Repost from before....


I've encounted a lot of people with vision loss, both blind and low vision, because I am an instructor for them. There is quite a variety. A short list of professions with blind workers....

Lawyer
Independent Living Skills Specialist
Massage Therapist
High Tech Assessor
Piano Tuner
Teacher
Judo Instructor
Writer
Researcher
Telemarketer
CEO (there are a few things you need to do before that point, though)
Student
Musician
Chef
Police officer
Aqua-fitness instructor
CPR instructor
News reporter


People I don't know personally but have heard about

Governor of a State
Military Officer
Orientation and Mobility Instructor (I would REALLY want to see him in action)
Prostitute (During my job interview, I was seriously asked how I would teach O&M to a blind prostitute... Because that issue actually came up).


As for finding a job that suits you, there are a few factors to consider.

First one is, how vital is vision to the job? While vision is important when using computers, there are ways around it. However, it would be much more difficult (and much more dangerous) for someone with vision loss to fly a plane or become a firefighter.

Second, what is your passion? If possible, you want to find a job that you care about. The chef loves to cook, and the ILS specialist loves to help people regain their independence.

Third, how to get the skills you need for that job? It is one thing to want to be a lawyer, but you have to put in your time studying and getting certified.

[deleted]

I'm a public servant. In regards to particular duties, I've found my way into the Parliament and Cabinet space. Basically in my current role I run Parliamentary Briefing Notes (the things the Minister reads from in Question Time) for our department. I also coordinate cross-department consultation things. My role involves a lot of reading (I get pretty tired because of it), plus writing and administration work. There's a need for good political nous, knowledge of Parliament and government processes (pro tip: the majority of public servants pull up short on that front) and written language communication skills.

How I got there? Well in school I knew university was the way to go. I wanted to do Law but ended up in International Studies (by choice, I could have transferred). I did my Honours in International Relations and really my specialisation is regionalism in Asia/Asian politics and political economy (again, Asia in particular - I only know English I should point out). Aaannd then I ended up in our state's human services type department in the policy directorate for disability. The reason being that when I went for the graduate position they were specifically looking for someone with intergovernment experience (i.e. who understood how the various layers of government interact) and I was the standout candidate (not just because my education background was exactly that, even if at an international-national level, rather than national-subnational level).

Desk based work is very accommodating for blind/VI, especially given the range of adaptive technologies available. The public service is a very good employer for people with disability in general because it is accommodating and proactive about wanting to make necessary adaptions to enable you to achieve the most you can.

I'm a software engineer. I work from home as the lead developer for a company that's 100% remote. I've been with them for a few years now. Before that, I did freelance/consulting work for 14yrs, again, all from home.

> how did you go about finding something that suits you?

I seem to have some kind of built-in need to create things and solve problems and learn new stuff on the daily or I get sad and twitchy, so it was kind of the perfect fit. I started out dabbling for fun and then started bidding on and getting small projects, and I just built up my career/portfolio/client base from there.

I'm an administrative assistant for a small business. I mostly take phone calls, handle scheduling, and browse the internet. I got kind of lucky because a family friend owns the company. If not for that, I would have reached out to an organization like LightHouse for job placement.

I decided to delete my original comment and repost because I don't like to edit comments after they've been read. My original comment lacked the explanation of how I went about finding the job I wanted.

I wasn't born blind, but my visual acuity has never been better than 10% or 20/200. If I was American that would qualify me as legally blind even though one can still live a fairly normal life with that visual acuity assuming there's no loss of contrast, color, brightness, or field of view.

I used to love the technology of the late 80s and early 90s and was always curious about how things worked, so my aunt gave me a box with some electronic components, a manual, and a board which was an introduction to electronics for kids. The first exercises were fairly simple to understand, however as I progressed, I stopped understanding what was going on, but the fact that I was building analog synthesizers and radios to use as toys impressed my family to the point that they decided to give me a computer when I was 12, and that took my attention away from electronics.

The first 3 years after having a computer were rather unproductive as I lacked Internet access and there was no one in the family with programming experience to teach me, however at 15 I went to high school where I chose an IT introductory course and learned the basics of programming. Unfortunately what I learned wasn't enough to motivate me because I was never taught how to build anything interesting.

By 17 I quit high school to start working full-time as a tech support call center operator for an Internet services provider, a job for which I had enough vision. Since I spent a lot of time doing nothing at work I decided to use the spare time to learn C properly as I didn't fully understand how pointers worked in high school. During this time I also learned about Linux and how extensively C was used there so I downloaded a Linux distribution and started to use it at home. The spark that really ignited my love for coding happened when a guy on IRC wrote a small IRC bot for me to study and learn how to use network sockets in C that ran on Linux.

Fast forward 4 years and I was already tinkering with the Linux kernel when a friend of mine bought a PDA with Linux, noticed that it ran very slow, and decided to ask me whether I could update the Linux kernel in it to the latest version and optimize it for performance. At the time I had absolutely no experience with anything the size of what he was asking but decided to accept the challenge if he managed to provide me with documentation for the hardware, so he contacted the vendor, got the documentation, and off I went with a vanilla kernel that at the time didn't even have ARM support. When after 3 months I finally got the kernel to boot and show Tux the penguin on the screen I couldn't believe I had done it because up until that point I could only make the device's LEDs light up and send output through a serial port. Another 3 months later I had already ported all the drivers to the new kernel and it was in fact much faster than the original port, so we decided to create a website for the project and share it with the community. In no time we got hundreds of users interested in the project and among them were several companies inviting me for interviews, which is how I found my first full-time job as a programmer.

By 31 I went fully blind and that ended my career as a programmer.