We Hired a Blind Coder
One of my friends is a blind coder (and he sometimes comments here on HN), and he&#x27;s had a very hard time getting regular work as a coder, even for things that seem obvious (like testing and fixing apps and sites for accessibility). He&#x27;s bright and built his own screen reader for Android, among other things. But, I think that&#x27;s a common experience for folks with disabilities; they begin to feel like they have to apologize for their disability, even in cases where it does not inhibit them from doing the work.<p>Even worse, there begins to be a notion that hiring someone with a disability is a charitable act, rather than just making a hiring decision based on their competence for the task. It seems like that would be kinda soul-crushing to always wonder if you were chosen for reasons other than your abilities.<p>I&#x27;ve seen so many interesting&#x2F;disappointing behaviors from people when it comes to people with disabilities. Once I was helping with an event that was organized and led by a woman with cerebral palsy and in a wheelchair. Media showed up to cover the event...and kept trying to talk to me about it (the able-bodied white guy who was mostly there to handle technical stuff and had very little interesting to say about what the event was about), even when the organizer was right next to me and clearly bossing people, including me, around. She also has had difficulty finding regular work in the past, despite being really impressive in a lot of areas.<p>I&#x27;m kinda just ranting here, as I don&#x27;t have good solutions, but I do think it&#x27;d be cool for folks to stop assuming that just because someone can&#x27;t work the way most folks work they can&#x27;t do the same kind of work. There have been blind developers (that I&#x27;ve been aware of) for about as long as I&#x27;ve been using computers (and that&#x27;s a long time). We should stop being shocked by it; though it&#x27;s cool and impressive, it tends to lead to thinking they might not be able to do the job as well, just because they&#x27;re doing it in such a different way.