

Ask HN: Do you know any Blind Person Who Can Code? - ekianjo

I am genuinely curious if anyone here on HN have ever met blind or visually impaired people who can actually code. I am sure it&#x27;s far from impossible but I can think of many reasons why the hurdles would be very high - the absence of proper tools, the difficulty to read code through voice, etc... On the other hand, visually impaired people may be strong at abstraction.<p>So, I&#x27;m just looking for examples out there from your own experience, and maybe some suggestions on how to make coding more approachable or enjoyable to people who suffer from such impairments.
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zachlipton
Sure (in my limited experience, the answer to "is there a blind person who
does X?" is virtually always yes). I've met engineers with varying degrees of
visual impairment. Obviously, it's not for everyone, but coding isn't for
anyone to begin with. Like everything else, they find the tools they need to
make things work for them. Several that I have met have been involved in the
open source accessibility movement, which means they've been working on
developing those tools to give themselves and others more control.

One anecdote. My team had done some work with a contractor, who was blind, to
do QA around accessibility features and screen reader compatibility, his
specialty. He came into town for an all-hands meeting, and after a brief
orientation to the physical layout of the office, was perfectly self-
sufficient and resourceful. Until one point a day or two into his visit when
he called me over to his desk asking for help. He was rather frustrated
because his screen reader had completely stopped talking to him, even though
he could feel from the fans that it was still on. He asked if I could see
anything obviously wrong on his screen. I failed to suppress a bit of a
chuckle as I realized the screen in front of him was the least accessible in
all of Windows: a BSOD!

~~~
pestaa
I didn't know so I looked it up: BSOD stands for blue screen of death.

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murz
One of my first mentors was a blind programmer. He's actually one of the
smartest and most productive programmers I know.

The main tool he used was some screen-reading software called JAWS, which
apparently is pretty sophisticated these days. You can see some of the other
tools available here: [http://www.freedomscientific.com/products/fs/blindness-
produ...](http://www.freedomscientific.com/products/fs/blindness-products.asp)

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ig1
I believe most blind programmers use braille displays, because much
programming is command line rather than UI based it's probably easier than
many other occupations.

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chrisBob
West Point has (had in 2004) a blind programmer that I think worked in the
foreign language department. His story was that he was an olympic swimmer that
lost his vision in an accident with a rowing machine.

I am not sure how he read the code, but I know the computer said the keys out
loud as he typed.

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cafard
I worked with a fellow, since retired, who was legally blind. As I recall, he
used some text to speech, and also magnification software that displayed
characters at a size of may be 10" square.

GSA is a good source for information about tools.

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nekopa
If you do a quick search on HN's comments, you'll find a few blind programmers
who hang out here. Some interesting insights...

