Ask HN: Resources for blind developers and sysadmins?

Re:Ask HN: Resources for blind developers and sysadmins? by mltony on Saturday November 24, 2018 @01:25PM (#18523295)

Blind software engineer here. Sorry to hear about your eyesight issues, dealing with that is always hard, but the good news is that there is life here. I've been working on a bunch of open source projects and recently I found a full time job as developer. I know almost a dozen blind software developers working in big IT companies. Let me introduce you to the tools you can use. There are basically two types of tools: screen magnifiers for those with low vision and screenreaders for those who don't have any usable vision. Judging by your description, you might want to start with a magnifier. In the unfortunate case if your vision keeps getting worse, you can consider switching to a screenereader. Magnifiers are obviously easier to learn, but you can write code and do all the good stuff with screenreaders too. I am not that familiar with Magnifiers, but I've heard that the most popular one is called ZoomText and it is for Windows. Macs have their own magnifier, not sure about Linux. In the world of screenreaders you have NVDA and JAWS for Windows, VoiceOver for Mac, ORCA for Linux and also EmacsSpeak, which is an accessibility extension for Emacs. You can also use phones with screenreader: there is VoiceOver for iPhone and TalkBack for android. One suggestion is try to find an organisation in your country that deals with blind and low-vision people - ask your eye doctor if he knows any - they might be very useful in your situation as they can recommend a lot of tools and resources specific for your country, such as white cane trainig, if you need it, guide dogs, braille training, they can also probably teach you how to use screenreaders and magnifiers. Feel free to contact me if you have any more questions: anton <dot> malykh <at> gmail. And good luck!

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Re:Ask HN: Resources for blind developers and sysadmins? by ndarilek on Saturday November 24, 2018 @02:12PM (#18523508)

Blind developer/sysadmin here as well. I completely agree with the above comment, and would add to it:

I'm not sure what platform you currently use, but if not Windows, you're in for some challenges if you're blind or visually-impaired. I'm currently using Linux because I'm a console-based developer (I mean, I still use Firefox and the GUI but run most dev tools from the console.) This generally works well enough for me until I need an IDE, because my current codebase is C#/CSHTML/JavaScript/HTML/CSS/TypeScript, and I can't juggle all that state in my head without something like an IDE to help out. And, as far as I know, there's nothing like that available and accessible for Linux. My hope is that VSCode can help a bit, but Electron apps are currently inaccessible under Linux, which rules out a whole bunch of traditionally useful tools (No "Electron is bloated" arguments here please, this is something else entirely.) Unless you're a Linux user who uses mostly GTK-Gecko-based tools and the console, and those GTK-based tools don't use crazy custom widgets, you can make Linux work. But QT is challenging, Electron is out, and Chromium/Chrome are inaccessible (though I hear that is changing soon.) Windows offers lots more tooling, plus access to Electron apps, which opens up many more possibilities for non-console-based development.

But anyway, if you can at all transition your workflow to Windows before things get more challenging, I think you'll be in a better place. I'm about to ditch Linux soon, but for a high-end PC which will run VMs for anything I might need. Running a pile of VMs is probably the best solution to this issue, but second best would almost certainly be Windows. MacOS and Linux trail behind, unfortunately.

I also wish you good luck. Happy to chat if I can help more. nolan at thewordnerd dot info

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Re:Ask HN: Resources for blind developers and sysadmins? by jareds on Saturday November 24, 2018 @10:19PM (#18525257)

I'm a totally blind developer and have never gotten Linux to work very well. What distro do you use? I'm also curious if you run Linux in VM's with speach? I think part of my problem may be bad audio support in Virtualbox and I may have better luck with VMware. I use Windows 10 every day with Jaws and Windows subsystem for Linux. WSL has noticeably increased my productivity compared to Cygwin do to the larger volume of software that runs in it and no longer having the need to spend time compiling tools from source. I find NVDA to be a pretty good screen reader and you could probably use it full time. I've used Jaws for over 20 years though so it's worth paying the $100 a year to keep up to date rather then spending the time getting used to a new screen reader. It's also nice to have a company you can call for support and talk to someone instantly when your entire ability to do your job depends on screen reading software.

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Re:Ask HN: Resources for blind developers and sysadmins? by ndarilek on Sunday November 25, 2018 @09:08AM (#18526913)

I use Fedora. Most of my issues seem like potential leaks/performance degradations in the accessibility stack. Performance drops over time, and doesn't seem to improve when apps are killed/restarted. The only components I can't restart are a11y-related, and the only way to get performance back is to restart or log back out and in. Maybe the issue is gnome-shell, but I can't help but feel like there'd be a revolt if everyone experienced the performance issues I do, so unfairly or not I blame accessibility.

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Re:Ask HN: Resources for blind developers and sysadmins? by forthewyn on Monday November 26, 2018 @05:06PM (#18537261)

Hi! I'm nosing in here but I'm a partially blind dev who recently came back to Linux and have had great success with the KDE desktop, specifically Kubuntu 18.10 in my case.

They have excellent accessibility support baked in by default.

Things are getting better all around in modern Linux though because in recent Ubuntu releases you can enable voice narration, full screen zoom (my show stopper must have) and screen readers from the login screen.

Good luck!

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Re:Ask HN: Resources for blind developers and sysadmins? by _asummers on Saturday November 24, 2018 @02:55PM (#18523700)

I've heard iOS is generally good towards people with visual impairments. Do you have experience with iOS/OSX and are you able to comment on their friendliness?

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Re:Ask HN: Resources for blind developers and sysadmins? by forthewyn on Monday November 26, 2018 @05:08PM (#18537274)

OSX has been an accessibility leader for a very long time. However recently everybody else has been catching up.

I was away from Linux and Windows for 10 years because neither provided key chorded full screen zoom by default and now they do.

So, in short, accessibility support in OSX is good, but no longer best in breed, so choose the OS you're most comfortable with generally.

IOS accessibility is excellent. Screen zoom, VoiceOver, high contrast, etc.

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Re:Ask HN: Resources for blind developers and sysadmins? by PakG1 on Saturday November 24, 2018 @11:02PM (#18525399)

Many thanks, may reach out in the future. :)

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Re:Ask HN: Resources for blind developers and sysadmins? by andrewfong on Saturday November 24, 2018 @06:51PM (#18524568)

I would toss in one other note about OS X. Consider enabling the "Speak Selection" or highlight-to-speak option. As the name implies, it reads selected text aloud.

My wife is low vision but not so much that she needs a full screenreader. Voiceover is overkill for her and has a steep learning / adjustment curve. Highlight-to-speak has been good enough thus far.

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Re:Ask HN: Resources for blind developers and sysadmins? by therein on Saturday November 24, 2018 @04:40PM (#18524113)

> Sorry to hear about your eyesight issues, dealing with that is always hard, but the good news is that there is life here.

You're awesome. Reading this made me tear up a little bit. There were a few blind software engineers at my previous workplace and I've always found it admirable. I wish you all the best.

As a software engineer, one of my greatest fears is losing my eyesight. I am currently not showing any signs of macular degeneration but having had LASIK, I am under increased risk of that happening. Had I known more, I would have kept my cornea intact. Now I feel slightly worried whenever I have problems focusing on text at night or getting blurry vision for a brief moment on occasion when I blink as these might be early signs.

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Re:Ask HN: Resources for blind developers and sysadmins? by mhuffman on Saturday November 24, 2018 @08:47PM (#18524957)

I have a serious question to ask you.

Do blind software engineers work exclusively on systems-type applications or does there exist technology for blind developers to create UIs?

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Re:Ask HN: Resources for blind developers and sysadmins? by jareds on Saturday November 24, 2018 @10:26PM (#18525282)

I'm a blind developer and my job is all back-end database and REST api development. I have done UI development on internal applications where function mattered more then looks. It's pretty easy to create basic UI's using HTML since everything is in code. Specifically I used Grails to generate UI scaffolding as a starting point that I was then able to modify. Once I got everything working another developer spent a day adding some CSS and fixing a few rough edges.

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Re:Ask HN: Resources for blind developers and sysadmins? by mltony on Sunday November 25, 2018 @01:16PM (#18527982)

I mostly work in the backends, but I wrote a few UIs too. Either in HTML/PHP, or in wxPython. I can probably write UIs in other languages/technologies too if I had to. They probably don't look very nice, but they are functional. Every now and then something would glitch and all my buttons would end up one of top of the other or something like that, so I'd ask someone sighted to check for that.

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