<story><title>Ask HN: I&apos;m a software engineer going blind, how should I prepare?</title><text>I&amp;#x27;m a 24 y&amp;#x2F;o full stack engineer (I know some of you are rolling your eyes right now, just highlighting that I have experience on frontend apps as well as backend architecture). I&amp;#x27;ve been working professionally for ~7 years building mostly javascript projects but also some PHP. Two years ago I was diagnosed with a condition called &amp;quot;Usher&amp;#x27;s Syndrome&amp;quot; - characterized by hearing loss, balance issues, and progressive vision loss.&lt;p&gt;I know there are blind software engineers out there. My main questions are:&lt;p&gt;- Are there blind frontend engineers?&lt;p&gt;- What kinds of software engineering lend themselves to someone with limited vision? Backend only?&lt;p&gt;- Besides a screen reader, what are some of the best tools for building software with limited vision?&lt;p&gt;- Does your company employ blind engineers? How well does it work? What kind of engineer are they?&lt;p&gt;I&amp;#x27;m really trying to get ahead of this thing and prepare myself as my vision is degrading rather quickly. I&amp;#x27;m not sure what I can do if I can&amp;#x27;t do SE as I don&amp;#x27;t have any formal education in anything. I&amp;#x27;ve worked really hard to get to where I am and don&amp;#x27;t want it to go to waste.&lt;p&gt;Thank you for any input, and stay safe out there!&lt;p&gt;Edit:&lt;p&gt;Thank you all for your links, suggestions, and moral support, I really appreciate it. Since my diagnosis I&amp;#x27;ve slowly developed a crippling anxiety centered around a feeling that I need to figure out the rest of my life before it&amp;#x27;s too late. I know I shouldn&amp;#x27;t think this way but it is hard not to. I&amp;#x27;m very independent and I feel a pressure to &amp;quot;show up.&amp;quot; I will look into these opportunities mentioned and try to get in touch with some more members of the blind engineering community.</text></story><parent_chain><item><author>ddevault</author><text>Not perfectly, and not for long. I wear glasses, but they only do so much, and my vision worsens every year. I use some light assistive technologies on the daily - higher contrast, large fonts, zooming in on things. To test the tools I linked to, I spend the occasional workday with all of my monitors turned off, relying on these tools to get work done. I also have a braille reader that I occasionally pull out.&lt;p&gt;I have a different philosophy and approach to using computers than most, and that affects my views on accessibility. Stapling a screenreader onto a graphical application, for example, to me seems like the wrong approach. Text-based applications are much more accessible, and these are my bread and butter. To this end, my work on accessibility involves making more information available as text, organized logically rather than spatially, and making it easier to access and manipulate that information with vision impairments (and other sorts of impairments, too).</text></item><item><author>hatsunearu</author><text>Are you sighted?</text></item><item><author>ddevault</author><text>I recommend using a tiling window manager - they allow you to organize windows logically, rather than spatially.&lt;p&gt;I have also written some plugins for using Vim (text editing) and Weechat (IRC chat) with speech synthesis:&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https:&amp;#x2F;&amp;#x2F;git.sr.ht&amp;#x2F;~sircmpwn&amp;#x2F;dotfiles&amp;#x2F;tree&amp;#x2F;master&amp;#x2F;lib&amp;#x2F;vim&amp;#x2F;vimspeak.vim&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;https:&amp;#x2F;&amp;#x2F;git.sr.ht&amp;#x2F;~sircmpwn&amp;#x2F;dotfiles&amp;#x2F;tree&amp;#x2F;master&amp;#x2F;lib&amp;#x2F;vim&amp;#x2F;vim...&lt;/a&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https:&amp;#x2F;&amp;#x2F;git.sr.ht&amp;#x2F;~sircmpwn&amp;#x2F;dotfiles&amp;#x2F;tree&amp;#x2F;master&amp;#x2F;.weechat&amp;#x2F;python&amp;#x2F;talkative.py&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;https:&amp;#x2F;&amp;#x2F;git.sr.ht&amp;#x2F;~sircmpwn&amp;#x2F;dotfiles&amp;#x2F;tree&amp;#x2F;master&amp;#x2F;.weechat&amp;#x2F;py...&lt;/a&gt;&lt;p&gt;And I have a script for Sway (a tiling window manager) which also gives you audible cues:&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https:&amp;#x2F;&amp;#x2F;git.sr.ht&amp;#x2F;~sircmpwn&amp;#x2F;dotfiles&amp;#x2F;tree&amp;#x2F;master&amp;#x2F;bin&amp;#x2F;swaytalk&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;https:&amp;#x2F;&amp;#x2F;git.sr.ht&amp;#x2F;~sircmpwn&amp;#x2F;dotfiles&amp;#x2F;tree&amp;#x2F;master&amp;#x2F;bin&amp;#x2F;swaytal...&lt;/a&gt;&lt;p&gt;All of this is somewhat incomplete, but it&amp;#x27;s a good starting point if you want to get used to them and work on improvements while you&amp;#x27;re still sighted. Good luck, and let me know if I can be of service.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>cookiengineer</author><text>As someone preparing for this, too, I still have no clue on how to rasterize the code quickly. Voice always feels inefficient and braille feels like a joke when it comes to the amount of information being displayed. Do you have suggestions? Do you transpile code?&lt;p&gt;I also use VIM because it feels like the best case of voice integration or braille integration...but I have no source for how to actually do this properly. Are there good reading materials on this?&lt;p&gt;Currently I am trying to build a semantic web browser, also with the intention to filter out all legacy crap CSS that prevents interaction with the content [1] and the idea of being able to train CNNs with the content... but when it comes to code, my memory of it seems to suck so hard that I always have no clue of what I wrote the day before.&lt;p&gt;[1] still alpha as hell: &lt;a href=&quot;https:&amp;#x2F;&amp;#x2F;github.com&amp;#x2F;cookiengineer&amp;#x2F;stealth&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;https:&amp;#x2F;&amp;#x2F;github.com&amp;#x2F;cookiengineer&amp;#x2F;stealth&lt;/a&gt;&lt;p&gt;(Also a long time observer of your work here. You are one of the good guys. Stay awesome!)</text></comment>
<story><title>Ask HN: I&apos;m a software engineer going blind, how should I prepare?</title><text>I&amp;#x27;m a 24 y&amp;#x2F;o full stack engineer (I know some of you are rolling your eyes right now, just highlighting that I have experience on frontend apps as well as backend architecture). I&amp;#x27;ve been working professionally for ~7 years building mostly javascript projects but also some PHP. Two years ago I was diagnosed with a condition called &amp;quot;Usher&amp;#x27;s Syndrome&amp;quot; - characterized by hearing loss, balance issues, and progressive vision loss.&lt;p&gt;I know there are blind software engineers out there. My main questions are:&lt;p&gt;- Are there blind frontend engineers?&lt;p&gt;- What kinds of software engineering lend themselves to someone with limited vision? Backend only?&lt;p&gt;- Besides a screen reader, what are some of the best tools for building software with limited vision?&lt;p&gt;- Does your company employ blind engineers? How well does it work? What kind of engineer are they?&lt;p&gt;I&amp;#x27;m really trying to get ahead of this thing and prepare myself as my vision is degrading rather quickly. I&amp;#x27;m not sure what I can do if I can&amp;#x27;t do SE as I don&amp;#x27;t have any formal education in anything. I&amp;#x27;ve worked really hard to get to where I am and don&amp;#x27;t want it to go to waste.&lt;p&gt;Thank you for any input, and stay safe out there!&lt;p&gt;Edit:&lt;p&gt;Thank you all for your links, suggestions, and moral support, I really appreciate it. Since my diagnosis I&amp;#x27;ve slowly developed a crippling anxiety centered around a feeling that I need to figure out the rest of my life before it&amp;#x27;s too late. I know I shouldn&amp;#x27;t think this way but it is hard not to. I&amp;#x27;m very independent and I feel a pressure to &amp;quot;show up.&amp;quot; I will look into these opportunities mentioned and try to get in touch with some more members of the blind engineering community.</text></story><parent_chain><item><author>ddevault</author><text>Not perfectly, and not for long. I wear glasses, but they only do so much, and my vision worsens every year. I use some light assistive technologies on the daily - higher contrast, large fonts, zooming in on things. To test the tools I linked to, I spend the occasional workday with all of my monitors turned off, relying on these tools to get work done. I also have a braille reader that I occasionally pull out.&lt;p&gt;I have a different philosophy and approach to using computers than most, and that affects my views on accessibility. Stapling a screenreader onto a graphical application, for example, to me seems like the wrong approach. Text-based applications are much more accessible, and these are my bread and butter. To this end, my work on accessibility involves making more information available as text, organized logically rather than spatially, and making it easier to access and manipulate that information with vision impairments (and other sorts of impairments, too).</text></item><item><author>hatsunearu</author><text>Are you sighted?</text></item><item><author>ddevault</author><text>I recommend using a tiling window manager - they allow you to organize windows logically, rather than spatially.&lt;p&gt;I have also written some plugins for using Vim (text editing) and Weechat (IRC chat) with speech synthesis:&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https:&amp;#x2F;&amp;#x2F;git.sr.ht&amp;#x2F;~sircmpwn&amp;#x2F;dotfiles&amp;#x2F;tree&amp;#x2F;master&amp;#x2F;lib&amp;#x2F;vim&amp;#x2F;vimspeak.vim&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;https:&amp;#x2F;&amp;#x2F;git.sr.ht&amp;#x2F;~sircmpwn&amp;#x2F;dotfiles&amp;#x2F;tree&amp;#x2F;master&amp;#x2F;lib&amp;#x2F;vim&amp;#x2F;vim...&lt;/a&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https:&amp;#x2F;&amp;#x2F;git.sr.ht&amp;#x2F;~sircmpwn&amp;#x2F;dotfiles&amp;#x2F;tree&amp;#x2F;master&amp;#x2F;.weechat&amp;#x2F;python&amp;#x2F;talkative.py&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;https:&amp;#x2F;&amp;#x2F;git.sr.ht&amp;#x2F;~sircmpwn&amp;#x2F;dotfiles&amp;#x2F;tree&amp;#x2F;master&amp;#x2F;.weechat&amp;#x2F;py...&lt;/a&gt;&lt;p&gt;And I have a script for Sway (a tiling window manager) which also gives you audible cues:&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https:&amp;#x2F;&amp;#x2F;git.sr.ht&amp;#x2F;~sircmpwn&amp;#x2F;dotfiles&amp;#x2F;tree&amp;#x2F;master&amp;#x2F;bin&amp;#x2F;swaytalk&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;https:&amp;#x2F;&amp;#x2F;git.sr.ht&amp;#x2F;~sircmpwn&amp;#x2F;dotfiles&amp;#x2F;tree&amp;#x2F;master&amp;#x2F;bin&amp;#x2F;swaytal...&lt;/a&gt;&lt;p&gt;All of this is somewhat incomplete, but it&amp;#x27;s a good starting point if you want to get used to them and work on improvements while you&amp;#x27;re still sighted. Good luck, and let me know if I can be of service.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>gopaz</author><text>I would love to read more about this in your blog!
Sway is my daily driver and I love it!</text></comment>