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Pair Programming with a visually impaired programmer

I'm visually impaired. I've never felt like this would be something that hindered me much in programming. But I've been thinking about pair programming lately. I've never done it, apart from a short session where I was helping someone implement a game in Java.

We used Floobits Which basically allows Google Docs-style collaboration across editors. It worked great, but since I use a screen magnifier, and not all of the screen is visible to me, there was often extra communication necessary to communicate where in the code changes were being made.

Do you have any experience in pairing as/with someone with a visual or other impairment? Are there things I can do to improve the experience?

Top comments (3)

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Jess Lee

I asked Dirk if he's paired programmed with a visually impaired programmer before and he says he has many times and that it's the best and has great results. I realize I sent a screen shot of the conversation earlier and didn't put an alt tag in. Really ironic and I apologize! That must have been frustrating.

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Frederik 👨‍💻➡️🌐 Creemers

I ended up reading the text in the image by zooming in with Safari on my phone. BTW, thanks a lot for not disallowing zooming on this site, a lot of mobile websites do that.

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Jess Lee

Glad you were able to read it!
Your feedback and posts have been really valuable to me and the team at dev.to, thank you :)