How does the work of a blind programmer from Finland work?
In the office of the Finnish company Vincit in Tampere, you can see an unusual picture: an employee is sitting at his desk, facing the partition. He has neither a monitor nor a mouse — just a keyboard and headphones. It seems that he is just looking at the wall, but in fact he is busy. This is a blind developer named Tuukka Oyala, and in the blog of the Vincit company he told how his work is arranged.
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Oyala is able to perceive only sunlight and very bright lamps, and these skills do not give anything useful for working at a computer. Nevertheless, he is engaged in web projects, and also advises colleagues on how convenient their work is for people with disabilities.
He has a regular laptop running Windows 10, and all the "magic" is in the programs installed on it. The screen reader intercepts a picture from the screen and presents information in an accessible form: either in Braille through a separate display, or synthesizes speech.
However, this robotic voice does not look like voice assistants like Siri, it is difficult to make out its "speech". He speaks about 450 words per minute — two to three times more than people in a normal conversation. So Oyala hears a paragraph of the text in Finnish. And here the same text is voiced by an English-language speech synthesizer.
Oyala does not use a mouse — only a keyboard with standard combinations of commands: arrows, Tab key to navigate inside the window, Alt + Tab to switch between windows, and so on. Screen readers also have a lot of their own "hotkeys" — for example, to read different parts of the active window, enable or disable some of their own functions.
Finn spends a significant part of his time on the command line, because it turns out faster this way. Of graphical applications, he uses only a browser and an editor, because the corresponding interfaces are made for sighted people who use a mouse, which means they are inconvenient for him.
Oyala calls Windows the most convenient operating system for people with disabilities. I would use Mac OS, but he is confused by their screen reader and navigation models in the system.
He also reads the code using a screen reader: "I skip unnecessary lines or maybe I listen to only half for the sake of context, but if I really need to figure it out, then I read everything like a novel. Naturally, I can't read a giant codebase in this way. In these cases, you have to abstract parts of the code in your mind: this component takes x as input and returns y, no matter what it actually does." Oyala draws a code map in his head. The first programming language for him was Python (says PHP doesn't count).
The main criterion of a developer when choosing a tool is accessibility and efficiency for the blind: "If I cannot use the tool effectively, then it is no longer considered."
Nevertheless, from the outside it seems that Oyala finds a tool for any need and lives an ordinary life. The description of his Twitter profile looks like blindness is just one of his many qualities, and not the main factor determining his life: "Developer, musician, bookworm, blind. I like good tea. I know Finnish."
Keywords: Programmers | Professions | Developer | Blindness | Finland | Finns