parham90

Hi there! A colleague of mine referred me to your post. I'd love to have a call and help with advice and coaching to reduce your anxiety of going blind. Since I published the post @ssivark mentioned, I got a lot of emails from developers who were afraid of going blind or who were actually like yourself and were going blind, so trust me when I say that you are not alone and people like you have pulled through. Since you value showing up and being independent, I'm certain you will pull through, too.

Please reach out to me on my website (https://www.parhamdoustdar.com/). I'd love to help.

> Sure, but does he want to emigrate?

I'd love to. This is a dream that I'm striving for.

> do you want to go to the trouble of getting him a visa?

Now, that'd be a tough one for anyone to answer.

I had a colleague build my blog for me. I love his work because he created a clean theme, and it's very easy for me to navigate. I hadn't thought that it'd also be easier to read for sighted people. That's great to know!

Ouch. No. Don't. :-)

Yes. I'm sorry for the confusing title. This has been pointed out to me and I agree. The reason it hasn't been changed is because it would change the permalink.

Sorry for not giving you the information you were looking for.

And you're surprisingly smart, which you demonstrated through your gedankenexperiment. I'm glad that writing about my experiences has allowed me to read one paragraph of the thoughts of people so much smarter than me. These are brief glimpses, but they definitely humble me.

LOL!

When you put it like this, it seems very impossible. But I've been doing the second part of it for two years, so if you need any help with that, just let me know. Haha.

I used another friend's credit card. There are some services here where some guy in another country who is originally Iranian will charge a fee to take your Iranian Rials and send them to a PayPal account, or go and pay for a service on another website on your behalf.

It costs extra money, but oh well. It's better than staying ignorant and not being able to improve and learn more.

Isn't that so very true.

Thank you a lot for your well wishes.

Well, I'm not doing anything political, so no one will catch me and kill me. I'm using it for exactly the same reasons as you, namely that the United States won't let me view some content, listen to some music and stuff. Even though I have to pay illegally to access this content (which is when I use my Canadian IP), I still am paying for them and must be able to use them.

Haha yes. Though being a blind programmer is not that bad; being in Iran is why I am trying to find a job in another country and relocate.

Exactly. I changed the article to better reflect these though. I'd personally get offended if someone actually meant to say something like this, and since I don't want people to think I'm making such a ridiculous statement, I edited the text to clarify.

Wow, so many awesome software. You'd think that as someone who has used VPNs since the day he first connected to the Internet, I'd know all about these things! :-)

Thanks a lot! I'll definitely try this one out!

Awesome, thanks! I'll definitely try these out!

Hi Dan,

If you're the person who contacted me through an email, I just replied to you! If not, I'll paste my response here:

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Hi Dan! You won’t believe how glad i am that you decided to contact me regarding this, rather than making a decision about me in your mind and not speaking about it. Thank you. Your email made me realize that I had made a mistake there that we developers often do, namely forgetting to explain the context and thinking that the reader already knows it. In Iran, we don’t have many women who go as far as a Masters degree in computer science. Even if they do, they don’t usually enter the workforce as a DevOps or software engineer. This was what I meant with “can you believe it?” — the fact that this lady had gotten so far is unbelievable. I know where you’re coming from, though. Whenever I reveal on the web that I’m a blind programmer, many people talk between themselves and say, “he’s a blind programmer! Can you believe it?” A lot of people in those circles raise an objection about this choice of words, saying that, “Why do you think it’s incredulous for him to code?” So, yes, I should have seen this misunderstanding coming. You’re awesome. I’ll go and change it immediately. Thanks again. Best, Parham

I apologize. The article title has created a misunderstanding for a lot of people. I'm not blaming Docker in the article content (as quoted by others).

Great suggestion. I'm debating whether to actually change it, but it'd end up not matching the permalink. Hmm.

Sorry for being late to this thread.

You can also use some accessibility evaluation tools. I would suggest that you go here, and check the box that says "WCAG 2.0" to get some tools that check accessibility in general:

http://www.w3.org/WAI/ER/tools/

If you fix stuff that these evaluation software show you, I think your blog will be among the very well thought-out websites in terms of accessibility. WAI-ARIA is for times that your application does a lot with Javascript, such as updating a region of text, or when you start using non-semantic elements for stuff they are not meant for (for example using the i tag for an icon, or the span tag as a link, etc).

Yes, I'm using Windows 7. I use that theme because my screen reader is more responsive the less CPU and memory usage I have. So for example, if I open a heavyweight IDE, the fact that it's using so much CPU will make my screen reader lag.

If I were to see this moment, I would wonder how you can bear using a mouse when the keyboard is so much quicker. However, you can probably use the mouse much faster than I can.

Why? It's probably the power of habits. Using a keyboard-mouse combination to interact with the computer is how you've always worked. Using a screen reader with a large number of specialized keystrokes is how I've always worked.

This was a problem years ago. however, nowadays almost all screen readers have a setting to report the indentation of the current line. This was popularized when NVDA (a Windows screen reader) and Orca (a screen reader for Linux) were written, since they are both in Python.

The thing with 3 dimensional objects is that you get a lot of those in real life. All it takes to show a blind person what 3 dimensional looks like is to pick up a keyboard, show its different sides, and describe that "This is the height, this is the width, and this is the depth."

That is very true. My colleagues had a hard time explaining how one can draw in 3D on a 2D medium, like a board. It was there that I figured sighted people see things differently when it's away from them. It's different than how I hear the sound. At least, it hasn't been researched as widely as there has been research done on sight.

This is really one of the points that always amazes me. We have all this potential, right here on earth. Why are we looking for aliens? Why aren't we spending more time in knowing how people with different senses missing understand a particular concept?

This occurred to me while I was struggling with linear regression and its use in machine learning.

Actually, a lot of things you may perceive as visual are not visual, at least if you imagine "visual" as something I (a blind person) cannot understand.

I do a lot of refactoring, maybe even more than you do, simply because I can't understand functions that have two indentation levels (like two if statements inside each other), or functions that go above 15 lines. I'm saying that I may do it more than you because, unlike sighted people, we can't glance at 6 lines at once; we have to look at the code one line at a time. So, the smaller each section (whether it's an if statement, a loop, or a function, depending on the language itself), the better for me.

You are right.

On a different note, I'm glad I got to know insightful people on HN through my post. You guys are helping me know more about myself through your interesting comments. Thank you.

That seems to be fixed now?

I agree. Yoshiro Nakamatsu claims that he invents things while submerging himself under water. While I'm not sure if he's telling the truth, one thing everyone agrees on is your well-said statement. We perform best when under immense pressure, when our fight-or-flight response activates.

Exactly. My screen reader is very adjustable in what it reads. When you have that level of control, you will be able to anticipate some of what you will be hearing, effectively improving the speed at which you understand. It's just how you read with your eyes (i.e. an experiment has found that when reading headlines, people read the first three words and last three words first).

Exactly. The reason I have been able to achieve such a high speed of reading is simply the fact that this sound is all I've heard for most of the day since I was 14. That makes it about 12 years.