, I am not very up to date with assistive
technologies. I think my plan is basically pick stuff up when I find it
useful.

Also, on a lighter note, while it's impossible to tell what the future holds,
in my experience many people retain good central vision into their 50s
(although that might be a self selecting sample). RP is also a key research
area (easy to administer things to the eyes) so it's always possible there
will be a treatment at some point. Obviously you still have to prepare for the
worst, but it's not necessarily an absolute. It's very que sera sera.

------
babaganoosh89
I knew a blind software engineer that was decent, he'd use Eclipse and have
his screen reader speed turned very fast.

------
taigi100
One small detail: when your hearing will get worst you'll probably have to
have a cochlear implant. The newer models have a "neat" trick where you can
connect them to your phone / pc by using bluetooth so they can act like sort
of headphones. Keep your head up and keep walking the path, you can do it!

------
growlist
Good luck man. I'm mildly visually impaired myself and the average person
gives it no consideration whatsoever.

------
cmaury
Hey, I'm a legally blind engineering manager (stargardt's macular
degeneration). The accessibility community was hugely welcoming when I started
to lose my vision at about the same age you are. I'm happy to talk through my
experience and be helpful in anyway I can. chrmaury at gmail.

------
e-_pusher
Sorry to hear this Zach. Best of luck and I hope you will pull through this
stronger.

I would look into positions at Microsoft. Since the current CEO Satya Nadella
took over, there has been a big push to improve the accessibility of Microsoft
products, and I know that there are quite a few blind developers working
there.

------
NitroNills
edbrowse(1) is developed by seeing-impaired person (Karl Dahlke) - it's a
webbrowser with ed(1)-like interface which also does JS. I've heard it's
awesome for scripting! Though it requires som ed(1)ucation.

[http://edbrowse.org/](http://edbrowse.org/)

------
sultanofsaltin
Like some of the other comments, I’d focus on developing skills in web
accessibility and areas that will help you be more productive.

I’m not sure how severe your hearing loss is but if podcasts are your style
check out [https://drunkenux.com/](https://drunkenux.com/). The hosts have
done a lot of episodes speaking from their backgrounds building education
sites, where accessibility in development is required (also it’s funny and who
doesn’t need a little levity).

More than anything, experiment with the suggestions here, different input
methods, track your progress, Etc. For managing the anxiety especially,
dedicating time weekly to work on your system can lead to some of the biggest
rewards and occasionally, key insights.

Carpe Diem and keep us posted as you find the hacks that work for you!

------
dude_bro
One of my managers during an internship in college was blind. I actually had
no idea he was blind until I met him in person; this includes being
interviewed by him remotely and have discussions about code I was writing in
real time. I was completely shocked.

This was at a very large corporation, and he had been blind throughout his
long career there. I believe the primary tools he used were JAWS and a device
that would actually generate braille for text on screen. This was pretty
incredible to me, as he would do most of his reading via this braille device.

I don't think you will be limited to a certain portion of the stack. In some
ways, it may open up certain opportunities like working more on the
Accessbility features for front-ends, which is a critical part of a front-end
but often overlooked.

------
symisc_devel
We do offer a custom version of our OCR reader app for Vision Impaired
persons. The app require minimal interaction with the user. Just a single will
trigger the phone camera, you have to take a picture and the text language is
automatically recognized and played back aloud in your default language and
accent with built-in translation powered by Google.

The OCR is powered by PixLab[1] and is damn good. The application homepage is
[https://i2s.symisc.net](https://i2s.symisc.net). If you are interested in
trying the Vision Impaired version, let me know via chm at symisc dot net.

[1] [https://pixlab.io/cmd?id=docscan](https://pixlab.io/cmd?id=docscan)

------
mattkrisiloff
Doubt my comment will get to you with so many commenters and it's a bit off
topic, but are you familiar with savesightnow.org? They are a patient advocacy
group specifically for Usher's Syndrome working on finding a cure...good
people involved in it.

------
benjamin21
Vincent Le Goff, the author of the excellent "Apprendre à programmer en
Python" (in French) from the french side of OpenClassRooms is blind. There is
a picture of him with the Braille reader and headsets in the book version.
Maybe he would be of some help ? course:
[https://openclassrooms.com/fr/courses/235344-apprenez-a-
prog...](https://openclassrooms.com/fr/courses/235344-apprenez-a-programmer-
en-python) profile:
[https://openclassrooms.com/fr/membres/prolixe-27218](https://openclassrooms.com/fr/membres/prolixe-27218)

------
parham90
Hi there! A colleague of mine referred me to your post. I'd love to have a
call and help with advice and coaching to reduce your anxiety of going blind.
Since I published the post @ssivark mentioned, I got a lot of emails from
developers who were afraid of going blind or who were actually like yourself
and were going blind, so trust me when I say that you are not alone and people
like you have pulled through. Since you value showing up and being
independent, I'm certain you will pull through, too.

Please reach out to me on my website
([https://www.parhamdoustdar.com/](https://www.parhamdoustdar.com/)). I'd love
to help.

------
gtm1260
I'm so sorry to hear that. I'm curious what people's opinions are specifically
around frontend. How can software enable someone who's blind to ensure that a
frontend matches a design? Can we as a community develop new tools for this?

------
pgt2art
[https://clinicaltrials.gov/ct2/results?term=retinitis+pigmen...](https://clinicaltrials.gov/ct2/results?term=retinitis+pigmentosa&Search=Search)

i hope the link can help you trials of new medications

------
AS126
Man, I'm so sorry to read this. You are so young, god damn it. You already
receive great advice in this thread, I can only wish you the best! Please
don't let this bringing you down! Have a wonderful life, no matter the
situation! Cheers.

------
fsckboy
check out TECO as a text editor. It was designed way back in the day when
printing minor text edits to paper (or paper tape!) over and over would waste
a lot of paper, so it trained you to keep a picture of your text in your head
and normal editing was writing little macros in your head to move around and
make changes.

EMACS was originally written in TECO. Don't waste a lot of time reading about
people remembering TECO today, you'll hear too much from all the people who
talk only about LISP's parentheses and not about how perfect the people who
love LISP find it. Better to spend your time seeing if you love TECO.

[https://almy.us/teco.html](https://almy.us/teco.html)

download it here
[https://github.com/blakemcbride/TECOC](https://github.com/blakemcbride/TECOC)

read about it on wikipedia and check out the external links
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/TECO_(text_editor)](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/TECO_\(text_editor\))

the guy who created it in the early 60's is still around
[http://www.opost.com/dlm/#teco](http://www.opost.com/dlm/#teco)

------
crashbunny
I read a blog post a while ago that was quite remarkable. From memory it was
someone going blind (your age) while studying law, and halfway through
couldn't read any more.

Determined to finish his degree he developed the ability to listed to
audiobooks ludicrously fast, way faster than reading, and it opened up a whole
new world to him that was previously hidden.

Chumhumming around today I'm pretty sure the man's name is Isaac Lidsky. He's
done TED talks and been interviewed on podcasts, written blogs posts, etc.

Go check him out and even try and contact him.

Good luck. I reckon you'll be strong enough, prepared enough, and with a
little help from lots of people be able to thrive.

------
Tijdreiziger
This presentation by a blind software engineer at Microsoft has always stuck
with me:
[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=94swlF55tVc](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=94swlF55tVc)

------
atum47
Well, back in 2018 I participated in a event for software engineers undergrads
in Paraná/Brasil, I was glad to see that there ware a blind girl there. At
first I was afraid to approach her with a thousand questions, cause I was
curious, just like you are, to know how is her day to day. I got the chance to
talk to her and she seemed pretty normal. Her computer had a screen reader and
she was having fun at the event. She and I end up taking a mini workshop about
Watson (IBM chatbot). Nice gal, she was doing alright and I'm sure you will be
alright as well. Don't give up.

------
sumguysr
My mother is blind and was a rehab teacher. Learn to use a screen reader now,
while you can still map the words to the visual structure on screen. The
structure applications expose to screen readers is often drastically different
than what we intuit from looking at it.

Learn braille. It's hard, resources are scarce, lots of people don't do it any
more. This is why, with practice you can read braille off a computer braille
display about as fast as sighted people read text. No screen reader can ever
be intelligible that fast. Braille is also a much better way to read code
syntax.

------
JonathanFly
>Are there blind frontend engineers?

I'm sure this has been mentioned, but front ends need to be usable by blind
_users_ so I would imagine a blind front end developer would be extremely
useful in that case, at a minimum.

------
hollander
How about focussing on communication methods for people who are (almost) blind
_and_ deaf, leaving all communication to touch. I don't know if you can make a
living from that, but given your intelligence, your programming and tech
knowledge, your determination, you may have what it takes to make this work.

Thinking about it, this type communication might work in dark and soundless
environments like when you dive in muddy water. Another target group is people
in a coma. Just a suggestion. There are probably more use cases than people
with Usher.

------
dchichkov
Curious, when doing your research on the syndrome, did you encounter following
article in Nature:
[https://www.nature.com/articles/jhg201029](https://www.nature.com/articles/jhg201029)

And did you read majority of articles that cite this article?
[https://scholar.google.com/scholar?hl=en&as_sdt=0%2C5&q=Gene...](https://scholar.google.com/scholar?hl=en&as_sdt=0%2C5&q=Genetics+and+pathological+mechanisms+of+Usher+syndrome&btnG=)

------
tumregels
I think you should consider reading this book

[http://www.buddhanet.net/pdf_file/mahasit1.pdf](http://www.buddhanet.net/pdf_file/mahasit1.pdf)

and/or listen to these talks

[https://www.amaravati.org/series/the-collected-teachings-
of-...](https://www.amaravati.org/series/the-collected-teachings-of-ajahn-
chah/)

or anything from within this realm.

Personally I believe there is cure and way out of suffering only in
meditation. But don't believe me - try it out.

------
tjohns
There are quite a few blind engineers at my company.

Most of the folks I've worked with are either backend engineers or working on
frontend accessibility-related features. (Frontend engineering doesn't just
include design for sighted users!)

While I don't have any experience myself, I'd recommend looking at braille
displays in addition to screen readers:
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Refreshable_braille_display](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Refreshable_braille_display)

------
jart
Might be possible for you to not go deaf / blind if you get Gates' crispr
thing from some greymarket source online for a few hundred bucks and do your
own research. [https://www.usher-syndrome.org/our-story/all-ush-
news.html](https://www.usher-syndrome.org/our-story/all-ush-news.html)

I've heard anecdotal evidence online that traditional health care system does
FDA-approved gene edits for 1%ers costing somewhere in ballpark of ~$800,000.

------
femto113
This site has resources oriented towards learning braille while you still have
sight:

[http://www.dotlessbraille.org/](http://www.dotlessbraille.org/)

------
ackbar03
Top comment has a good positive example but if you want another example of
success, apparently the head of global macro at citadel hedge fund is blind as
well, I don't know if he's still there. There was a story about him from
before when he was working at standard chartered as a fx trader blind. He had
a similar impairment where he was losing his vision and used the time in
between to train himself to work and visualize graphs from data read out to
him or something like that

------
WhyNotHugo
I had a professor in university who was blind.

To this day, I'm amazed at how I could read code to him, and he's spot where
the mistake was.

He coded with a screen reader. AFAIK, accessibility on Linux is pretty poor in
general (I'm a fan of Linux, but I get the impression that's the truth), so
you might want to consider well what you main OS will be.

Frontend might be tough -- but then, you're a perfect candidate to give
feedback on website accessibility. There might be a career there if well-
planned.

------
trm42
Sorry to hear about what's happening to you. Read once about this guy who's
using screen reader to code:

[https://www.vincit.fi/en/software-development-450-words-
per-...](https://www.vincit.fi/en/software-development-450-words-per-minute/)

One of the interesting things here is the mention of web frontend frameworks
which may make the frontend work possible even without seeing the frontend.

Hope you'll get through the life change. Take care.

------
diebeforei485
I have heard anecdotally that Apple in particular does hire a lot of blind
software engineers - in large part to help make its products accessible to the
blind.

~~~
dan-robertson
On the other side of this, I’ve heard that the software Apple makes tends to
be very good from an accessibility standpoint. An advantage of not needing to
look at it is that you can have your phone screen permanently off and get a
massively extended battery life.

~~~
robocat
I wasted a bunch of time attempting to start making a mobile single page app
accessible. Much of that was due to Safari 12 on an iPad, because I had
believed that Apple VoiceOver was good. I found VoiceOver to be incredibly
buggy. With iOS system apps, I was able to see where the voice feature was
totally misleading or just wrong. And trying to use the ARIA markup to get
Safari to voice the UI correctly felt like a dark art, and I gave up after
weeks of effort.

If Apple VoiceOver is the best, god help the blind, because our software is
failing them (and that includes the software I was responsible for).

------
ssivark
On the question of tools:

1\. Emacspeak, a text-to-speech system developed by T.V. Raman (a developer at
Google) who was blind since childhood:
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Emacspeak](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Emacspeak)
&
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/T._V._Raman](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/T._V._Raman)

2\. How a completely blind dev/manager uses Emacs daily (talk at a recent
Emacsconf) --
[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=i8dBvssptP0](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=i8dBvssptP0)
& [https://www.parhamdoustdar.com/2016/04/03/tools-of-blind-
pro...](https://www.parhamdoustdar.com/2016/04/03/tools-of-blind-programmer/)

3\. Google has an app called "Lookout" which they suggest using while wearing
your phone attached to a lanyard around your neck, that uses ML (not fully
perfect) to identify objects in front of you.

To the extent that you stay within some homogeneous environment and avoid
fragmentation in your tools, you might be able to get good text-to-speech.
(The quality of AI solutions will hopefully continue improving drastically
over the next few years)

Also, probably experiment with and invest into one of the software ecosystems
(Google/Apple/Amazon/etc) so they get comfortable with understanding your
voice.

You probably want to avoid the mouse, and get comfortable with a fully
keyboard based workflow. To that end, check out browsers like Qute and Next.

\----

Beyond software and tools, would you want to relocate to some place where
there is dependable public transport (or cab service)? Once you move, it might
take a while to get familiar with the surroundings.

Good luck, and hope you manage to stay ahead of the curve. I'm sure finding
community would help. Try reaching out to some of the people mentioned in this
and other comments -- I'm sure they would love to help.

\----

PS, HN'ers: It would be great to find a few interviews with accessibility-
oriented guidance on "Usesthis". To that end, I've opened a Github issue with
this request. Feel free to comment there and add suggestions of people to
interview, or other recommendations
[https://github.com/waferbaby/usesthis/issues/97](https://github.com/waferbaby/usesthis/issues/97)

------
cdiamand
Sorry to hear that! Not sure if you're familiar with algolia, but you can
search of all of hacker news for blind programming resources:

[https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&que...](https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&query=I%20am%20blind&sort=byPopularity&type=story)

Hope this helps and best of luck!

------
tomohawk
Consider getting a job at a fortune 100 company or with the federal
government, or with a company that does contracting for the federal
government.

------
Marconius
Look into local blind center resources for immediate help in the transition
process. The earlier you start working with the Department of Rehabilitation,
the sooner resources can be made available for training, education, and tech
you'll need moving forwards.

I was an animator and VFX artist and lost my vision suddenly in 2014 in the
span of 30 minutes. I can no longer do that work, but started learning
orientation & mobility white cane training from the Lighthouse for the Blind
in San Francisco and worked with the Dept. of Rehab to figure out life moving
forwards. I received training in how to use a screen reader in iOS, Android,
Mac, and Windows. I learned about accessibility and dove into my background as
a former QA engineer for animation software and my UX/UI experience from VFX
and motion graphics and started learning development on my own time. Figured
out Python using TextEdit and Terminal on my Mac, am in the process of
learning JS, used Xcode to learn Swift, and I tend to code websites by hand,
then share them with someone with sight to check out my CSS.

There are a lot of resources out there to help you adapt, but it will take
baby steps. I highly recommend you learn braille as blind coders tend to use
braille displays to quickly check through lines of code, although I primarily
just use VoiceOver to listen to code line by line at a very fast speed.
Braille will help you type a lot faster on your phone when you find a
collaborative work experience to be inaccessible; we use Slack at work, but
the desktop version is awful in terms of accessibility, so I only use the iOS
app and can quickly and accurately type out very detailed messages using
Apple's braille screen input.

It's all about adaptation and not being afraid to ask for help. Zoom and
Google Meet work great, and Microsoft products have gotten much much better in
terms of accessibility. Google Suite takes a lot of getting used to, but is
doable and functional with enough practice.

If you are on Windows, Jaws and NVDA will be essential to learn, and I've
heard that Visual Basic studio is very accessible. I haven't found Sublime,
atom, or other text editors to be accessible on the Mac, but TextEdit and
Xcode work just fine for all matter of filetypes, and of course emacsspeak and
Vim work in Terminal or iTerm.

Check out the /r/Blind sub reddit, Applevis.com, and know that you'll have
support. It's a huge transition but you'll make it through!

------
irrational
I don’t have any experience, but I had a girlfriend in the late 1980s who’s
dad was a totally-blind programmer. Surely in the past 30+ years technology
has made a lot of strides so that it should be even more doable now than it
was back then. Or in other words, if a guy who had been totally blind from
birth could be a programmer in the 1980s, you can definitely do it in the
2020s.

------
thepratt
I don't have information to share on where to look, but some positions to
consider relate to a11y. I've met and worked with some consultants in the past
that their entire position was dedicated to making websites and apps more
accessible - audits and on-going. He also did training for teams to bring them
up on best-practice so the dev teams can do this proactively.

------
Shebanator
You have my deepest sympathies - it is tough enough going blind, but having to
cope with potential hearing loss as well? The good news is that there are
solutions even in this space -
[https://www.helenkeller.org/hknc](https://www.helenkeller.org/hknc) is a good
resource, as is the National Federation for the Blind.

------
lobo_tuerto
Two years ago this was posted on HN:

Blind since birth, writing code at Amazon since 2013
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16896236](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16896236)

Hope it can be useful, and alleviate a bit the anxiety you are feeling.

------
MattPalmer1086
I met a blind front end web developer a few years ago. I'm afraid I don't have
any details on his setup, but they do exist.

------
daviddever23box
You will survive and thrive in the remote era; that said, make a note of the
areas for which screen readers lack coverage (i.e., BIOS screens, stack traces
and the like) so that you can work around or call out a need for said tools.

Good luck, and do reach out if you need anything; PVL is real and more people
suffer from it than you'd realize at face value.

------
josephkern
You should consider setting up a well known and repeatable folder structure
for your email inbox.

You will need to file everything into a phonetically distinct structure for
efficient navigation through your folder hierarchy. Nested directories in this
case is not a bad idea.

I have seen this type of structure used _very_ efficiently with a screen
reader and Outlook in person.

------
ruckuus
This one quite old article about a blind software engineer at Google, may not
directly help in any way, but thought to share it here
[https://www.businessinsider.com/how-blind-google-engineer-
wr...](https://www.businessinsider.com/how-blind-google-engineer-writes-
code-2015-5?IR=T)

------
collyw
Just a thought, as I am in no way an expert here, but there must be companies
that help implement solutions for people with vision problems. I am sure they
would be the most sympathetic to hiring people in your position, you will have
unique insights that able sighted programmers won't. Maybe get in touch and
see what they recommend.

------
contingencies
Get off the computer and enjoy the sensory world while you can. You will have
adequate time to hone your comprehension of process, formalism and other
manner of abstract erudition thereafter, which will have its own beauty.
Travel is a bitch if you can't see. Get out there now. I can recommend from
first hand experience cycle touring with a tent and sleeping bag as a good way
to see much of the world at a leisurely pace and very cheaply which does not
require you to waste time saving money. Having that geographical reference to
hang subsequently acquired knowledge on is golden. Get out there.
[http://www.artoftravel.net/](http://www.artoftravel.net/)

------
leanuser57
First of all, I wish you luck and strength. I can't really imagine how this
must be for you.

One little pointer: I know that edbrowse is developed by a blind programmer.
It might take some time to adapt to, I guess.

[https://github.com/CMB/edbrowse](https://github.com/CMB/edbrowse)

------
hindsightbias
Working at big-corp, have worked with several differently abled coders who
were amazing. You might look at larger orgs, like Cisco, P&G, IBM etc. Modern
tooling may make it easy for smaller orgs, but big corps have been active in
these types of issues for a long time.

teamblind.com has forums on employers and hiring info.

------
DCRichards
I recommend watching (and listening to) this talk by Saqib Shaikh, a blind
developer using Visual Studio and how we codes and debugs with his screen
reader
[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=94swlF55tVc](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=94swlF55tVc)

------
jll29
SAP had or has a blind developer at their Walldorf, Germany headquarters. As
of 2000, he was using a Braille line.

Perhaps back-end work is easier without vision, in particular databases.

I hope you get to travel a bit whilst you can still see - catch some beautiful
memories (nature) while you can... that's what I would do. All the best!

~~~
zachrip
I spent last summer working remotely traveling a lot of Western Europe mostly
by myself and it changed my life. I'd never left the country before and here I
was dropped off in Oslo at 1am by myself. Now I have so many memories and I
take time most days to look at the pictures I took to try and build stronger
mental imagery that I can remember. I wish everyone had the opportunity to do
so.

------
katar
If you haven't already looked into it, your state probably has some kind of
"services for the blind". I have RP and was able to get help from them.
Definitely look to see if your state has a govt dept like that. They offer
tools and training to those in need to get jobs or keep working.

------
godzillabrennus
If you are in the USA then I think the best profession for the blind is the
legal trade. Do you have it in you to change careers?

Courts in the USA are by and large accommodating thanks to the ADA.

Your technical background, with the loss of vision, with a legal degree, and I
think you’d have a very long, lucrative, and fulfilling career.

------
spir
[http://www.alteraeon.com/](http://www.alteraeon.com/) may be of interest.

Alter Aeon is a text-based online roleplaying game (a MUD). I believe that
over half of their players are vision-impaired. Perhaps they could be a source
of information as well as community.

------
adrianbye
I'd suggest making the focus being what you need in order to support yourself
as a blind person, not being a software engineer.

There may be particular things blind people excel at and do very well with.
Use a list of those things as your starting point.

Perhaps software engineering is on that list, but I'd make sure.

------
hliyan
So sorry to hear this! I have no expert advice to offer, but have you thought
about developing a very high level of expertise in some area (preferably in
some areas of back end architecture) which allows you to consult without
having to write code (unless that is what you truly want to do).

Best of luck!

------
marcg
Look up Dr. Chieko Asakawa, who is a distinguished researcher and technologist
at IBM for accessibility concerns. Having lost her sight at a young age, she
understands this space. I had the pleasure to work with her and her team,
years ago, and found them to be incredibly sharp.

------
ChrisRR
I'm reminded of this short video of a blind software developer using Visual
Studio. Maybe it'll give you some idea
[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=94swlF55tVc](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=94swlF55tVc)

------
skocznymroczny
At my university computer science course, there was a student who had sight
issues. He was actually one of the better students. Most of the time he was
writing the code with high-contrast theme enabled and extreme zoom, like see
only few words at a time kind of zoom.

------
mmaret
They are not "production ready", but you may, one day, benefit from retinal
implant. One of the most advanced seems to be from [https://www.pixium-
vision.com/](https://www.pixium-vision.com/)

Good luck !

------
mmaret
They are not "production ready", but you may, one day, benefit from retinal
implant. One of the most advanced seemd to be from [https://www.pixium-
vision.com/](https://www.pixium-vision.com/)

Good luck !

------
DoreenMichele
You can also join blind dev works.

[https://groups.google.com/forum/?nomobile=true#!forum/blind-...](https://groups.google.com/forum/?nomobile=true#!forum/blind-
dev-works)

------
gobins
In a similar situation though as not as bad as what you have and have thought
I should prepare for the worst. I have CSR(Central Serous Retinopathy) for the
last 3 years. It come and goes but my eyesight gets worse every time it comes
back. Stay strong.

------
sheinsheish
Start learning a musical instrument. This will give you something for the soul
and heart to look forward to. Especially because developing is exclusively a
mind activity and also because playing music activates and connects both sides
of the brain.

------
dcreemer
I have an (adult) child with Usher Syndrome, and have lots of connections and
resources that I'd be happy to share. There is a a decent amount of research
going on right now. If you like, feel free to reach me at my username at
gmail.

------
fludlight
Look into becoming an ADA consultant for web/mobile. It's a growing market
that companies are forced to pay attention to due to lawsuits. There is
recurring work every time they redesign parts of the front end, which is
often.

------
rergaerg
Thanks for this question and for everyones answers. I am a software engineer,
and have a friend, female, aged 30 from a different department at work who is
going blind and afraid to research anything. I think this will help a lot.

------
KuhlMensch
I am not blind, but as a frontend engineer, I have noticed when myself or my
colleges do frontend state, we will use TDD/Component testing using enzyme or
react-testing library for days, and only do the final test visually.

------
aivarannamaa
It could be good idea to learn about accessibility API-s (MSAA, UI Automation,
Accessible 2, ATK), in case you want to contribute to improving the
screenreaders and/or create new accessibility tools, now or in the future.

------
ubrpwnzr
I agree with those that reference the govt policies that all orgs are suppose
to follow. This could really turn into your career. I went to school with a
blind network engineer and he was top of the class. Stay strong brother.

------
Elof
I'm not loosing my vision, but I'm dyslexic. I listen to almost all content,
but just assumed I couldn't do that with code. This is inspiring me to try.

Thank you OP for asking and thank all of you helpful HN folks for sharing.

------
kikoreis
I have worked closely with Nicolas Pitre, a kernel engineer who is blind and
is one of the most amazing people I've worked with. I'm happy to put you in
touch with him if you like -- my email is in my profile.

------
yadco
Maybe focus more on software design / general architecture. Or teaching
programming concepts. Or some other job that you would be using your knowledge
while not having to stare at code for hours on a screen.

------
hopia
[https://www.vincit.fi/en/software-development-450-words-
per-...](https://www.vincit.fi/en/software-development-450-words-per-minute/)

------
qu4ku
I strongly recommend you to consider cybersecurity. I believe that you not
only will have a chance to compete with typicals but you will have an edge.

The shell is a pretty awesome place to be in if you asked me.

~~~
saagarjha
I'm not sure what being blind has to do with cybersecurity?

------
blue_devil
Perhaps off-topic: if you have not read "The mind's eye" by Oliver Sacks, you
may find it helpful, emotionally. Keeping an (audio) journal might help also
to cope with anxiety.

------
CPLX
Only tangentially related to your question perhaps, but it's good time to
become a musician, and to learn all the various software and digital elements
involved in making modern music.

------
brozaman
> \- Are there blind frontend engineers?

I know one frontend dev who is entirely blind from birth. He specializes on
making websites accessible for blind people, and he's got a good reputation.

------
straffs
My father was in a similar situation in his 30's. He went back to school and
became a physical therapist. Today he says it is one of the best choices he
made in his life.

------
kuon
I have no real advice. But I want to wish you good luck. And let you know that
at my modest level, I will always advocate for good accessibility in software
and hardware.

------
DekelS
Hi,

I was wondering if you might have a LinkedIn profile so I can review your
experience and skills. Maybe in the near future, we can use someone with your
abilities in our company.

------
DekelS
Hi,

Do you have a LinkedIn page by any chance? I would like to review your resume
and skills.

We will need some additional force in our company in the near future, and you
might fit =)

------
imprettycool
If I were in your position, I'd probably get a job at someplace like Facebook
or Google. They're huge, cushy companies and probably have resources for SWEs
that go blind. Who knows maybe you can go on disability while you're working
there, and never have to work again in your life

BTW, I don't know if asking the internet for advice on this subject is a good
idea. I imagine it's gonna be mostly speculation. I'd seek out other people
that have firsthand experience (i.e. they went blind) and ask what they did
and how they're doing...

------
nerdinja
I once played World of Warcraft: Classic with a blind man I met on Twitch, if
he can do that, you can sure as hell write good lookin' code.

------
stevev
Not sure if anyone has mentioned plover. A few years ago a dev was able to use
it audio wise to code. Programming by sounds. openstenoproject

------
begeekandchic
I think you might find this interesting -
[https://serenade.ai/](https://serenade.ai/)

------
thulecitizen
It is so incredibly heartwarming to me to see this thread stay as one of the
top submissions/threads as long as it has.

Thank you HN community.

------
blzaugg
Would you be willing to chat privately with a colleague of mine going through
a similar lost of sight transition?

------
NitroNills
edbrowse(1) is developed by seeing-impaired person - it's a webbrowser with
ed(1)-like interface which also does JS. I've heard it's awesome for
scripting! Though it requires som ed(1)ucation.

------
mannanj
I know I'm not helping you with your original question but I hope this can be
well received anyway. Have you looked into or tried extreme diet interventions
in the way of recovery? Red light or other type of light therapy?

------
Techasura
This will help you mate:
[https://youtu.be/cmpu58yv8-g](https://youtu.be/cmpu58yv8-g)

------
g_langenderfer
[https://www.youtube.com/results?search_query=blind+software+...](https://www.youtube.com/results?search_query=blind+software+engineer)

------
lholden
> I'm a 24 y/o full stack engineer( I know some of you are rolling your eyes
> right now

It can be tough some times being a younger person in the industry, but know
that there is no reason anyone here should be rolling their eyes at this. I
was working full time in software development at 17 myself.

> What kinds of software engineering lend themselves to someone with limited
> vision? Backend only?

There is a growing market for front end web accessibility. Especially for
software that meets the needs of both sighted and non-sighted individuals. Not
only do I think there is a place for non-sighted individuals in front end
software development if that's something you are interested in, but I think
it's vital to have these individuals having a role in developing front end
software.

> Does your company employ blind engineers? How well does it work? What kind
> of engineer are they?

We do not currently employ any blind engineers, though we would be very happy
to hire one. We have customers that require visual accessibility compliance
and right now this compliance is largely being implemented by sighted people.
I would consider this a non ideal situation.

With this said, I also don't want it to be felt like you _have_ to specialize
in your own disability either. I have known some really badass back end
engineers that are entirely blind. With the right tools and some experience,
they are able to consume content at the same speed as any sighted person.
Hell, in some cases... significantly faster.

> I'm really trying to get ahead of this thing

I think this speaks for your character. It's easy to get caught up in denial
and to hold out until the very last moment.

I can't personally speak to how it feels to deal with going blind, so I'll let
those with much more experience in this area speak to that. One thing I can
say though, is to start using the available tools _now_ and full time, even if
you don't require them yet. By the time you find yourself depending on them,
you will already be accustomed to using them.

I'd be happy to speak about my own personal struggles with disability (I am
rapidly becoming deaf), but honestly... I'll spare you that unless you
actually want me to. It's obviously a very different experience and I don't
want it to feel like I am diminishing the significance of what you are going
through. :)

> Since my diagnosis I've slowly developed a crippling anxiety centered around
> a feeling that I need to figure out the rest of my life before it's too
> late.

This is a very reasonable and understandable reaction to what you are dealing
with.

------
emgee_1
Definitely checkout emacspeak.

------
emgee_1
Definitely checkout Emacspeak.

------
Fr0styMatt88
I've been very low-vision since birth and having glaucoma (since birth) meant
that I lived with the very real possibility of going blind. I knew this from
the time I was a child and preparations were made. Thankfully my glaucoma has
been under control for many years at this point, though I'm still extremely
low-vision. So what follows is just some random points, as I don't really know
how to keep this post reasonably short, nor what should go in what order. So
hopefully this doesn't devolve into rambling :) Anyway, some observations and
lessons:

\- Others have mentioned touch typing. I was taught touch typing from an early
age with the help of an educational support teacher. I can say that it's one
of the most valuable skills I have and I'm really, really thankful to the
special teachers that put in the effort with me over those years.

\- I naturally gravitated to computers. I don't know what it was, but after
seeing them in school, I had to have one! I never got into blind sports as a
kid and couldn't play most regular sports at school, so my parents saw the
opportunity of computers as something I could get into. Something else I'm
_really really_ grateful for (I've been incredibly, _incredibly_ lucky). The
rest is history.

\- I'll stress again - if you love software engineering and computers, there
is no reason at all that it can't be your profession.

\- Tech-wise, I use a magnifier on my Android phone and I use the magnifier on
OSX. On Windows, it's easier to sit close to the screen. If you're at the
stage where you need screen magnification, I can say that I've found the OSX
built-in magnifier along with the trackpad a stellar combination.

\- I find it difficult to locate the mouse pointer, so I use an extension
called Saka Keys in my browser, which allows me to follow links on pages
without having to use the mouse. I primarily use the command line for things
if I can, especially if I might be on another machine that I can't get as
close to as I need (eg- helping a friend quickly). You get to a point with
touch-typing where you can feel when you've made a typing mistake. You also
get really good at memorizing stuff, as others have said.

\- At work, don't be afraid to speak up about what you need. This is tough.
For many years I was embarrassed about needing help. It's illogical, I know,
but it happens. You want to be independent and prove that you can be 'just as
capable' as everyone else. That's a double-edged sword though. People WILL
forget you are vision-impaired. I had a friend that I've known for years ask
me why I sit so close to the webcam a few days ago when we were video
chatting. My webcam is on top of my monitor.

\- Believe it or not, people WILL forget you are vision impaired or even
blind. I have plenty of experience with the former. If you're fiercely
independent, people won't think to offer you help. You need to get comfortable
with asking for help when you need it. It's a long, long process and something
I'm still not 100% on myself; it's difficult.

\- A case in point: At work, for the longest time if somebody wanted to show
me code or talk me through code, I'd feel too self-conscious and awkward to
say anything as we sat there and they started talking through their code. You
get really good at memorizing stuff and going off what they say along with the
broad 'shape' of the code. It would only be when I needed something specific,
like they were pointing to a value or something, where I would lean in and say
"what was that value again?". Nowadays I'm much more comfortable in my own
skin and I simply ask them to either enable the magnifier on their machine,
show me code through a remote desktop connection or I go to my machine and I
have them talk through the code while I'm sitting as close to the screen as I
need to.

\- On a more philosophical note about other people; you're going to come
across some strange, but well-intentioned behaviour. I've had new co-workers
ask me why I sit so close to the screen; people assume if you're wearing
glasses that your vision must be fine. You'll get really annoyed at the
"sitting close to screens ruins your eyes" crowd; yes, I've been told (with
good intentions) that sitting so close might damage my eyes.

\- The way I think of this is that people are generally good and I'm happy to
answer questions from anyone, as long as they're made in good faith. Often I
think that people are just uncomfortable with talking about disability. Being
a kind of a taboo, they think it's better to 'not say anything', or they're
afraid of being rude. I'd rather people ask and I've also become a lot better
at being forthcoming about what I need.

\- I'm still learning not to shy away from being a 'vision impaired' person.
There are some YouTubers that I recommend which I find really inspiring and
helpful in this regard:

\- The Blind Life is a YouTuber (who if I recall correctly has RP) who focuses
on assistive technology and gadgets.

\- Molly Burke does some great stuff. She is also blind, RP I think.

\- For disability more generally, I cannot recommend 'Special Books By Special
Kids' highly enough. It will literally change the way that you react to
people. It is utterly incredible.

I know it's very different when you haven't grown up with a disability and
suddenly you have to deal with it vs it being "the way it's always been", but
I hope some of this might help and I wish you all the best.

------
mahdid000
you can work as a conciliar and give some advice to companies.

------
mhkool
Search for Dr den Boer on YouTube. In one of his videos he says: I am no
ofthalmologist and a patient that was loosing sight came in and TL;DR his
sight came back after 6 months of treatment. Of course I cannot make promises
but with loosing sight I would certainly visit him.

------
takecarefnd
I suggest you to learn meditation. It can help to relief your stress.

~~~
takecarefnd
Calming the Mind: The Practice of Awareness Meditation

[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dG5ywz8OGqo](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dG5ywz8OGqo)

------
diogopmelo
I am blind and I have been working as a software engineer for almost 3 years.
My formation was as an economist with a Master in management, but I went into
a 10 month reconversion course to IT, focused on java programming. I am
working at a Portuguese international company called Critical Software (I am
Portuguese), and it is really inclusive and I feel great. When I was looking
for a job in economics./management I felt that no-one wanted to employ me
because of my blindness, it was a little depressing, but in IT what matters is
your brain, so, usually, there is no discrimination. Sometimes some creativity
is needed to overcome some visual challenges, some inaccessible documents or
less navigable websites, but with a good team spirit and no problems in
assuming when you need help, everything is doable. My experience is fully as a
backend developer, but I had an internal workshop on React and I could make
things happen in frontend during that afternoon. I am a Mac user (using
VoiceOver) and I've used Windows with Jaws and NVDA before 2013. Now I am
starting a new challenge at work, because we have to use Linux to run the test
environment and, after having a very inaccessible experience with Mint in the
last days, I will now install Ubuntu and try to completely figure it out with
Orca, its screen reader. I am also doing a Master degree in Software
Engineering since September, I've encountered some challenges, but where
others visualize, I tend to create mental representations and, sometimes, I
have a broader mental picture of things than my colleagues. I also agree with
the user about the super-powers, I am realizing that my reading speed is
priceless when there are things to learn at work or to study.

Regarding life itself... you can prepare in advance, I knew that I would
become blind since I was 8 (I am 29), I still see a tiny bit, irrelevant to
work or study but useful to figure light and some walls. I started to try to
get around my room at night with no lights and I developed some confidence in
myself during my teens. I also learned how to walk with the cane before I
thought I needed it, it gives you extra security to know that you are prepared
for the inevitable. And walking independently on your own is a requirement to
have a guide dog.

I am an independent blind person now and, besides driving, I do everything I
want. I play guitar, drums, go to the gym, hear the books I want with my
screen reader and I've lived alone and cooked on my own for one year and I
still have all my fingers. I know blind people that watch Netflix with audio
descriptions, others that run marathons, play futsal...

My biggest challenge was when I wanted to change to software development and
my first trial was a failure, and I lost hope of doing it. Since you have that
part already, my suggestion is to be calm, believe that, like others, you are
capable of overcoming the challenge and try to be yourself and believe in your
problem solving capabilities, because in the en that is what life and
blindness is about. And trying to prepare in advance and believing it is
possible is a decisive first step, believe me!

Try to familiarize yourself with screen readers - NVDA on windows, Voiceover
on all Apple things, Orca on Linux, talkback on Android. Know how to turn
yours on and off and try to get familiarized with hearing things. There are
other tools but I am not an expert on neither: braille displays, tactile
printings, haptics also.

Also, try to have some mobility lessons (I don't know if it is the right
English term), it is important to learn to feel and hear instead of seeing and
to "activate" the capabilities you already have but never needed.

Sorry for the essay, but I wanted to assure you that you can live your own
life and be independent despite being blind. If you need anything,
diogopmelo@gmail.com

------
attrutt
Learn to C

------
O_H_E
Someone on lobste.rs posted a few days ago that they are doing an month-long
experiment programming with their voice. Maybe get in contact with them.

[https://lobste.rs/s/qi5dmk/how_does_your_current_dev_workflo...](https://lobste.rs/s/qi5dmk/how_does_your_current_dev_workflow_looks#c_qgak0s)

------
peter_d_sherman
Hi! My name is Peter Sherman. I have been a software engineer for 20+ years. I
have also engaged in regular meditation for 20+ years. I would suggest that
what you're going to experience in the future may turn out to be a blessing,
rather than a curse, as daunting as the idea of future blindness seems.

Now, before I am tarred and feathered alive by pretty much everyone here in
the HN community, please give me a moment to explain!

You see, most people spend their lives, their entire lives, searching for
something which is outside of themselves, something which they believe will
make them happy.

If they find it, it very well might, but unfortunately, it's only for
relatively short periods of time, and then desire kicks in, and then there's a
new set of goals, a new set of priorities. Nothing lasts forever. Nothing that
grants happiness, even for many years -- will continue to do that for many
more. Everything changes. (This is Buddhist philosophy incidentally).

What you're searching for, might very well be within -- rather than in the
external world.

So how do you find this thing within?

Well, the first step is that you have to close down the external world.

You do this by closing your eyes (note that this is no different than
blindness -- but it is less permanent), and relaxing, observing the mind and
its flow of images.

If you see nothing but black... don't worry, I promise you, there's a ton of
stuff in there -- more than you could ever imagine, more than 80 Zillion
Internets' worth of data.

You'll see black for a fairly long time, maybe it will be months, maybe it
will even be years, but eventually (with continued regular meditation) is that
you'll start to see pinpricks of light, bits of sound, and you'll start to get
intuitions and ideas from the higher mind, and you might see flashes of
images. You might also drift off into lucid or semi-lucid dreams.

The trick is, don't try to use any force whatsoever to try do any of that, or
those things will disappear. The harder you try, the less success you'll have
(it's paradoxic in this respect), so a relaxed gentle focus is the key.

Becoming blind, at least the knowledge that that's going to happen to you --
could be compared to knowing that one day in the future you're going to be
pushed into the ocean -- and you don't know how to swim.

Meditation, closing the eyes for at least 20 minutes a day, at a regular time
every day, and relaxing, letting go, but maintaining a teensy bit of relaxed,
gentle focus, gentle presence ("be here, now"), is not unlike learning to
swim.

By the time you are pushed into the ocean... you want to be a champion
swimmer, not someone who doesn't know how to swim.

Meditation then, is like learning how to swim, if the knowledge of future
blindness is like being forced into an ocean...

Anyway, if you'd like, we can talk more about this. Shoot me an email at
peter.d.sherman@gmail.com, and let's chat!

Oh, and here's a great song, by the way:

Billy Joel - In The Middle Of The Night (The River of Dreams)
[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=A9HFYNITCSs](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=A9HFYNITCSs)

OK, NOW the HN Community -- can tar (-xvf) and feather me! :-)

------
paypalcust83
Accessibility engineering perhaps.

I'm fairly certain I'm going to get ARMD because of genetics and family
history, and won't have anyone to care for me. It's going to suck.

As my late grandfather said: _Getting old isn 't for wimps, but the
alternative is worse._

------
fctorial
You should try out a lisp. They have the simplest syntax and the code is quite
concise.

> This code turned out to be a lot more complicated than I anticipated. The
> patch ended up adding a hundred lines of Arc. A hundred lines of Arc! Do you
> have any idea how many lines of Arc that is? I just looked through the
> history and the last commit that added that many lines of code was over two
> years ago when we got Arc to compile to JS. [1]

Clojure is quite well documented, and you can do full stack development with
it (clojurescript). Intellij has good support for it, and it stores the state
of code as an ast. I think there are addons for dealing with ast
(search/replace) as well.

Also, you might want to "settle down" wrt your dev setup (tech, tools), since
jumping from project to project, tool to tool won't be that easy. Maybe pick a
self contained environment you can learn inside out (smalltalk, tools.deps).

Emacs seems to check all these points, but it's still visual oriented. Maybe
build one yourself.

[1]
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22767204](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22767204)

~~~
dan-robertson
Counting parents without being able to see indentation sounds like hell but
surely there are alternative solutions.

~~~
dan-robertson
Ugh I typod “counting parens”

