Are There Blind Programmers? 39
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.
Re:Microsoft (Score:1)
hmm (Score:1)
Re:Sure there are (Score:1)
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.
If you saw the movie "Contact" (Score:2)
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!
Re:Happy Passover Zachary Kessin (Score:2)
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.
Re:Happy Passover Zachary Kessin (Score:2)
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 (Score:1)
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Re:If you saw the movie "Contact" (Score:2)
http://www.seti-inst.edu/phoenix/contact.html
This is an amazing thread.
Yep. (Score:1)
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.
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Re:Just Blind or Visuall Impaired also? (Score:1)
Just Blind or Visuall Impaired also? (Score:2)
Irony and a Story (Score:2)
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
Re:Irony and a Story (Score:2)
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).
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Evan
Re:Sure are (Score:2)
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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I shared a cube with one... (Score:1)
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)
Sure there are! Remember VBBS? (Score:1)
Yep, there are plenty of blind programmers.
There sure are (Score:2)
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.
Happy Passover Zachary Kessin (Score:1)
here's one (Score:2)
There is research going on at UC Berkeley for UI development for the blind.
Check out the IC2D [berkeley.edu] project.
Tools (Score:1)
Before anyone calls me insensitive, let me do it first...
Re:there's actually resources for it... (Score:3)
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.
Re:Sure there are (Score:2)
Ah! How is ol' Bobby [imdb.com] nowadays?
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One that I know of (Score:1)
there's actually resources for it... (Score:3)
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)
I gotta believe (Score:1)
Re:I gotta believe (Score:1)
Sure are (Score:1)
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? (Score:2)
Here's a neat mouse for blind users (Score:2)
Please, no pr0n references here.
Re:How does Slasdot rate in this area? (Score:1)
Re:I remember seeing a lot of blind people at the (Score:1)
Re:there's actually resources for it... (Score:2)
Sure there are (Score:5)
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.
How does Slasdot rate in this area? (Score:1)
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)
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
Yeah. (Score:1)
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.
I remember seeing a lot of blind people at the NSA (Score:1)