Catch up on stories from the past week (and beyond) at the Slashdot story archive

 


Forgot your password?
Close
typodupeerror
×
Programming IT Technology

Are There Blind Programmers? 39

Posted by Cliff from the seeing-isn't-necessarily-anything dept.
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.
This discussion has been archived. No new comments can be posted.

Are There Blind Programmers? More

Are There Blind Programmers?

Comments Filter:

  • Re:Microsoft (Score:1)

    by Anonymous Coward
    Does he work in the UI division?

  • hmm (Score:1)

    by Anonymous Coward
    You might not consider him a programmer, at least not in the sense now, but one of the great mathematicians ever, and could easily be a programmer now, was Euler, and he was blind.
  • 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.

    That's exactly the sort of note I'd like to see a teacher snatch and ask the student to read... somehow I doubt the 'goofing off instead of getting an education' argument would work too well.

    Sadly, the only year I played chess via notes in high school, the teacher for the period in which I had a willing opponent was largely uninterested in catching us pass notes.

  • 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!
  • 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.

  • 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.

  • Visual Studio has a setting for "Use screen reader compatible menus", so there's a demand.
    __
  • Kent Cullers is the blind astronomer at the SETI Institute. Here is a page about "Contact" that describes his caricatured roll:

    http://www.seti-inst.edu/phoenix/contact.html

    This is an amazing thread.

  • Yep. (Score:1)

    by pen ( 7191 )
    I work at a training company, and there was a blind programmer learning Java in one of our classes just a few weeks ago. He just had to come in about 10 minutes early and install JAWS [hj.com] on the machine he was sitting at.

    I must say, that program is crazy. This probably relates to the recent Ask Slashdot about rented software. He has to carry a key on a floppy. The program first erases the key from the floppy and then copies it to the hard drive, while also binding itself to the hardware it is installed on. He had to call and order another key just to make the software run on another computer.

    --

  • And the blind and v.i. people I know can do a better job of spelling than I just did *d'oh*
  • 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.
  • Also check out BLINUX.

    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.

    --
    Evan

  • Oh, and I forgot to mention one thing about the Braille'N'Speak - years later, I still wonder why people make a big deal about chorded keyboards. They were in use for Braille at *least* as far back as the 1930s, when the Perkins Brailler came out. Sure, it's more natural for Braille, being a six bit celled format (26 + 38 extra symbols, and they use those extra characters for interesting purposes), but chording keyboards date way back before the computer.

    Actually, if you're a data format geek, Grade 2 braille is fairly interesting, with symbolic prefixes, positionally-dependant meanings and so on. (Grade 1 is straight alphabet).

    --
    Evan

  • > 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.

    --
  • I spent a year as a cubemate with a great visually impared programmer named Marcel. He did programming mostly on an HP mini, and was very good at it. He had a speech synth card in his PC (running a dos-based terminal emu) that would read characters and words to him, and had a large, loud braile printer that with it's even larger sound enclosure, took up lots of our collective cube space. He was a great guy, and had the best collection of blind jokes.

    He was also second in command of the IT group, and occasionally had to sign authorizations of various types (vactaion, purchase, etc.). To do this he had trust in everyone that worked for him, and a little signature template (think credit card-sized piece of metal with a rectangular hole in it) that he'd ask people to place over where he needed to sign. Never had a problem.

    The only thing we weren't able to come up with a good solution for was a pager.

    Marcel was a really great guy - don't think I've had a better cube-mate since.

    -Bill

  • Blind systems administrator (Score:4)

    by AtariDatacenter ( 31657 ) on Tuesday April 10, 2001 @04:46PM (#300457)
    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.)
  • The VirtualBBS software (remember BBSses?) was written by Roland DeGraaf, who is a legally blind programmer.

    Yep, there are plenty of blind programmers.
  • 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.
  • L'Shanah Habaah B'Yerushalayim! (Next year in Jerusalem!)

  • There is research going on at UC Berkeley for UI development for the blind.
    Check out the IC2D [berkeley.edu] project.

  • Yes, but probably not using VisualC++, VisualBasic, VisualAge, ...

    Before anyone calls me insensitive, let me do it first...

  • Ans SuSE comes ready for blind users - detects special hardware on install. I haven't tested these options, just noticed them when loading SuSE 7.0 and 7.1.

    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.

  • 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 [imdb.com] nowadays?

    --
  • I have a graduate student in the employ of my office that is quite an accomplished programmer. Of the people I work with, he'd be the first I'd ask if I had an obscure programming question that was stumping me. He is doing thesis work on making web resources more accessible. I wonder how slashdot rates in this area. He does his work under Solaris with a braille screen reader. He uses a versions of "screen" that is hacked for screen reader support.

  • there's actually resources for it... (Score:3)

    by b0r1s ( 170449 ) on Tuesday April 10, 2001 @03:14PM (#300466) Homepage
    If you go search, there's multiple resources for your question...

    blindprogramming.com [blindprogramming.com]

    Gnu's blind programmer [leb.net]

    games written by a blind programmer for blind users [gamesfortheblind.com]

    Hope this helps.

  • Yes, there are two that I know of... (Score:4)

    by b0r1s ( 170449 ) on Tuesday April 10, 2001 @03:06PM (#300467) Homepage
    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.

  • I had a Chemistry professor in college, who was blind(UMASS Amherst). If he could do chemistry expirements(and proctor exams, figure that one out, and he did catch people cheating on occasion), I gotta figure there are blind programmers, etc out there too! For this guy it was all a game of knowing what was where, I think. I fact a friend of mine once messed with him and swiched the oder of several containers on the lab table before a lecture. The professor, stopped for a second during the lecture, switched the containers back to the proper order, and simply commented "nice try".
  • Not that I eer saw, but he was wearing the typical dark glasses, so maybe that counts.

  • 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. So I'd say yeah.

  • Have we all forgotten the movie Sneakers? Maybe not a programmer per se, but Whistler sure knew his way around the braile console...
  • VirTouch [virtouch.co.il], an Israeli company has developed a 'braille mouse' of sorts, which allows you to feel graphics on the screen and interact with GUI environments. This would clearly be useful to blind programmers and users alike.

    Please, no pr0n references here.

  • This is a test to see whether annielaurie (User #257735) reads her replies.
  • And at the CIA, IIRC, a lot of the hired help are blind, for security reasons

  • Sure there are (Score:5)

    by raju1kabir ( 251972 ) on Tuesday April 10, 2001 @03:23PM (#300476) Homepage

    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.

  • Easy enough to find out if you are taking a day off and have nothing else to do. I ran the main page through CAST's [cast.org] "Bobby" validator. Sadly, Slashdot flunked. But not by much. The report:

    This page does not meet the requirements for Bobby Approved status. Below is a list of 1 Priority 1 accessibility errors found:
    Provide alternative text for all images. (1 instance) Line 16

    Not bad by comparison with a lot of what's on the Web -- probably somebody just had an off day, right?

    The serious lesson here is that if you want to make your pages accessible, CAST is a good starting place. They will cite you W3 chapter and verse for everything they find. I'm sure there are other Web-based validators around. Good job, Slashdot!

    Annie

  • Blind Programmers (Score:3)

    by annielaurie ( 257735 ) <annekmadison@nosPAm.hotmail.com> on Tuesday April 10, 2001 @05:48PM (#300478) Journal
    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
  • I know of several who were unfortunate enough to have hit that goatse.cx link.

    In all seriousness - why not? There's nothing preventing blind people from coding. I've seem some wonderful tactile and audible devices which make computing not just possible, but second-nature. The monitor doesn't have to be the only way to get feedback from programs.

    I'll grant that GUI environments don't help any, but that isn't necessarily a requirement for most coding projects. Someone else can handle the GUI.
  • In high school when I interned for a few summers at the NSA, I marvelled at how many blind people were walking around the halls. I knew the DoD was an equal opportunity employer, but these guys had enough tags on their badges to indicate they were doing something far beyond quota-related employment. Then it dawned on me that they were hired not because they were disabled but because they were better able to listen than sighted people. In the land of the listeners, the blind man is king. I am not sure if they would have had to do any programming per se, but I imagine they would have had to operate some non-trivial hardware to do their jobs.

Slashdot Top Deals

Stellar rays prove fibbing never pays. Embezzlement is another matter.

Close