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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.
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.)
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.
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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.
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