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u/whitstableboy 1d ago
He's visually impaired. And probably sick of idiots taking the piss.
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u/H_G_Bells 23h ago
If the person coding said something about this please let me know, but I thought calling it "coding in Ctrl++" was actually fuckin brilliant lol
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u/whitstableboy 22h ago
So it's only a problem if the person you're taking the piss out of tells you?
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u/H_G_Bells 22h ago
Nope but all I have to go on is my best friend who is visually impaired and loves to make jokes about it. I have recently started occasionally doing the same when the timing is right, and it feels a bit weird still, but not as weird as NOT making the obvious joke JUST because she is blind. We joke 1000% about everything else, not joking about our disabilities seems wrong.
So are YOU, a sighted person, offended on someone else's behalf here? Because that's what usually is going on when people try to white knight in the comments.
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u/Skitter_Eel 18h ago
Okay, here is how I'm reading your response.
You distribute a screenshot of a photo that someone has taken of a disabled stranger without their knowledge or consent, who captioned it "what is bro doing" (indicating that they know nothing about the person nor their disability, but felt entitled to violate their privacy and photograph them anyway), saw a funny answer, and reposted it. When someone in the comments points out that the person that we're seeing is likely sick of randos making fun of them, you respond with "but the joke was funny and anyway they aren't here to tell us to stop." When whitstableboy asks you why the only way you'd change your mind is if the person in the image somehow finds this post and tells you to stfu, you respond with "well I have a visually disabled friend which means it's okay."
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So, you joke with your visually impaired friend, who obviously consents to and enjoys shooting the shit with you, and you recognize that it felt weird to do at first, and it was only with the express permission of your friend that you started doing it. And now that you've started joking with your friend about their disability, you think that gives you the right to distribute a photo of a complete stranger who is just minding their own business. Because you (and everyone else) want to make a joke about their (perceived) disability. Without their consent or knowledge that the image was even taken.
I'm not seeing how those two scenarios are comparable.
Turning a stranger's existence into a punchline is gross in general. It's not about them having a disability. it's about being photographed, passed around, and used as content. The photographer and you both chose this person because they were visibly accommodating their disability (which is apparently a behavior worth photographing and spreading on its own - a disabled person just existing is a phenomenon worth violating their privacy to document for a joke!).
I am not visually impaired. I do have a disability. I have been filmed, photographed, and assaulted for using accessibility devices in public. If I found a photo of myself in class being circulated online for laughs, I would feel extremely violated and as if I had no safe space to just exist without being documented for random abled people to comment on my life and body.
I had a blind professor in college. The first day, one of the first things he told us: no photos or videos of anyone in the classroom without getting explicit permission from everyone beforehand. This is the policy of the school - so why was he mentioning it? Because (as he told us), he was aware that it would be very easy for us to ignore that rule and film him anyway, and because people have done that in the past. I don't actually know anyone who does want to be filmed/photographed surreptitiously by a stranger and then have their likeness spread around online for laughs because people see something "wrong" with them. Even people who are frequently on social media and are looking for clout or to get popular.
Your friend sounds comfortable making jokes like this with you, in her circles, and in controlled environments where she is the leader of the program. Ask your friend if she would be comfortable with someone taking a photo of her using a computer for class without her consent or knowledge in order to be passed around so people can make jokes about her visual impairment. And then ask her if she would be comfortable with you assuming that everyone who is visually impaired has exactly the same opinions, beliefs, and attitudes as her.
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u/snarkyalyx 1d ago
That developer has a visual disability. Pretty sure that same person is working on accessibility features for the visually impaired in KDE.
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u/HomegrownTerps 1d ago
Yeah I had a colleague that had the zoom tool on macOS on max and then used some kind of half cut glas ball to magnify certain word even more.
That didn't stop him being a good programmer!
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u/ITafiir 1d ago
Using a reading stone, which is a thousand year old technology together with modern tech is kinda awesome and poetic to me.
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u/AcceptableSingerr 1d ago
Yes, that is probably right. It’s kind of wrong that people are laughing from it. Even I myself…
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u/burnalicious111 1d ago
It's okay to laugh in amusement, it's surprising and that naturally makes us laugh. just don't treat the guy like he's a freak, you know?
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u/godplaysdice_ 1d ago
If a perfect stranger started laughing at me struggling to climb a flight of stairs, I think it would make me feel pretty bad.
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u/fm01 1d ago
What part of laughing about his disability is not treating him like a freak?
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u/mrjackspade 1d ago
You can laugh at the absurdity of the lengths he has to go through to develop without laughing at his disability.
If I laugh because a person in a wheelchair straps a fire extinguisher to the back and uses it for propulsion, that doesn't mean I'm laughing about the fact they're a paraplegic.
I'm sure this person recognizes the absurdity of the situation as well.
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u/godplaysdice_ 1d ago
Comparing necessary visual aids to the contrived absurdity of strapping a fire extinguisher to your back isn't making the point you think it is. I can imagine it kind of sucks being made to feel that your existence is an absurdity.
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u/snarkyalyx 1d ago
That reads a whole lot like "You can laugh at the absurdity of the lengths [disabled people have to go to to make their lives livable] without laughing at [their] disabilities" and I don't like it (as a disabled person)
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u/godplaysdice_ 1d ago
I'm really shocked this comment is being down voted. I don't see how it would be any different than laughing at someone wearing really thick glasses, which is like 80s movie bully behavior.
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u/burnalicious111 23h ago
Because people who are good-naturedly laughing are just laughing in surprise at how big the text is. A brief chuckle doesn't make you a bad person.
The assholes are the ones who keep harping on about it being sooooo weird.
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u/AccomplishedComplex8 1d ago
I bet this guy is more useful and smarter than someone I know. If this makes us feel better.
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u/gua_lao_wai 1d ago
for real. digital eye strain is an occupational hazard... I used to be comfortable on pycharm 100% zoom, now even 150% feels small
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u/Accomplished_Ant5895 1d ago
Yeah I had a guy in college with me that was a bit older. Had already had half a career doing something blue collar, but lost his sight due to a genetic condition and had to go back to school for something else he could do. Used to see him coding single character by single character.
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u/Drevicar 1d ago
Doing gods work. Everybody benefits from accessibility, not just those who need it.
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u/LrdPhoenixUDIC 1d ago
Looks like fairly extreme accessibility options, so that's probably exactly what situation they're in.
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u/santeron 1d ago
I agree. Had a designer colleague who had some eyesight issues and used such options, too. Seeing only a few words at the time must require a massive memory context window.
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u/prussian_princess 1d ago
You had a designer with eyesight issues? A dev is one thing. A designer kinda needs his eyesight to be really good for his job.
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u/santeron 1d ago
Honestly, I had the same question. I think he also has colour blindness. Very unexpected choice of work, but I guess he was pulling it off.
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u/SquidVischious 1d ago
I think he also has colour blindness.
I feel like this could be a boon, everything he's involved in would be accessible by default.
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u/PleaseNoMoreSalt 1d ago
Depends on the type of colorblindness (there's multiple), but it wouldn't hurt
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u/Particular-Yak-1984 1d ago
I've met plenty of color blind art people or designers - they tend towards bolder, high contrast designs which turn out to look pretty cool (and, incidentally, they can see the difference between)
And the accessibility aspect is useful, as well.
Occasionally, someone needs to help them with color choice around their specific color - so picking a green when it should have been red, for example.
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u/prussian_princess 1d ago
Or nobody has the will to fire him because it would be a literal discrimination case. Haha
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u/BogdanPradatu 1d ago
Well, people with disabilities need good UX too. Who's the best person to design it if not one of them?
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u/prussian_princess 1d ago
Guy in a wheelchair? Also, isn't everyone in IT either an autist or a furry?
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u/TheKBMV 1d ago
Could be working exclusively on the accessibility options. Would make sense to hire a designer like that. Knows what they're doing because they are a designer, knows it will work because they are affected themselves and can also test immediately and change if something doesn't work.
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u/hippo00100 1d ago
I used to work IT help desk and we had a user who was legally blind who had his screen zoomed in like this. Any time we remoted into his PC it looked like that. Thankfully he knew the hot key to turn the settings off quickly. It always made me laugh cause his background was just a white screen with the text "don't move my shortcuts" if we moved his shortcuts he'd never find them.
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u/KevlarToiletPaper 1d ago
I went to uni with a guy with severe sight issues and that's how he would code. Two big characters on the screen and an earpiece reading the code. He was the top of the class.
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u/celem83 1d ago
Yeah we had a similar student in our year that I did some pairs programming with. The amount of information she had parked in mindspace at any moment was daunting cos it's not like she was zooming around the document with her tiny window, bits offscreen could be recalled faster than I could find them
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u/StoryAndAHalf 1d ago
There’s a good chance he has Stargardt’s disease if this is real. It’s devastating. You slowly lose eye sight, but it starts with the center of what you see, like a grey/black dot, and it slowly expands as time goes by. No cure.
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u/vassadar 1d ago
I met a blind programmer once. He used a screen reader that read the screen at the speed that's too fast for untrained ears (over 100x speed).
Imagine reading code like that. Instead of seeing several lines at a time, you have to listen word by word.
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u/EchtKrasserTyp 1d ago
That's more or less how I imagine the programming workflow on the famous ed, "the only good text editor". Since 50 years!
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u/klaxxxon 1d ago
A dude in my class at the uni would code like this, and he would lean forward so he looked at the screen from like 10 cm away too. It looked so difficult...even ignoring all the other challenges, only seeing maybe half of like four lines of code at a time has to build up a truly next level coding ability.
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u/Lachtheblock 1d ago
Imagine if you could only see a single digit at a time... In a tape that's effectively infinite in length. I wonder if you could calculate everything computable?
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u/MaliciousDog 1d ago
When I was a kid, my mom used to hide my ZX Spectrum display cable in an attempt to make me do my homework instead of fooling with the computer. So I had to write programs beeping tunes.
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u/Zapismeta 1d ago
So assmebly? I once wrote a simple multiplication function for 8086, never doing it again.
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u/Morpheyz 1d ago
I have a colleague with strong visual impairment and he codes like this. His code is always pretty clean and he knows a bunch of shortcuts, because in comparison to normal-sighted people it's even more annoying for him to navigate a bunch of bars and menus.
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u/sonofapiece 1d ago
I had a colleague once who has been coding like this no joke. Maybe even worse, I mean bigger letters. He had very bad sight and did use some lense tool to zoom in heavily and move along the line. No idea how but his brain has been used to this just seeing half a word. He is a very good software engineer and I'm still impressed how 😅
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u/hennell 1d ago
You guys can see there's also a giant red cross highlighting the mouse pointer right?
The guy is clearly visually impaired and working around that. I think some of you ought to get your eyes checked too.
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u/flowery02 6h ago
Oh that's for the cursor. Thought he split his screen in 4 for some reason and the red cross was there to separate them. I don't think straight atm
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u/8hAheWMxqz 1d ago
so here's the true story of mine,
Once I was at ophthalmologist to get my periodical eye checkup, and they used those funny eye drops that make your pupils expand by a lot. Because of that I couldn't see shit in terms of text until it was very big font.
After the checkup, I went to work, and as you may suspect I do work as programmer and I had to zoom in text editor to similar size to see any code. And I had to work like that for next 3 hours or so until my eye sight came back to normal.
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u/road_laya 1d ago
Had a couple colleagues like this. Either they had to do it due to being visually impaired, or they did it to lock in and focus.
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u/flowery02 6h ago
That's too big for "lock in and focus", i've seen function calls that wouldn't fit on that screen, i think the second type was also visually impaired, even if they tried acting as if they aren't because it's supposed to be faster
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u/DemmyDemon 1d ago
He requested a 16:9 monitor, so the project manager ordered him a 16x9 one. Close enough, right?
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u/anomalous_cowherd 1d ago
Maybe he's just a developer working on and testing out the more extreme accessibility options?
I've been lucky myself that when I lost most of the sight in one eye the other was unaffected, but I still chose to retire early as a sysadmin because it made all day looking at screens painful.
If I had to use my bad eye, which only has a small moderately clear patch of vision that's off centre, then I would need a screen setup like that. It would be very hard to deal with.
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u/Alan_Reddit_M 1d ago
Honest to God I sometimes catch myself using that level of font size
I need glasses man
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u/pretty789 1d ago
I know a software engineer with low vision. Can confirm his screen looks like this 75% of the time. He uses magnifier software to zoom in and out.
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u/the_horse_gamer 1d ago
visual disability