
Blind since birth, writing code at Amazon since 2013 - dominotw
https://blog.aboutamazon.com/working-at-amazon/blind-since-birth-writing-code-at-amazon-since-2013
======
jareds
Articles like this make me worried about my future as a blind programmer. I
enjoy back-end database and web services development, not accessibility work.
A lot of the I'm a blind programmer articles I've scene appear to be blind
developers who work on accessibility. I hope they work on accessibility do to
interest not because everyone assumes if you a blind programmer accessibility
must be the type of work you want to do.

~~~
ars
People naturally assume you would be interested in accessibility work, but I
suspect if you simply say that's not what you are interested in, _and_
demonstrate normal levels of ability in other work you'll be fine.

What could happen though, is if your ability is not in line with other
programmers. For accessibility work people will hire you anyway (since you
have unique experience), but for other work you'll have a hard(er) time.

And since there is an implied assumption that a blind programmer will be less
productive, you are probably right about being pushed toward accessibility
work.

The solution is of course obvious (and typical for any kind of disability):
Show that your productivity is in line with others. People aren't malicious
usually, just unaware.

~~~
sdrothrock
> People naturally assume you would be interested in accessibility work

This is the problem. It's like going to a black person and saying "oh man, I
assume you must like fried chicken!"

> Show that your productivity is in line with others.

This also doesn't compute -- I can't think of a link between "you must be
interested in accessibility work" and "we'd like you to work on that because
your productivity is probably low."

I've faced both of these problems as a mostly deaf developer -- people always
assume I want to work on hearing-related things.

~~~
ars
> I can't think of a link between

I explained that. It's not a link between low productivity and interest.

It's a link between low productivity, and willingness to hire only for
specialized work. (i.e. if not for the specialization they would not hire at
all, since productivity is low.)

The fix is to show there is no low productivity.

I don't think you actually read what I wrote.

~~~
sdrothrock
I'm not trying to directly argue with you, so I may have missed the details of
your post. I apologize for that.

Some of the points you make made me want to speak about the general perception
and assumption that a disabled person:

1\. Must have an interest/insight into accessibility work

2\. Must have a lower productivity due to the disability

You even address the latter with:

> And since there is an implied assumption that a blind programmer will be
> less productive

and that "implied assumption" is what I want to talk about.

To me, that assumption is very close to racial stereotypes -- assumptions
about someone based on their appearance. To keep it in the "disability"
sphere, it would be like assuming Stephen Hawking (a clear outlier) is a
complete vegetable and unproductive due to his disability. While his
disability no doubt makes him less productive at specific tasks impacted by
it, his overall productivity is made up for in other ways.

Many people want to put the onus on the disabled person to demonstrate that
they're "normal" or "normally productive" in order to bust themselves out of a
niche (accessibility work, a special team of "disabled people," a special
reading level, etc.) rather than simply assuming that they are "normal" and
waiting for a demonstration otherwise, as they would would with any other
person.

To me, it's too close to saying "well, we'll see if this black guy is normally
productive -- if he's not, we'll put him in the 'urban brainstorming
division.'"

I'm speaking about this in an attempt to get a broader discussion on the idea
as someone who's been pigeonholed exactly these ways in the past.

------
kahlonel
As a guy who writes code for a living, one of my biggest fears is losing
eyesight. Looking at this guy, I fear a little less now :) There is definitely
a need for the tech to evolve for blind programmers.

~~~
ThrustVectoring
Get disability insurance.

~~~
themodelplumber
For real, insurance is an afterthought to many but you are looking at a little
money spent for peace of mind.

~~~
bastijn
While true this deserves a comment that money may be only second and not the
first reason for those fears. Losing the ability to do something you love
might be the reason for the comment. The article comforts by showing that
being blind does not mean coding ends. You can still be a first class citizen.
Though to spoil it a bit, being blind from birth vs. at later age might be
different. At least you need a huge period to adapt I guess, which is where
the insurance comes in again. Full circle!

------
orliesaurus
What an inspiring story, shows that true passion overcomes every barrier.

And yet, sadly, I have to add this to this beautiful story: is it just me or
does this feel like Amazon marketing at its finest?

~~~
lobotryas
Of course it's amazon PR. They are trying to rehabilitate their less than
flattering image as both an engineering shop and how they treat their
warehouse employees (the latter: terribly, like something out of a Dickensian
novel).

~~~
mlevental
of course it's Amazon or: it's on their site

~~~
themodelplumber
It's on this site, too ;-)

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melling
I have a few links on blind programming.

[https://github.com/melling/ErgonomicNotes/blob/master/blind_...](https://github.com/melling/ErgonomicNotes/blob/master/blind_programming.org)

And a lot more on programming by voice:

[https://github.com/melling/ErgonomicNotes/blob/master/progra...](https://github.com/melling/ErgonomicNotes/blob/master/programming_by_voice.org)

The section on Silvius seems to be a more recent project.

~~~
lgregg
I found this video, it's pretty insightful.
[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iWXebEeGwn0&feature=youtu.be](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iWXebEeGwn0&feature=youtu.be)

Thanks for sharing.

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ssalazars
I know this guy, he lives, or used to live in the same apartment complex as I
did, and I would see him almost every day at the bus stop. He is a real
warrior. Whenever the Front seats were busy he will encourage people to stay
seated and he would find an empty seat.

It's very nice to see Amazon wrote the article about him!

------
baruchthescribe
I did a large project with a blind programmer many years ago. He was the
sysadmin of a server I had in the Bahamas. When on the phone with him, I could
always hear the speech software gabbling out directory listings and stuff. He
was really good too - always been very inspiring to me.

------
rectang
Hi-speed screen readers seem to unlock the potential of talented visually-
impaired programmers. Forzano and others train up to shockingly fast rates.
The plasticity of the human brain has so many uses!

~~~
VectorLock
How does that work anyways? Do the screen readers just speak ultra-fast? Do
they say things like "parenthesis" or "right bracket?" Is there some kind of
audio coding of whats on the screen?

~~~
thedirt0115
Yes, they speak ultra fast and literally say the punctuation verbatim. See
[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iWXebEeGwn0&vl=en](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iWXebEeGwn0&vl=en)
for an example ("How a Blind Developer uses Visual Studio"). You can hear it
saying "right brace", etc.

edit: typo and clarify what I'm linking to.

~~~
uglycoyote
After watching this I can kind of understand how a blind person would write
new code. But I find so much of working on a team with a large codebase is
about hunting through mass quantities of code without really knowing what you
are looking for, which always seemed like a very visual process to me.
Sometimes I find myself scrolling through a 2000 line file looking for a
particular shape of the code that I would not even be able to articulate but
know it when I see it. I'd be really curious to know how a blind person
navigates a large, unfamiliar codebase.

------
Bahamut
I always love reading stories like this - even with such a disability, he has
been able to accomplish a feat that is relatively difficult to accomplish for
most devs. I have heard my own company has blind developers as well, and
accessibility is a first rate concern for us.

I do wish more companies invested in being accessibility friendly - not doing
so automatically shuts a portion of population away from the product(s) by
default.

------
burritofanatic
Here is another video about Michael Forzano from SUNY Binghamton, where he
attended to study computer science:

[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MWF8SDFju4M](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MWF8SDFju4M)

------
daenz
Sometimes I imagine how I would cope with writing software if I lost my
eyesight, and I don't have an answer so far. The fact that this man is able to
overcome that kind of obstacle and work in software is extremely inspiring.

------
egocentric
For anyone interested:

How Blind People Type and Dial Numbers on a Touchscreen:
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16897415](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16897415)

------
chroem-
As someone with vision loss, this is a wonderful feel-good story, but I think
the reason why Amazon PR picked it up in the first place is because it's a
surprising exception that proves the rule. I've interviewed with quite a few
tech companies, some in SV, and was turned down for a combination of "culture
fit" and the gaps on my resume caused by my vision loss. I think the fact that
everyone, even Amazon, is so amazed that they hired a blind programmer is
indicative of a real problem here.

------
chongli
Question for anyone who knows:

How do they accommodate blind students for university math exams? Calculus in
particular seems like it would be crazy hard to do without a pencil.

~~~
blindgeek
When I was studying math, a lot of times, I got to take tests at home. Prof
would email me a copy of the test in LaTeX (they used it anyway), and I'd mail
my answers back in LaTeX or PDF. Worked well for us. I'd just slip out the
door on test days, walk the three blocks to my apartment, type up my answers,
and mail them back.

In one case, one of my profs actually wrote his own textbook. It was for an
intro to theorem proving / symbolic logic class. He also used LaTeX. While
everyone else got a printout of the course text, I got a copy of the source
code that I could read with a screenreader.

------
davidu
Great story. The curious part of me would love to see a video of how he codes
and how fast / accurate / contextual the screen-reading software is. Yes, I
see the irony in wanting to see a video of that. Still, want to see what the
experience is like for him, at least to the degree I could understand.

~~~
Barrin92
[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iWXebEeGwn0](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iWXebEeGwn0)

Here's a video of another blind dev. What I find fascinating in both cases is
the speed at which they use voice assistance. I can barely make anything out.

~~~
davidu
Wow. This is amazing. Makes me want to make my software way more accessible to
users.

------
alkonaut
I literally can't shut off my machine with my eyes closed. And the screen
reader is even worse, I can't even shut that off with my eyes open when I
accidentally enable it.

------
Who828
This reminded me of RubyConf India talk I attended back in 2013 titled
“Turning blind eye to rails development by Siddhant Chothe”, that was also
quite inspiring.

It made me realize, how rarely we think about accessibility when developing
software.

Here is the link to the talk,
[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WqL89VcYd6g](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WqL89VcYd6g)

------
harshulpandav
Curious about his mental map for code/software. Often times when I 'visualize'
mapping between modules in a software, I observe a latency in visualization
because in my mind I navigate through squares or blocks, literally. Obviously
he does it differently, and faster. He has an unique ability which probably
most of us don't.

------
VectorLock
I wonder what his development environment looks like. How does the audio
reader work when reading code? What language does he work in? I'd be
fascinated to get some insight into how he mentally models the code. I can get
a lot of information just looking at the way a bloc k of code is structured.

~~~
maxmaxmax2
There is a video that shows how is environment looks like and what his screen-
reader sounds like. It reads very fast. To the untrained ear it is
unintelligible.

------
latchkey
[https://www.channelnewsasia.com/news/cnainsider/giang-the-
ad...](https://www.channelnewsasia.com/news/cnainsider/giang-the-adventurer-
grab-s-first-blind-coder-makes-the-world-9312236)

------
cryptozeus
That screen reader speed is insane !

~~~
cup-of-tea
Yeah, the difference in human ability between trained and untrained is always
amazing. What's funny is I'm sure this blind man is more efficient than people
who use mouse-driven software to work. When you use keyboard-driven software
like emacs or vim it gives you the ability to develop similar speed.

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hi41
This story is very inspiring. How is he able to do his work without looking at
block diagrams, complicated entity relationship diagrams, writing on paper to
clarify among other things which I as a sighted person normally do?

~~~
coldtea
I thought you were being sarcastic, but apparently not.

Well, programmers have been doing their job for half a century without BS
Entity-Relationship-Diagrams, UML and the like.

~~~
hi41
No, I was not sarcastic at all. I admire the programmer. I was just trying to
understand something which was far outside my own experiences. I couldn't
fathom how he was able to a successful programmer without the tools most of us
use during the normal course of the day.

~~~
coldtea
Sure, but that's perhaps true for more essential tools: seeing the code, the
debugger window, the output, going through logs, etc.

The ability to see diagrams would be quite low in utility.

------
ybrah
Used to work with a blind programmer at my old job. He was an interesting
fellow

------
fouc
I think it would be _very_ interesting to spend some time doing my development
from audio only.

Any idea on the easiest way to get going? My environment is osx, iTerm, vim,
and safari mainly.

~~~
kolanos
1\. To turn on VoiceOver: CMD+F5

2\. To turn on screen curtain: Right Option+C

3\. For VoiceOver help: Ctrl+Option+H

4\. For keyboard help: Ctrl+Option+K

Ctrl+Option is your VoiceOver key combo as well. Good luck.

------
misiti3780
damn that is incredible! i had a hard time understanding the function names
they were being spoken so fast, i wonder if his ears have adjusted and tuned
to that speed?

------
bob_theslob646
That was an amazing story!

I just hope that he is being payed fairly. Here is an example of someone who
is disabled and not being payed fairly in my opinion.

>Kandu Industries can pay Chris and roughly 150 other workers substantially
below the federal minimum wage of $7.25 an hour because of a 1938 provision in
the Fair Labor Standards Act that permits employers, who apply to the
Department of Labor for a waiver, to pay lower wages to people with
disabilities.[1]

>According to the department, about 20 percent of people with disabilities
participate in the workforce, and of that group, about 3 percent, or
approximately 195,000 workers, are being paid subminimum wages. These workers
typically make well below the minimum wage, sometimes as low as “pennies per
hour,” according to the Department of Justice.[1]

(Many People With Disabilities Are Being Paid Way Below the Minimum Wage, and
It’s Perfectly Legal)[[https://www.motherjones.com/politics/2017/08/many-
people-wit...](https://www.motherjones.com/politics/2017/08/many-people-with-
disabilities-are-being-paid-way-below-the-minimum-wage-and-its-perfectly-
legal/\]\[1\])

~~~
jacquesm
That's totally disgusting. Not only do they start out with a bad hand, this is
then used to exploit them with the blessings of the government.

~~~
ars
Maybe you should educate yourself more before posting full of outrage.

A good place to start would be in the other comments in this thread.

But I'll summarize for you: The companies are only hiring them as a community
service. They cost more than a regular person and do less. Force companies to
pay full wage, and they won't hire them at all. Even at the lower wage it's
not really worth it to them.

Maybe they shouldn't bother, since people like you interpret helping people as
exploiting them......

~~~
jacquesm
As an employer I've hired disabled people more than once, and in fact am about
to do this again in the coming 30 days.

They didn't cost a penny more than their able bodied brothers and sisters to
employ. And they got paid just the same amount that other people did in that
job.

Besides that a friend of mine ran a whole courier company with nothing but
disabled people. All of those got paid full wages as well.

I'm sure there are boundary cases where it can turn into community service but
this sounds - with the details available - as exploitation to me.

For European employers _if_ there would be compensation this would be done at
the back-end between the companies and the government, no way would the
'minimum wage' be reduced simply because someone is disabled. As if an hour of
work by a disabled person is somehow worth less than an hour of work by an
able-bodied person doing the same job. You'd have to get into extremes of lack
of productivity before you could justify the 'pennies per hour' posted here.

Then, finally: there are institutions here called social workshops. In those
places there is a cross between real work and therapy, work that is extremely
simple and that basically anybody could do. For those places the people that
work there tend to get compensation but it is not at the level of an actual
wage. The thing is that the state already pays them a full social security or
disability allowance which takes the place of a salary. Anything above that
(such as through this work) is a special arrangement, they are not expected to
earn a living wage by themselves.

I hope that all this shows you that I've educated myself sufficiently.

~~~
lazyasciiart
Wow, you haven't educated yourself at all. You haven't even read the article
linked in this conversation. If you had read it, you would have come across
the enormous similarities between this program and the social workshops that
you describe. Here, since you haven't bothered to read it

> Most people making subminimum wages, like Chris Wilson, work in factorylike
> settings known as sheltered workshops, which are supervised workplaces for
> people with disabilities. Workers package and assemble products, for
> example, sometimes folding paper, making jewelry, or sorting mail.

The subminimum wage is only allowed for people who are unable to work at
normal levels of productivity because of their disability - in other words, it
doesn't apply to people with a disability who can produce an hour of work
that's worth the same as an able-bodied person doing the same job. (Also worth
noting that 'able-bodied' is an odd word to use in this context, most of the
people in this program would have an intellectual disability, not a physical
one.) For your further education, here's an article that contains some
examples of how this is measured:

> For example, if an average worker loads 100 boxes in an hour, but the worker
> being tested loads 15, that worker could be assigned a wage that is 15
> percent of the average worker’s, or $2.25 an hour, rather than Seattle’s $15
> minimum wage. ... > With a supervisor, the six workers complete the amount
> of work that would normally be done by two people.

[https://www.seattletimes.com/seattle-news/puget-
sound/seattl...](https://www.seattletimes.com/seattle-news/puget-
sound/seattles-effort-to-end-lower-pay-for-disabled-workers-would-it-help-or-
hurt-them/)

------
RickJWagner
Awesome story. More power to this guy, he's an inspiration.

------
nickthemagicman
How do they use Stack Overflow?

------
fizixer
I have this weird idea of an experiment, actually two experiments:

\- I want to use my computer with my eyes closed (or blindfolded). Because I'm
really interested in exploring the limits of my sense of hearing combined with
my speech, plus my ability to use keyboard and mouse. It's like learning to
ride a bike. I have not used any accessibility features of any of my OSes
(linux, and windows) mainly because of my bias that those features are more
like "lip service" than making sure that they are a full fledged replacement
of visual user interface (well I have many gripes with the state of visual
user interfaces, and by extrapolation, non-visual UIs can only be equal or
worse, not better). So a big part of my experiment would be to explore, from
first principles, what an ideal non-visual UI would look like, and then
develop that software. The funny thing is that my interest in this experiment
is not fueled primarily by the desire to help others, sorry to say, but by the
fun and the thrill of being able to efficiently use a computer with eyes
closed, almost like getting a new mini-superpower. (Surprisingly, my interest
in this experiment came about as a result of thinking about going from
mouse/keyboard based GUI usage, to keyboard-only vim and tiling window
managers and touch typing, while your four fingers of each hand are constantly
in the home row and move away only to carry out a specific task. It's almost
as if restricting yourself makes you more efficient in some sense).

\- As an extension to this, I'm interested in being able to live in my
apartment for a few days blindfolded (including leaving-the-apartment in the
experiment would make it too open-ended/challenging). I'm allowed to plan as
much as I can beforehand, to memorize what is where in my rooms, kitchen,
restroom, etc, and also make a list of strict rules about where a certain
thing should be placed after it has been used (e.g., a toothbrush, etc), and
then I blindfold myself and see how far I can get. I would need to know where
each thing is, but there are too many things in my apartment, so maybe I would
want to reduce the number of things I have, and this way it connects to the
idea of minimalism, another interest of mine. And again part of the reason for
this experiment is the fun, but also to learn what changes can be made in
typical apartment indoor so a person doesn't have to rely on his/her sense of
sight to live fully (e.g., cook, clean, move around, etc). I guess this is the
kind of experiment that vsauce gets to conduct. I think it would be
interesting if he creates an episode based around this. (Though I'm ignoring
the biggest effect of being in this experiment, the psychological effect of
not being able to see).

(edit: It also appears to me that there is a connection between trying to
carry out operations blindfolded, and trying to code up something by imagining
what that code would do in run-time, because a piece of code running on a
computer is almost like a blind/blindfolder agent carrying out operations
based on values of variables, etc. So does such an experiment make you a
better programmer in some way? or give you a new perspective about running
code?).

