"The day we hired a blind programmer"

^{Jason (left), Technical Director of MomoCentral.com and Hervin Haliman (blind), blind developer}

There are very few disabled people on the streets of our cities. This is not because there are few of them at all, not at all, there are a lot of them. It's just that our life and the environment are not suitable for such people. They prefer to stay at home, without annoying the “normal” majority with their views and trying not to advertise their features on the Internet when communicating with other people.

But these people are essentially no different from the rest. Moreover, they may well be better than others. Outstanding scientists, programmers, anyone. If only they have such an opportunity ...

“In August 2014, we placed an advertisement for a developer’s job, along with a link to a test task. Candidates had to pass the test before we call someone for an interview via video link, ” tells the amazing story of SuYuen Chin, co-founder of the freelance platform for MomoCentral.com. She explains that in their company a fully distributed team, no one goes to work in an office, so that a programmer could be in any country.
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One candidate who showed outstanding results in the test was someone named Herwin Haliman from Indonesia.

The girl says that during the video interview she and her colleague Jason and Hervin themselves discussed programming issues, work experience, his family and other general topics: "Then he stopped and calmed down for a second, and the indecision was reflected on his face." She and her colleague did not understand why she was silent, and assumed that this might be due to communication lags. Then he still spoke:

"By the way, I have something to tell you guys about my condition."

The co-founders looked at the guy in bewilderment: “Condition? What is the condition? ”And he was stunned by them:“ In fact, I am blind. ”

Herwin said that he has 0% vision on one eye and 10% on the other. According to the World Health Organization, blindness is considered to be less than 3/60 of vision, or narrowing the field of view to 10 degrees.

Indonesian programmer Hervin Haliman is not at all able to distinguish text on a computer screen. Maybe in medical terminology, he is not considered to be “completely blind”, but in practical terms, for a programmer, this is really a complete loss of vision.

According to WHO statistics , around 285 million people worldwide suffer from complete or partial loss of vision, of which 39 million are considered completely blind, and 246 million have poor eyesight. About 90% of all people with vision loss live in low-income countries.

Although Herwin did not see anything on the screen, he coped superbly with the test task.

Technical director of the company Jason could not believe it: “Wow! Do you want to say that you completed all the testing of the code through the screen reader? ”He exclaimed during the video conference. Jason already had experience working with a visually impaired developer when they jointly fixed a bug in the open source code of the Mozilla Thunderbird project, a bug related to the work of the reading system for the visually impaired.

So it was, Herwin really worked through a screen reader (screen reader). Such a program recognizes text on a monitor screen and reads it out loud. Many operating systems have built-in screen readers, such as Narrator (MS Windows), VoiceOver (OS X), and others. But much more convenient third-party development. For example, commercial programs Jaws for Windows (Job Access With Speech) and Window-eyes are popular. Worthy of competition is the open source program NVDA (NonVisual Desktop Access), which supports 48 languages ​​( repository on Github).

By the way, the NVDA program in 2006 was written in Python by two blind programmers from Australia. Now it is a powerful software tool that is supported by the extensive open-source community.



After recognizing Herwin in his blindness, the employers had to make a decision. Does hiring a programmer who is almost completely blind? They came to the conclusion that the candidate for the position should be determined solely by his abilities and qualifications, and not by any physical signs.

Thus, he was allowed to the second stage of the interview, during which it was necessary to show their programming abilities on the air. The guy was given the same task as all the other candidates.

No one was particularly surprised when he brilliantly performed a test task and proved that he works no worse than his competitors for the position, including those with perfect eyesight. In fact, it worked even better!

In general, it was decided without hesitation that Herwin should be hired to work without reservation. Rather, on the contrary, this guy himself fell into a terrible panic when employers made a decision and prepared a contract to send him for signature. He bombarded them with assurances of how hard and how much he would work, despite his condition, although based on the results of the interview there was no doubt that he would cope with his duties even better than others. He was convinced that there is nothing to worry about, everything is in order.

It seems that blind or visually impaired people often find themselves making excuses for their condition when applying for a job, even if they are not inferior to anyone in mind or ability. This is very inconvenient and humiliating.

Herwin gets paid at the same rate as the rest of the company. Suyuan says that if they decided otherwise, it would “hurt not only him, but also ourselves.” Naturally, there is no question to exploit the guy more than all the others, as in the middle ages they could deal with blind helpless slaves. No one even had such thoughts.


^{Free time}

“There is no reason to give him extra hours, because he writes code just as quickly (if not faster) than any other,” Suyuan writes. The new employee immediately joined the workflow and started producing an excellent result, his code required a minimum review, and he coped with the difficulties that eluded many colleagues.

On the contrary, Hervin is given extra free time so that he can quietly bring his little daughter to school and take her back, take her to the clinic if necessary, etc.

Some time later, the company launched the freelance platform MomoCentral , where selected developers and designers fulfilled customer orders. At first, Herwin was worried that clients wouldn't work with him because of his blindness. Once he asked: "Will you fire me if clients do not like me?" Suyuan says that this question has not yet been erased from her memory, so suddenly he sounded from a man who is an excellent professional.

He was reassured and assured that no one was going to fire him. Although some clients preferred to be careful, soon Hervin received a large order from Spini and worked for a long time with their technical director from Singapore (in the photo), they even became friends.



In the process, it turned out that in some things the programmer needs a little help. For example, he could not recognize specific details of graphic layouts with which to work. However, it turned out that the problem is almost completely eliminated if the customer supplies the layouts and tasks with small text instructions describing what is depicted in graphic form.

Now the Android application that Hervin developed for Spini has hundreds of thousands of users! What else can serve as the best proof that blind people can work just as well as anyone else? Not every healthy programmer with perfect vision has such developments in the asset that are used by hundreds of thousands of people!

This is a great and very inspirational story. Hopefully, it will give strength and energy to blind people who live in Russia, if they want to learn programming, fully work for Russian or foreign customers and get a decent salary.