In my experience programming is a mental job (no pun intended) and blind devs are equally suited or if I may dare to say, somewhat better equipped to do it as eyes are sometimes a big distraction. I could do programming without getting distracted by people moving around in the cubical for example.
As PG once wrote in an essay [0]: “A good programmer working intensively on his own code can hold it in his mind the way a mathematician holds a problem he's working on.”
So this is how I or every other blind programmer works IMO.
Only UI is something a challenge, though still manageable if one wants (personally I delegate styling part and focus only on the frontend/backend development part as that’s where I can be the most productive.)
The other challenge is the tooling, often especially in enterprise settings, tools of the trade which are GUI-based, not much accessible and this can have a big hit on the performance of a blind developer. Luckily I’ve often able to find an alternative in such situations (or rather opted me out of such activities as it was usually related to non-dev related processes). If everything under the hood is based on API (or command-line like in Linux), finding alternatives won’t remain a challenge.
Could you give examples of tools which make your easier vs. those that make it hard / are impossible to use? This seems like a good additional argument for open / interoperable systems vs. closed, tightly controlled systems.
As PG once wrote in an essay [0]: “A good programmer working intensively on his own code can hold it in his mind the way a mathematician holds a problem he's working on.” So this is how I or every other blind programmer works IMO.
Only UI is something a challenge, though still manageable if one wants (personally I delegate styling part and focus only on the frontend/backend development part as that’s where I can be the most productive.)
The other challenge is the tooling, often especially in enterprise settings, tools of the trade which are GUI-based, not much accessible and this can have a big hit on the performance of a blind developer. Luckily I’ve often able to find an alternative in such situations (or rather opted me out of such activities as it was usually related to non-dev related processes). If everything under the hood is based on API (or command-line like in Linux), finding alternatives won’t remain a challenge.
0]: http://paulgraham.com/head.html