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Are There Blind Programmers?
Sean asks: "Are there any blind programmers out there? I'm interested to hear how prevalent they are, what sort of work or projects they do (and the size of the projects), and whether we have any blind contributors to open source projects. In fact, it would be interesting to widen the question to ask how many blind IT professionals are out there. How do blind programmers work and what development environments are they likely to work in?" I know that there are ways for the blind to use a computer, however I don't know if the tools that they use are robust enough for programming. However, as computer technology and interfaces improve. I'm sure that more and more people with disabilities will be using them.
There was an astronomer who was blind in the film. He is actualy based on a real person who has a Ph.D. in Astronomy or Astrophysics (I don't know which) and does SETI work (Sagen knew him which is how he ended up in the book and movie). He commented that in Astro physics these days you have computeres doing all the looking at things anyway, so he just built one more set of tools to do it. I don't know that it was easy for him but he did it.
He was interviewed by Terry Gross on NPR's Fresh Air a few years back you might be able to find it on real audio.
If you are blind and looking to be a programer I will say good luck and keep at it. This is why the Congress passed the ADA!
Erlang Developer and podcaster
L'Shanah Habaah B'Yerushalayim! (Next year in Jerusalem!)
Thanks mate, you just made my day!
Ive been called all sorts of antisemetic stuff around here, nice to get something decent for a change.
Erlang Developer and podcaster
So much for a good day...
But you know the funny thing is I still win. I win every time I put on my Kippah and walk out the front door. For I can win simply by living my life as a Proud Jew in a free country. And G-d willing someday raising my children as proud Jews and thairs for the next 3313 years and beyond.
So no I will not shut up and I will not go away! Scum like you who can't even sign your name don't scare me at all. As for the world hating us, well we've lived with that for the last few thousand years we are used to it. We can live with it some more.
Erlang Developer and podcaster
DOn't forget that in addition to totally blind invidiuals there are also legally blind/visually blind person to take into account. A visually impaired person may be using something as simple as a High Constrast display with a screen magnifier, whereas a totally blind person will be using a screen reader. A good place to look for some contacts may be www.lionsclubs.org the Lions Clubs do alot with Visually Impared and blind persons and there may be a local chapter near you.
I wonder how much of that name is an inside joke - one of the derogatory terms for blind people is "Blinks" or "Blinkys", due to their eye constantly blinking (depending on why/when they went blind).
Years and years ago, I wrote a text to Level 2 Braille translator (in Mix Power C, remember that?). It was for my local group of friends mostly - many of them were blind... and I met almost all of them (including a woman I dated for 3 years) on various BBSes, some of which had blind SysOps.
Now, this was in the late 80s/ early 90s, but back then they used the great (but horribly named) Braille'N'Speak, which most users cranked up to a super fast speech rate that most people couldn't understand, but that they were used to.
Hey! A quick Google search found it: http://www.blazie.com/pages/hardware.html. You might try there... I know many of their employees are blind, and I would imagine some of them are probably programmers.
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Evan
"$30 for the One True Ring. $10 each additional ring!" -- JRR "Bob" Tolkien
> There's a blind guy who lives down the hall from me who, in the same time I got one degree in classics, got two in computer science and mathematics, not to mention a Rhodes scholarship.
I met a guy who is totally blind, has a Ph.D. in philosophy, and has just started working on a B.S. in CS (wants a job, I suppose).
For his first semester CS class he even did the graphics programs; I know this because I had the really interesting experience of helping him understand what one of those graphics assignments was asking for.
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Sheesh, evil *and* a jerk. -- Jade
Not a programmer, but I know of a blind systems administrator who works at Williams. His workstation is interesting. No monitor, but a text-to-speech module. Over the years, he's managed to crank up the rate at which he can hear the output. Today, you couldn't make heads or tails of what the thing is saying to him, but it makes perfect sense to him! (And yes, he works with the hardware, handles network connections, and more. Amazing.)
In high school, I tutored a guy at the New Mexico School for the Visually Handicapped. Actually I was tutoring him in geometry of all things. For problems which required drawings, we'd use thin mylar sheets on a rubber-topped clipboard. You draw with a pencil and it leaves a raised line.
Coincidentally, we were both participating in the NM Supercomputing Challenge (SCC) (which gave us modem access, through NM Technet, to Unicos on Cray computers at Los Alamos National Labs, connected to the internet. This was before the net became widely available: 1991. They weren't happy when I hopped onto #hack on irc but that's another story. Bad memories.)
Anyway, the blind guy had a standard laptop computer which had some kind of speech board added into it, and device drivers for DOS. He had borland c++ which includes command line compilers.
He used edlin as an editor because the speech software reads stuff off the screen as they are printed. You can also move the cursor around the screen in a special mode to inspect it, but it's easier, using edlin (like unix's ed) to print out whichever lines you want, then specify that you want to edit a specific line.
The only problem with that method was that he didn't indent any of his code, which the SCC judges counted against him, since they had trouble understanding it. At any rate, he's the only guy who did any real work on the project.
There is research going on at UC Berkeley for UI development for the blind.
Check out the IC2D project.
Actually, I'd like to find a printer for Braille - I have a friend who is blind and I read material to him onto tapes that he painstakingly transcribes into braille. If I could just print it out, that'd help both of us. But, those printer I found searching about a year ago were just too expensive.
-- @rjamestaylor on Ello
He'd just stare straight ahead at the teacher, keeping the whole game inside his head. Not only that, but after he invariably beat me, he'd write down a transcript of the game - every move from start to finish, complete with detail of where I went wrong - and pass it over to me.
Ah! How is ol' Bobby nowadays?
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blindprogramming.com
Gnu's blind programmer
games written by a blind programmer for blind users
Hope this helps.
Mooniacs for iOS and Android
I happen to know two blind professionals. One is a programmer for an Orange county, ca, based startup, and the second is a sysadmin for a local isp. Braille based keyboards, and sound events for common problems, they seem to do ok. The programmer seems to function almost flawlessly, but the sysadmin occasionally has to ask his co-workers what his screen says (odd crash/core dump, when he doesnt have a sound event to alert him of what's going on). But yes, they do exist.
Mooniacs for iOS and Android
Have we all forgotten the movie Sneakers? Maybe not a programmer per se, but Whistler sure knew his way around the braile console...
Please, no pr0n references here.
+5:offtopic,but anti-American
The founder of a hosting company in this area is blind, and you'd barely know it.
In fact, the first time I came to the facility and met him, it was a good 10 minutes before I put it together.
There was a lot of noise in the machine room, as all sorts of digitized voices were mumbling cryptically. But what tipped me off was when I noticed that he sat down to work at his computer, and started typing away, and the monitor was off!
To the best of my knowledge the rest of the staff are sighted, but it ends up being helpful even for them. The place is hyper-organized, and everything is always in a predictable place.
It's pretty amazing to watch him walk across the facility, pull a machine drawer out, and replace the hard drive, facing you and talking the whole time.
I don't know what sort of programmer he is, but he's the fastest thing you'll ever see on the keyboard, and I've seen him do plenty of tricky stuff in the shell. When he's line-editing it seems to read to him what's under the cursor.
I think the skill necessary for keeping a sense of the state of an edit buffer would be similar to that of a childhood friend, who I'd play chess with during class at school. We had a complicated signalling system to exchange moves. I had to keep notes on a piece of paper, constantly erasing and scribbling to keep track of what was going on. He'd just stare straight ahead at the teacher, keeping the whole game inside his head. Not only that, but after he invariably beat me, he'd write down a transcript of the game - every move from start to finish, complete with detail of where I went wrong - and pass it over to me.
"Patriotism is your conviction that this country is superior to all other countries because you were born in it." -- GBS
I knew, but have gotten out of touch with, a man who was blind and worked as a Novell administrator. He also ran a FidoNet BBS, which may tell you just how very long ago it was. The NetWare gave him no problems, because its menus were all text-based. He had a Braille printer which in those days was a fabulously expensive proposition.
What always fascinated me was that in those long-ago days, his preferred o/s for general work, for his BBS, etc. was OS/2. IBM was very responsive to the requirements of users with various disabilities. Microsoft was not, at least not initially. Blind end-users had more than a few Maalox moments when it began to appear that the GUI, in the form of Windows 3.x, was going to prevail in the business world.
I guess things occasionally do get better.
Annie
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