[SwellJoe]

One of my friends is a blind coder (and he sometimes comments here on HN), and he's had a very hard time getting regular work as a coder, even for things that seem obvious (like testing and fixing apps and sites for accessibility). He's bright and built his own screen reader for Android, among other things. But, I think that's a common experience for folks with disabilities; they begin to feel like they have to apologize for their disability, even in cases where it does not inhibit them from doing the work.

Even worse, there begins to be a notion that hiring someone with a disability is a charitable act, rather than just making a hiring decision based on their competence for the task. It seems like that would be kinda soul-crushing to always wonder if you were chosen for reasons other than your abilities.

I've seen so many interesting/disappointing behaviors from people when it comes to people with disabilities. Once I was helping with an event that was organized and led by a woman with cerebral palsy and in a wheelchair. Media showed up to cover the event...and kept trying to talk to me about it (the able-bodied white guy who was mostly there to handle technical stuff and had very little interesting to say about what the event was about), even when the organizer was right next to me and clearly bossing people, including me, around. She also has had difficulty finding regular work in the past, despite being really impressive in a lot of areas.

I'm kinda just ranting here, as I don't have good solutions, but I do think it'd be cool for folks to stop assuming that just because someone can't work the way most folks work they can't do the same kind of work. There have been blind developers (that I've been aware of) for about as long as I've been using computers (and that's a long time). We should stop being shocked by it; though it's cool and impressive, it tends to lead to thinking they might not be able to do the job as well, just because they're doing it in such a different way.

[TriNetra]

Here's my personal anecdote: I'm a blind dev and building a company in India.

I had been having jobs in US-based companies for about 8 years and on the side I'd been creating products/taking freelancing projects to be independent of job (not that I lacked in any job rather I almost always quickly emerged to be the most technically competent go-to person to get solutions to programming problems.)

At the moment one of my sighted friends has joined me from my last company and together we're working on consultancy-backed product initiatives.

I’ve been frequenting HN for years and this is of course not my original account. Chiefly because from the outset in my freelancing career I’ve mostly made it a practice not to reveal my disability. I always thought that if I deliver well, there’s no reason that I should reveal about my blindness. In fact IMO that would rather put me at disadvantage as work relationships over the internet are largely driven by impression – showcasing your skills and abilities.

With grace, this has worked fine and I’ve worked with clients across the world currently being as security/solution architect consultant on a project for a multi-billion dollar financial company in US.

At present I’m personally earning $10k monthly which is quite good in India and setting me up for likely never needing to go back to job again.

[huuu]

I think this is another reason why privacy is important. Sometimes you need to hide something. Not because you are doing something illigal but just for personal reasons.

$10k is quite good in the rest of the world by the way ;) Good luck!

[velox_io]

As someone who has tried to use screen readers in the past (I had quite bad dyslexia as a kid), I do find it impressive that people can program with them (screen readers more than stumble when trying to read code). In the end I only really used them to proofread my writing, and still do occasionally.

With regards to disability (I injured my knee a few years ago and use crutches to get around): It is amazing how people assume your brain is somehow also effected by and treat you differently. You see the best in people (the kindness) and the worst in people (those who either pretend you're invisible or will literally push past you to try and get the last seat). I actually find it's a pretty filter to save me time dealing with superficial people.

The worse part for me is dating, those few seconds when they first see the crutches. Especially when the date's going well and then you have to get up. Sometimes you recover, sometimes you don't..

There's also term for disabled people (don't downvote me, I didn't invent it!) a 'supercrip' - A disabled person who works hard to overcome his/her disability. While it may not be the most flattering term, it is prefixed with the word super!

[satori99]

> I've seen so many interesting/disappointing behaviors from people when it comes to people with disabilities.

The city I live in had a systematic problem with loud speakers announcements on trains. Blind people rely on these announcements to know which station they are at. And trains speaker systems were mostly broken or heavily distorted on nearly every carriage.

The remarkable thing about this was that the only blind person making complaints was an Australian Disability Discrimination Commissioner, who made a written complaint (to himself) each time he found it hard to get off at the right station while going to his job [1].

I share a house with my physically disabled sister who deals with similar problems nearly everyday. My sister was lucky enough to find employment with a government agency that takes it's responsibilities towards disabled people seriously, but many disabled people still disengage from society because of the extreme hassle involved in something so simple for the rest of us, like getting to work.

[1] http://www.smh.com.au/nsw/blind-rage-over-railcorps-silent-s...

[schoen]

> who made a written complaint (to himself) each time he found it hard to get off at the right station

I was going to ask whether there was then a civil service ethics rule that required him to recuse himself from investigating his own complaint. But the article already addressed that:

> Each complaint, which will have to be addressed by others within the commission [...]

[stevetrewick]

This drives me crazy. My local light rail system has an automated announcement system that malfunctions frequently. I write a complaint every time. I've escalated all the way up the org chart and I still can't convince them that this system not working needs to be noted in their service disruption announcements. Same with busses, always too quiet, always send the company a complaint while I'm still on the bus. It's tiring to be that guy but unless someone is letting them know, nothing gets fixed.

[SiVal]

It seems to me that one thing we could do would be to use some updated version of our existing technologies to provide people with personalized notifications of such things as what station they're entering via personal technologies such as a phone. Your phone (or alternative device) tells you, in a language or visual or tactile cue of your choice, where you are, what station you are entering, how much more time to your destination station, and so on. You subscribe to the notifications you want in the format you want.

This sort of thing could be approached more generally, so that it would work for kids who aren't paying attention, for travelers who don't speak the loudspeaker's language even when it's working, adults who see and understand the language just fine but need an alarm because of a tendency to fall asleep and miss their stop, and so on.

Which then tells me that the big tech companies should all have whole divisions of employees with various "features" (very short, tall, blind, speech problems, etc.) who would not only test ideas like these but design, prototype, and build them. They would not only be experimenting with products and services for customers but with how to get their own work done, looking into questions such as whether you could design a programming language with a syntax optimized for hearing instead of looking, which would then be transpiled into something more mainstream, or creating alternatives to keyboard & mouse for those with muscular disorders, or countless other things.

My guess is that many of the ideas they come up with for helping some small niche of the population will be discovered to be of great value to many other groups in ways that weren't anticipated. Of course the dev tools they come up with for blind coders would be made available to all, but the "audio-optimized syntax" might just prove to be popular with programmers with no vision problems, and the keyboard/mouse replacement might be a big hit with cooks, surgeons, and musicians.

I'm sure there are many such things already going on that I haven't heard of, but I'm thinking it could become a very rich source of innovative technologies and products with big markets and should be such a big push that everybody knows about it.

[SwellJoe]

This is a super cool way to think of it, and I think some good companies probably already do it this way.

It also makes me wonder what the "best" programming language would be for blind coders. I know my friend has talked about Java and Python, and I think Python has problems for blind folks because of the significant white space; but I believe even that is surmountable.

But, your mention of a syntax optimized for hearing is probably something we want to build, anyway. I just noticed a while back that there's a whole generation of kids who don't type to interact with their devices. They talk to them; I guess they still read the screen for replies, but I would guess there will come a time when even reading is optimized out of the system...already lots of folks interact primarily with their device through an earbud. Things like Google Glass will eventually happen.

In short, optimizing for other abilities seems like a future-friendly direction for exploration.

[jondubois]

Yes, it must take a massive amount of internal strength and drive to be able to become a good software engineer while blind. They deserve the highest respect. Not only do they have to be good at programming, but they have to be excellent salesmen too (in order to convince potential employers).

Interview processes are quite cold/inhuman, but if you're blind, you really need to create a 'human connection' with your prospective employer in order to offset the 'perceived risk' that your disability brings.

If a blind person is competing with other fully-able applicants, it's easy for the employer to subconsciously fallback to a 'safe option' (it's a natural human instinct to avoid unknown risks) - That's why the 'frantic' follow-up communications are so important for a blind person - It's to make sure that the employer doesn't fall back to making 'subconscious' decisions.

[TriNetra]

This.

Unconscious bias often limits your potential opportunities. I remember when I was looking for a job change one of the interviews I had was with a subsidiary of SAIC in India, the telephonic technical interview went very well and they invited me for in-person round. I did have mentioned visual impairment on the resume in the beginning but guess they didn't understand it or likely never bother to read resumes carefully.

When I reached there the HR got confused–they didn’t know what to do – so they asked me to give a written aptitude test (this was specifically mentioned not to happen as I’d already qualified the technical round). Good that I went with my brother who assisted me as scribe and then another technical interview happened with a team lead which also went well. They informed me that their dept. head would take a decision and get back to me.

If you're wondering whether they got back no that line of response meant that they didn’t expect person like me and weren’t interested.

[coroutines]

I just wanted to add 2 things:

1) Whether you have a disability or not - I have always wondered if I was hired because I was young and could be 'molded' or if I was qualified. Maybe it's at the forefront of your mind if you're disabled, but I'm sure everyone wonders if they got a pass for a superficial reason.

2) It has been my experience that those with a disability overcompensate in other abilities to appear as qualified as their non-disabled colleagues.

[mahmud]

Blind devs would be perfect for certain problem spaces, like security-sensitive work or expert-witness type research.

[TriNetra]

In my experience programming is a mental job (no pun intended) and blind devs are equally suited or if I may dare to say, somewhat better equipped to do it as eyes are sometimes a big distraction. I could do programming without getting distracted by people moving around in the cubical for example.

As PG once wrote in an essay [0]: “A good programmer working intensively on his own code can hold it in his mind the way a mathematician holds a problem he's working on.” So this is how I or every other blind programmer works IMO.

Only UI is something a challenge, though still manageable if one wants (personally I delegate styling part and focus only on the frontend/backend development part as that’s where I can be the most productive.)

The other challenge is the tooling, often especially in enterprise settings, tools of the trade which are GUI-based, not much accessible and this can have a big hit on the performance of a blind developer. Luckily I’ve often able to find an alternative in such situations (or rather opted me out of such activities as it was usually related to non-dev related processes). If everything under the hood is based on API (or command-line like in Linux), finding alternatives won’t remain a challenge.

0]: http://paulgraham.com/head.html

[random778]

Could you give examples of tools which make your easier vs. those that make it hard / are impossible to use? This seems like a good additional argument for open / interoperable systems vs. closed, tightly controlled systems.

[jacalata]

Why?