Python is less problematic than many people think. NVDA has a pretty nifty feature (I think JAWS probably does too) to announce indentation through a tone. You can get that through NVDA -> document formatting -> Settings -> line indentation reporting.

That said, I like Rust a lot. It can do high and low-level stuff, and it doesn't use an unreasonable number of sigils or weird symbols. Also, cargo has a formatter that will autoindent the code for you, which is nice if you don't care to do it yourself and want to share with sighties.

No idea about blind discord communities. I'm around on IRC.

Assembly language, of course.

Legally blind programmer here I would recommend Java as you don’t have to worry too much about memory management and once you get it down other programming languages will be easier to learn

Hey there! As a VI programmer who also recently started relying more on screen readers and who has been studying web development for a bit, I find any language that doesn't rely a lot on tabulation is ideal (I do Java, for the most part), though using a good IDE with a Beautifier makes things way easier and more languages accessible as well (I use Visual Studio Code, and with a bit of NVDA tweaking it works like a charm!)
I'm pretty sure there must be a blind programming community somewhere, though I can't seem to find any on Discord (and if anyone knows about one, I'd love to know about it as well!), but there's $1, which is fairly small atm, a lot of us work/study in tech related fields :)

Hi all, I would start with python. I actually created a discord server with one of my friends not long ago called programming for everybody and currently it has less than 10 members but we are growing it. We have both blind and cited programmers on the server. The link is $1

What new work do you want to do? Do you want to continue in your current field? Are there particular kinds of projects you'd like to work on? Answering these questions can help determine what programming language you'll learn first.

The choice of a first programming language is somewhat arbitrary. By "somewhat arbitrary" I mean that you could do well in any of the most popular programming languages for which there are accessible software development packages. However, some professional fields favor particular languages. If you feel drawn to a particular field or a particular project, then choose the language mentioned most frequently in job listings, forum posts, and academic papers for that subject. I'd recommend digging a little bit into a particular field and then writing a new post about what you've found.

"Front end" doesn't have to mean visual. User interface and user interaction design are still heavily biased toward visual design, but principles of good interface design and good interaction design relate to non-visual design as well. If you became a front end designer specializing in non-visual designs, you could fairly quickly be sought out for your expertise.

Pick a language, learn it steadily, create one project after the other, and ask and answer questions on $1.

Another thing to keep in mind is that the everyday practice of programming involves more than just typing out code. You'll learn about "source control" or "version control," a part of your work related both to how you build up software projects over multiple versions. It's also related to how you coordinate work with other programmers.

You have likely found blog posts and stories about blind programmers. The following posts may already be familiar to you, but I'll post a few:


Here's one called "The Tools of a Blind Programmer":

$1


On $1, a site developers are quite familiar with, here's a post called "How can you program if you're blind"

$1


From Perkins School for the Blind, here's an article called "Accessible Coding":
$1



If you're passionate about some subject, you almost certainly can find some way to combine your interest in that subject with programming. Learning by doing is critical in becoming a developer, so go ahead and learn programming by doing development work that keeps you motivated.

Even as a beginning programmer, set an ambitious goal to one day complete a software project specific to one of your interests or hobbies. Then as you learn new concepts you can practice them by creating simple projects related to the grand goal.


For example, if your passions are polka music and goldfish, then your grand goal might be to create an app in which tapping on the screen of a mobile device plays polka music that "feeds" virtual goldfish. (Years from now, the two dozen people intensely interested in both polka music and goldfish may find this Reddit post and wonder why this app still doesn't exist.)

Imagine breaking your PolkaFish app into its simplest components. If you want audio in your app, what is the simplest sound you can imagine having your app make, and how do you write code to do that? What basic math do you need to keep track of how much goldfish have eaten? How do you keep track of multiple goldfish? If the goldfish change over time, how do you keep track of time? How do you assign a name to each goldfish? Each such question could drive you to study a particular programming question, or the questions may come to mind as you're working through the lessons in some formal programming course.

And if you end up creating a PolkaFish app, it may not sell millions, but fellow polka music and goldfish lovers will be ecstatic. And that's great motivation to continue developing and learning.

I'm a sighted programmer but the idea of being able to do it blind leaves me in absolute awe, you bunch of double hard bastards.

If you are into Ruby there is a code editor designed from the ground up for people who are blind.

$1

I think it does other languages too but Ruby is its primary one.

As a VI developer, I am currently working in Javascript (Vue.js, Typescript), with a little bit of Python (Django). I’ve also done work in Swift. I would recommend Python then Javascript, just based on ease of usability.

Best of luck!

Yeah I’ve been wondering about this for a while, part of me wanted to learn python but another part of me wanted to learn JavaScript, which one would be better?

Pretty much any language except for Python works for me, however due to being blind I prefer languages where the predominant coding style uses very descriptive camel case naming, such as Objective-C, Swift, C#, and Java, because I don't use Braille and voice synthesizers have a lot of trouble reading abbreviations. That said I'm currently working on a C project and using 5 different libraries that follow completely different naming conventions without many issues, it just takes a little bit longer for me to read the documentation, or the headers when the documentation doesn't exist. Python doesn't work for me since it's based on indentation, which makes code hard to follow blind, especially without Braille. That said there are blind people using Python in production, such as on the NVDA screen-reader, I just don't know how they can be productive with it. I also avoid languages where variables are prefixed with other characters such as php, which uses $ everywhere, and Perl, which uses $ for scalars, @ for arrays, and % for hashes, because listening to the screen-reader repeat those characters is just annoying.

I don't use Discord, but back when I had sight I used FreeNode (a programmer-centric IRC network). Nowadays I just ask questions here on reddit and sometimes answer them when I'm procrastinating.