Ask HN: I'm a software engineer going blind, how should I prepare?

[zachrip]

I'm a 24 y/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'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 "Usher's Syndrome" - characterized by hearing loss, balance issues, and progressive vision loss.

I know there are blind software engineers out there. My main questions are:

- Are there blind frontend engineers?

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

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

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

I'm really trying to get ahead of this thing and prepare myself as my vision is degrading rather quickly. I'm not sure what I can do if I can't do SE as I don't have any formal education in anything. I've worked really hard to get to where I am and don't want it to go to waste.

Thank you for any input, and stay safe out there!

Edit:

Thank you all for your links, suggestions, and moral support, I really appreciate it. 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 know I shouldn't think this way but it is hard not to. I'm very independent and I feel a pressure to "show up." 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.

[vidanay]

Your comment about proof reading and errors not sounding right reminds me of the "proper/best" way to learn Morse code for ham radio. Most everyone is familiar with the charts that show A=.- B=-... etc. Lots of beginners try to actually interpret the sounds in their ears and convert that to a letter and then convert a bunch of those to a word. Obviously, that is very processor intensive and has a high failure rate. The best way is to treat each audio pattern as a letter in a new language and skip the conversion process. Eventually, you recognize entire words just from the sounds.

[anonytrary]

> you'll be bumping the speech rate up to 1.75-2X normal speech

Try 5-6x. I've met some blind people who listen to audio so fast, it sounds like noise to me. As someone who isn't blind, I regularly listen to lectures and audiobooks on 1.75-2.5x (depending on the base rate) without issues, but 6x is just something else entirely.

> Typos will be easily spotted as they just won't "sound right".

Really good way to describe this. It's almost like listening to an audio fingerprint which magically indexes the answer in your brain. My blind friend was doing law, but I'm sure she did something similar to help her map the dependencies between laws.

[leeoniya]

> Also, because code is no longer represented visually as blocks, you'll find you're building an increasingly detailed memory model of your code.

does refactoring by other team members have an outsized negative effect on this?

[WalterBright]

Since I work on the D programming language design, I'm interested in any advice you can give on what would make a programming language design more accessible to blind programmers.

[hnick]

> You'll be amazed how good your memory will get without the crutch of sight

That's all really interesting. I personally have a problem with my thoughts in that I need to "sound out" or read them aloud in my head. This sometimes really slows me down, I mull over a thought until it sounds right. Especially when I'm tired I can get stuck in a loop. And it applies when reading too, I can force myself to read faster but usually I slow down and hear every word out of habit.

I know some people don't have this inner voice. I wonder if it means they can think more freely.

[herval]

This is incredible! If you have a couple of minutes, would you mind sharing some of the Mac tool recommendations? I'm not blind, but as someone working on consumer apps, good examples really help!

[frabbit]

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

That's a really interesting idea to me, because I have been trying to improve my memory and recall (mostly of things like telephone numbers) using the Major Memory system and the emphasis behind that and similar techniques seems to be constructing visual imagery which encodes other information. So, it sounds like you are saying that you have found other pathways/techniques that do explicitly do not do this.

[renaulth]

Hi, I am in a similar boat, I still have sufficient vision to code without a screen reader, but my concern has always been about the non-programming tasks that any modern developer is faced with on a daily basis.

In my job I typically spend 3-4 hours a day in the IDE, but but rest of the day is spent looking at production issues and servers, looking at RabbitMQ management UI, etc. The emphasis being on "looking".

I'm just curious as to how a screen reader would allow you to do those things, in a high pressure environment?

[hansccwolf]

Do you use the screen reader for your code, too? How do you debug your code?

[bollu]

Can you please recommend software for this? which screen reader should I use? how should I configure it? how do you code with it?

[shrimpx]

Just curious, is it harder to read white space indentation code like python versus curly bracket code like JavaScript?

[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...

[tambarskjelve]

"Now I will have less distraction." - Leonard Euler upon losing his right eye vision

[hutzlibu]

"When you abandon this two dimensional representation, your non-visual mental map suffers no spatial limits. "

My visual representation is definitely 3 dimensional and I am not sure what you mean by abandoning it? I mean, code is statement blocks and controll flow elements. It is data and connections between them at execution. I can imagine, not being visual gives you much more focus and fewer distractions on the mental map, but is it really different?

[blzaugg]

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

[herenorthere]

Wow. Great response. These comments are why I come here. Thank you!

[aws_ls]

Just wanted to say, Thank you!

[StandardFuture]

This makes me wonder if we would benefit from forcing children to occasionally train their brains via partial sensory deprivation. Maybe there are aspects of the human brain that go unexercised because we strive to constantly and always use all of our senses for everything simultaneously as much as we possibly can.

[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/.weechat/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...

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?

[dicknuckle]

As a side note, weechat runs beautifully in Docker. I access it with Glowingbear but though a terminal it would also be trivial.

[bear8642]

Rob Pike's Acme editor is another powerful tiling editor you can check out.

[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.

[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.

[zachrip]

Fortunately my hearing loss is stable and correctable using hearing aids.

[O_H_E]

This is a bit off-topic, but may I ask: how did you get introduced to programming?

Feel free to not answer :D

[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.

[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.

[hycaria]

>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.

I would say you're selfish or dumb enough to be moving in a time where people should just stop those behaviors and stay wherever the fuck they are... And this is not even considering you know, GHG and stuff.

But globally this comment is so full of oneself I'm amazed.

[mburst]

I would recommend trying to study up on Section 508 compliance 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.

[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

[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

[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/

[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.

[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.

[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

* You can file issues and provide feedback as we try to improve continously 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

[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!

[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.... 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

[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

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

https://www.businessinsider.com/how-blind-google-engineer-wr...

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

[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/

(The BBC guide is also good: 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.

[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.

[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.