I'm totally blind and a first year computer science student at $1, although I've self-taught and have been doing some programming (starting with simple scripting languages) since around age 8 or so. I like $1. Emacs can do so much, and the audio interface gives us an equivalent for things like syntax highlighting. Before Emacspeak, though, I used notepad++ on Windows with a command console (still my preferred environment for Windows development, unless/until I find something better).

I'd recommend starting with something like $1; my friend /u/graham87 (also totally blind) and I went through it a few years ago and we liked it a lot – although the turtle chapter didn't do that much for us (for obvious reasons).

Feel free to let me know if you have any other questions!

Three leading experts in the field are Jennison Ascencion, Matt King and Rob Dodson. You can look up their work online. Where are you located? If you’re in the SF Bay Area PM me for resources.

I recently had a batch of VI teens who started on HTML, but were really struggling with The move to JS. We went backward a little and did some work with XSLT and XML datasets to get some basic concepts and that seemed to work pretty well.

As a blind coder I also prefer a text editor, although some IDE features are handy.
I have also played with BBC Micro:bit (I work at a school) and that's been fun. we're now moving on to the old MOO system, using telnet-style clients to connect to a "game machine" and build a world. Huge fun.

For education, check out Quorum. It is a pretty neat language, and they have lots of educational resources targeted at VI/blind learners. https://quorumlanguage.com/learn.html. Even if you eventually move to a more mainstream language, Quorum is designed to help people learn programming fundimentals (not to say it isn't generally useful).

Hi, I write code though I'm not a professional programmer.

My guess is that a web-based editor is going to be problematic. Web UI type things are often very iffy, respond inconsistently to shortcut keys, etc. Maybe I'm just old school but I use text editors for code rather than IDEs. Tend to find the latter unbearably unresponsive.

I don't want to give the impression I have the recipe for how to teach programming to blind people, but I might try with an REPL type language like python, ruby, etc. Python has the whitespace thing, but one gets used to it eventually.

Best of luck. I'd like to hear how it went.

I do HTML and Javascript without any trouble, though I tend to use Emacspeak or other text editors. CodePen is a mess accessibility-wise, or was last time I looked.

In Xcode set the font to presentation.

Mac has a really good zoom function; Ctrl-Mouse wheel. You may have to turn on zoom in accesibility panel in systems preferences.

Again on Mac, dark mode really helps me.

Why are you starting with Javascript?

So I have over 20 years experience as a programmer, but I'm without a job atm due to my blind eye.

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Emacspeak may be an option. Open source software for the blind to use speech recognition and synthases using things like FLITE or Festival on a linux host is going to be the big deal because most hardware for the blind is expensive beyond the affordability of most people.

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Languages that don't enjoy using white-space for things is going to be best; Python is unusable as a language when you cant see white-space, I have never seen a good way to code in it blind. Stick with Languages based on C like C, C++, Java, C#, etc. Teach them BASH.

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Teach them the basics, help them automate their own lives.. but don't expect to get them jobs. The market is glutted with sighted, cheap noobs who don't know what market rate looks like and don't really care they are being set up for failure later in their career 2-5 years from now. I'm dealing with companies DAILY right now that if they even suspect I have a vision issue, actively refuse to hire or even cancel the interview request; its all set up so you cant prove it and its all set up to protect the company so there is no way around it, I'm powerless against it and your people will be as well, sadly.

I've worked in IT/Programming since before I developed vision problems. I've been using VSCode (embedded/microcontroller development) with the font cranked up and sometimes a magnifier.

It's taught me a new level of patience. Since I deal with C and C++ mostly, debugging usually involves a couple of breaks and coming back to find out that was a colon instead of a semicolon or something like that.

I tend to write code using TextEdit and running Python scripts in iTerm or Terminal. Those work just fine with VoiceOver, and I'll pop into Xcode to work on Python when I need to do major revisions or jump to a certain line of code when bug testing. I've also found Tabs to work a hell of a lot better than Spaces for the white space in Python since VoiceOver can announce the amount of a repeated bit of punctuation, making it easier to manage indents. I can't speak for Windows, but rather than doing a web interface, having students get used to a Terminal interface, writing and running code directly from directories on their machines, all would work to their advantage. Those skills come in handy when getting into git and practical application of learning how to code.

The application and use of code seems to be largely missing from a lot of curriculums. Sure, you can learn Swift, but how do you turn that into an app? I'm still having trouble finding the right information I need to get that far after having learned Swift and it's really frustrating. Python gets you up and running on building fun little bits of useful functions pretty quickly.

I used to code as a visually impaired person with only 10% of vision since my lack of visual acuity didn't really affect the process, however I stopped after going blind since I have a very hard time understanding code dictated by a screen-reader and struggle a lot with Braille.

Xcode isn't limited to Swift, it also supports C, C++, and Objective-C very well, and is the recommended IDE for the Mac even though from an accessibility perspective I find it to be inferior to Visual Studio 2017 on Windows, especially with the latter's $1 extension. One aspect in which Xcode is superior to Visual Studio, however, is debugging, because it allows for direct interaction with the debugger's console so you only have to type commands whereas in Visual Studio it requires you to use an interface that's not fully accessible to keyboard users without the so-called "object navigation" of NVDA.