I think programming is actually one of the most accesible professions out there.

Here's a really popular thread on Stack overflow. I think you might find it interesting... https://stackoverflow.com/questions/118984/how-can-you-program-if-youre-blind

In case you are sighted, here's a youtube demonstration about how Saqib Shaikh, a blind Microsoft engineer, uses visual studio: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=94swlF55tVc

Also, I happened to know about a guy (a colleque of my friend) who is currently working as a front end developer and company's *accessability police*. One might think that front end development is something people really need eyes for but turns out that's not necessarily the case.

I work as a data analyst, although I'm primarily in SQL and R all day. I use VoiceOver in command line for R and my company's host (idk what it's called, tbh I majored in English lmao) for SQL. Works just fine with VoiceOver, although R can be a bit trickier.

TV Raman ($1) is probably the most famous blind SWE, and he has some articles on it. From what I've seen quite a few smart blind young people are going into tech these days--I work for a large tech company and was AMAZED at the number of blind people.

I am a computer engineering professor. Of course my grad students do most of the coding now, while I'm writing proposals. I made it through my PhD (a 5.5 year programming and paper writing marathon) with just as little eyesight left. I code mostly in C, Java (used Eclipse) and C# with Visual Studio. Very possible to be productive.

I do all my coding with a screen reader. Mainly in emacs. Works very well as an accessible ide

I can tell you from personal experience that it is possible to code blind. I wrote a small iOS videogame with 3D graphics a few months ago without any sight and the only help I got was for testing because I can't play my own game. Regarding doing it professionally I personally don't feel like it since I've lost my versatility.

EDIT

The code is a mess and is available $1. I will be refactoring it soon.

Ruby/Node developer here. I do have some vision remaining, though, so mostly I just need a large monitor and a big font. Every now and then I use VoiceOver a little bit - RubyMine supports it pretty well.

Yet another case here. I'm 16, have been blind since birth and have, since about the age of 8, tried absolutely every programming language, IDE, browser, command line utility, operating system and screen reader that I can, with in reason, get my hands on. I'm a huge Linux enthusiast, use vim / neovim all day, every day, even in school, where I write all my notes, including maths and scientific notation, in LaTeX or markdown. I use a macbook for school but typically do my development, mainly php and python, in a Linux partition. I've also used windows 10 with VS Code and NVDA in the recent past to hack on things and with WSL that's also a good, if imperfect (mainly because of WSL) system. I even run a website all about blind and visually impaired computing including, hopefully in the future, articles and videos about programming and my programming workflow. You can look at the "I've taken this site down temporarily because it's being rewritten," page at https://blindcomputing.org..

See http://www.github.com/tvraman/emacspeak/

There is a code editor for Ruby designed specifically for those with no sight https://github.com/edhowland/viper

Not sure how many there are on this sub... I do know from googling for my husband that there are many out there, working for Amazon and other tech giants.

I have a reasonable amount of vision left, enough for me to get by with a bigger screen and zooming in on stuff, and even I find it hard. The "mental block" I have is that I can't imagine being really productive (on the same level as others) in a tech company being blind or VI. That's also what I am scared about. And yeah it's possible to write code/text in an editor, but that's not all that a programmer does. I am worried about the other stuff. Like the operational things. Remoting into a server and reading logs, looking at RabbitMQ clusters when they break, monitoring Kibana for anomalies, interpreting results from a SQL query, etc...

While it might still be possible to do those things in some way or the other, I find it hard to think that you (I) will be able to do those things under pressure. And the tech field is full of pressure.

This brings up another concern. If they do carve out something specific for you to do, then chances are you won't be paid the same as the other fully fledged developers.

I don't mean to be de-motivational, but these questions/points come from inside me because it's things I worry about every day.

Please tell me if/that I am wrong.

I've written text-based games and some productivity apps in Python using nothing but TextEdit and Terminal on my Mac. I code HTML and CSS by hand and am currently teaching myself JavaScript through FreeCodeCamp. Had started off learning Swift via Treehouse and am comfortable with Xcode to use it as an IDE or code editor, but generally have VoiceOver customized enough to be very helpful when busting out code in TextEdit.

I'm fully blind and have only been so for 5.5 years, then found the right resources to learn on my own online after getting tech training and figuring things out for myself.

i have diabetes