Week 14 - The Blind Programmer

Tommy McWilliam, Mobile Engineer at Quora told a story about one his of his best friends in high school, who was diagnosed with Leber's hereditary optic neuropathy when he was in his senior year. NONL constantly reduced his eyesight and in his first year of college, he was almost completely blind. He majored in computer science, and the way he programmed was one of the most unusual. 

In college, he used a combination of magnifier and narrator. The screen magnifier was called MAGic and allowed him to enlarge the text so that only a few characters could fit on the monitor. The monitor itself was a huge screen over 30 inches, optimized for the visually impaired.He always set Narrator to its maximum reading speed (probably over 300 wpm). By comparison, audiobooks tend to sound twice as slow. His friend also preferred to use the absurdly old version of Firefox (3.5 or something) because it supported his screen reader the best. He performed almost all actions with hotkeys, moving through applications and windows with staggering speed.

He used Emacs as a code editor (Probably because he used to hotkeys). Narrator read the code, which he scrolled through. Likewise, Narrator read the terminal output, so there was no chance that something would be missed. He used languages ​​that do not overuse symbols in their syntax, so they are easier to understand. More accessible are those languages ​​that "look" similar to English, like Python, Ruby. However, using indentation instead of parentheses makes life quite difficult - you have to listen carefully to the number of tabs on each line.

There also was a funny incident. They learned OCaml, a functional language with unusual syntax. So his friend was forced to listen to nonsense like let rec fib n equals return match n with return vertical bar one hyphen more than ... semicolon semicolon and the like. On this day, he was working with a very large piece of code that did not compile in any way. He listened to this ridiculous syntax over and over again, but could not find a single error. Nothing changed until he walked into class, where a sighted teaching assistant noticed that for some reason the Narrator was pronouncing the number "0" as the letter "O". This was a completely new kind of bugs that sighted programmers don't encounter.

 It's also worth noting that he is passionate about the HTML accessibility specification, especially ARIA. Currently he is a full-time software developer.


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