Inevitably, whatever happens, you keep on truckingIt&#x27;s a circular but effective way to coupe

Use a text editor such as Emacs or Vim.Migrate from front end development to backend...Learn to live in the command line.Take car of your soul

I would like to second this. Any tiling window manager could be of great help.

Please watch this video on the i3 desktop environment. The windows are managed and can be controlled by keystrokes.<a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.youtube.com&#x2F;watch?v=b_RL_Q8CR78" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.youtube.com&#x2F;watch?v=b_RL_Q8CR78</a>From 2015, a blind engineer uses emacspeak to write C++.<a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.businessinsider.com&#x2F;how-blind-google-engineer-writes-code-2015-5" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.businessinsider.com&#x2F;how-blind-google-engineer-wr...</a>I have read some HN comments in the past from blind engineers. Not sure if they are frontend.

Even as someone who isn&#x27;t blind, I think popularizing more screenless tools (or even tools with just fewer visuals) could be useful for the dev community as a whole. My eye strain is getting especially bad now that we&#x27;re in quarantine since I&#x27;m sitting in front of a monitor nearly the entire day.Hope to see some cool suggestions, tools, and software posted in this thread!

There&#x27;s fair amount of useful information here <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;news.ycombinator.com&#x2F;item?id=18522497" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;news.ycombinator.com&#x2F;item?id=18522497</a>

I was thinking the exact same thing!  It would be something I would definitely be interested in reading just to get a different perspective on how different people approach a site.

One thing to consider is to write a blog on accessibility - it’ll help expose issues to those who develop developer tools which is great but it’ll also help you get exposure for getting work.

It looks like the shortcut depends on what one&#x27;s VoiceOver triggers key are.Here&#x27;s the Apple doc for anyone interested: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;support.apple.com&#x2F;en-us&#x2F;HT201443" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;support.apple.com&#x2F;en-us&#x2F;HT201443</a>

NVDA on Windows also offers a screen curtain. So does TalkBack on Android.

On Macs, there&#x27;s a screen curtain feature that can be turned on and off. The shortcut is FN+CTRL+OPTION+SHIFT+-. It might be different on older versions of OSX, used to use the right option key, but I&#x27;ve forgotten the keystrokes.

Biggest advice, start programming with your monitor covered up by a sheet or turned off now while you still have the option to turn it back on to figure out what you just did.Gradually have it turned off for longer periods without turning it on to see what&#x27;s happening until you can do it without seeing it at all.

I&#x27;m very sorry to hear that.I&#x27;m not sure where you&#x27;re based, but I&#x27;ve heard of Usher&#x27;s Syndrome after hearing a talk from someone named Molly Watt, who also has Usher&#x27;s Syndrome. It might be worth dropping her a line, as in her line of work she might be able to either give some advice, or point you towards someone in your situation that can help.<a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.mollywatt.com&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.mollywatt.com&#x2F;</a>

Hey, there you have a few references that could be of some help!Google: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.businessinsider.com&#x2F;how-blind-google-engineer-writes-code-2015-5?IR=T" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.businessinsider.com&#x2F;how-blind-google-engineer-wr...</a>Visual Studio: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.youtube.com&#x2F;watch?v=94swlF55tVc" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.youtube.com&#x2F;watch?v=94swlF55tVc</a>Forzano (Amazon) <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.youtube.com&#x2F;watch?v=57P_dCEPtRw" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.youtube.com&#x2F;watch?v=57P_dCEPtRw</a>, <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;blog.aboutamazon.com&#x2F;working-at-amazon&#x2F;blind-since-birth-writing-code-at-amazon-since-2013" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;blog.aboutamazon.com&#x2F;working-at-amazon&#x2F;blind-since-b...</a>Wishing you the best, J

Python is totally possible with a screen reader; the screen reader just needs to read out punctuation. It&#x27;s easier with a self voicing application like emacs.

&gt; He had to stop working on languages like Python where a screen reader is of little help.i find this interesting. is it due to the space significance thingy?

Which languages work best with a screen reader?

I had a coworker this happened too.
He was in his late 40s when this happened and so had to use a screen reader instead of a Braille display.
He used edlin over putty on Windows. Since Jaws ran best there for him. He had to stop working on languages like Python where a screen reader is of little help.

I knew a blind software engineer that was decent, he&#x27;d use Eclipse and have his screen reader speed turned very fast.

While I don&#x27;t yet know a ton about the accessibility software development community, I&#x27;ve discovered Deque Labs[1] while looking into some accessibility tooling.They have really good resources and training around accessibility for the web, and some of the software they develop[2] is incorporated into Google Lighthouse.Their guides and videos might help you get a sense for how other people use alternative access methods to interface with the web.With both the skills to write software and a deeper understanding of the use cases you&#x27;ll be well-positioned to help improve things for a lot of people - I&#x27;m sure it could be tough at times, but stick with it, and best of luck to you.[1] - <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.deque.com&#x2F;services&#x2F;accessibility-empathy-lab&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.deque.com&#x2F;services&#x2F;accessibility-empathy-lab&#x2F;</a>[2] - <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;github.com&#x2F;dequelabs&#x2F;axe-core" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;github.com&#x2F;dequelabs&#x2F;axe-core</a>

Not perfectly, and not for long. I wear glasses, but they only do so much, and my vision worsens every year. I use some light assistive technologies on the daily - higher contrast, large fonts, zooming in on things. To test the tools I linked to, I spend the occasional workday with all of my monitors turned off, relying on these tools to get work done. I also have a braille reader that I occasionally pull out.I have a different philosophy and approach to using computers than most, and that affects my views on accessibility. Stapling a screenreader onto a graphical application, for example, to me seems like the wrong approach. Text-based applications are much more accessible, and these are my bread and butter. To this end, my work on accessibility involves making more information available as text, organized logically rather than spatially, and making it easier to access and manipulate that information with vision impairments (and other sorts of impairments, too).

As a huge fan of Plan 9, I would strongly recommend against acme for visually impaired users. It&#x27;s highly mouse-driven, requiring a spacial understanding of the interface and the ability to see where the mouse is and coordinate its movement to execute commands.

Rob Pike&#x27;s Acme editor is another powerful tiling editor you can check out.

As a side note, weechat runs beautifully in Docker. I access it with Glowingbear but though a terminal it would also be trivial.

I recommend using a tiling window manager - they allow you to organize windows logically, rather than spatially.I have also written some plugins for using Vim (text editing) and Weechat (IRC chat) with speech synthesis:<a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;git.sr.ht&#x2F;~sircmpwn&#x2F;dotfiles&#x2F;tree&#x2F;master&#x2F;lib&#x2F;vim&#x2F;vimspeak.vim" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;git.sr.ht&#x2F;~sircmpwn&#x2F;dotfiles&#x2F;tree&#x2F;master&#x2F;lib&#x2F;vim&#x2F;vim...</a><a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;git.sr.ht&#x2F;~sircmpwn&#x2F;dotfiles&#x2F;tree&#x2F;master&#x2F;.weechat&#x2F;python&#x2F;talkative.py" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;git.sr.ht&#x2F;~sircmpwn&#x2F;dotfiles&#x2F;tree&#x2F;master&#x2F;.weechat&#x2F;py...</a>And I have a script for Sway (a tiling window manager) which also gives you audible cues:<a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;git.sr.ht&#x2F;~sircmpwn&#x2F;dotfiles&#x2F;tree&#x2F;master&#x2F;bin&#x2F;swaytalk" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;git.sr.ht&#x2F;~sircmpwn&#x2F;dotfiles&#x2F;tree&#x2F;master&#x2F;bin&#x2F;swaytal...</a>All of this is somewhat incomplete, but it&#x27;s a good starting point if you want to get used to them and work on improvements while you&#x27;re still sighted. Good luck, and let me know if I can be of service.

I work with many engineers who became blind in a variety of ways. If you provide your email address, I can introduce you to them. Here is my temporary email (docesar172 at lagsixtome dot com) if you do not want your contact to be published.

I met a blind front end web developer a few years ago.  I&#x27;m afraid I don&#x27;t have any details on his setup, but they do exist.

Indeed, we are building a web app now to replace an existing GUI. In our group, in at least two companies we have people with color blindness, so we decided to incorporate WCAG design practices from the beginning.It&#x27;s quite hard for us, as we relay on browser extensions to test and tell us whether we are doing accessibility right or not, before we send the app to be tested by our co-workers&#x2F;users.These tools lack somewhat, they are not easy to integrate in the build process, and instead developers have to remember to run them, and check different things (e.g. there are multiple types of color-blindness, EU vs. USA regulations for accessibility, ARIA roles&#x2F;labels where possible for screen readers etc).So you could definitely start working on something in that area. Maybe more tools, more information, services for testing, consultancy.

Accessibility testing&#x2F;engineering is a very important niche within software engineering. You could very easily build a career that will enhance the lives of others in similar situations.

If I were in your position, I&#x27;d probably get a job at someplace like Facebook or Google. They&#x27;re huge, cushy companies and probably have resources for SWEs that go blind. Who knows maybe you can go on disability while you&#x27;re working there, and never have to work again in your lifeBTW, I don&#x27;t know if asking the internet for advice on this subject is a good idea. I imagine it&#x27;s gonna be mostly speculation. I&#x27;d seek out other people that have firsthand experience (i.e. they went blind) and ask what they did and how they&#x27;re doing...

You might want to check out some things like<a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.reddit.com&#x2F;r&#x2F;emacs&#x2F;comments&#x2F;bh0vm0&#x2F;emacspeak_how_the_blind_use_emacs&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.reddit.com&#x2F;r&#x2F;emacs&#x2F;comments&#x2F;bh0vm0&#x2F;emacspeak_how...</a><a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;stackoverflow.com&#x2F;questions&#x2F;118984&#x2F;how-can-you-program-if-youre-blind" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;stackoverflow.com&#x2F;questions&#x2F;118984&#x2F;how-can-you-progr...</a>and also contact some individual programmers with visual impairments.I don&#x27;t have particular expertise in this area but I remember meeting a completely blind software developer in 1995 or 1996 (when presumably the tools available were much more limited!). He said that he had successfully pursued this career for a number of years already at that time. However, I think the things he was working with would be things that you&#x27;d consider more to be backend engineering.I also know a computer scientist who is blind and who has continued researching, publishing, and teaching, but as he works in theory, his work might also feel more backend-like.&gt; - Besides a screen reader, what are some of the best tools for building software with limited vision?If you decide to learn Braille well, Braille terminals are still a thing:<a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;Refreshable_braille_display" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;Refreshable_braille_display</a>(You might have seen one used in the movie Sneakers!)Some fluent Braille readers can use these terminals at very high speeds (although people who use screen readers also often get used to using their screen readers at extremely high speeds).&gt; - Are there blind frontend engineers?I know you might not want to pigeonhole yourself and work specifically on disability-related projects, but a lot of companies are trying to ensure accessibility of their web sites and so are interested in having developers with specific disabilities to help make sure that that works out properly. I believe there are consultancies of people with specific impairments who develop (and test) UI for accessibility to users with similar disabilities.

Do what you&#x27;re passionate about. You&#x27;re going to have a learning curve no matter what, might as well enjoy the ramp up as much as possible.

I&#x27;m glad it&#x27;s fulfilling for you. It is for me too. What I said wasn&#x27;t an indictment on software engineering as a source of joy.I think many 24 year olds have spent so much of their recent years thinking about their career that they might miss the fact that there&#x27;s so much more to life. This time might be better spent in other ways too. I just want to nudge this individual towards considering those things too.

I am failing to see where are you coming from with this. If anything, changing careers to software development made me live a more fulfilling life in the last 3 years.What would be your suggestion for the best way to live a full and fulfilling life?

This advice is universally applicable. We should be returning to first principles in our own lives - although, it’s so hard to do so.

Because programming without sight is hard. It&#x27;s definitely doable and could very well lead to a fulfilling life. Or it might not. Maybe there are other careers that he might be better suited for and where his disability won&#x27;t be as much of a hindrance. If so, he still has time while he can see to prepare for a career change.Basically, the GP is telling the OP to consider all of his options and not to box himself into software engineering just because that&#x27;s what he does now.

I think “Remaining time with vision” is the intended reading, as in if there’s some other career OP wants to switch to, it would be easier to do now

I am confused why his diagnosis makes any difference... this isn&#x27;t a fatal disease, so he has no fewer years to live than the rest of us.If he thought being a software engineer was what he wanted to do to live a fulfilling life before his diagnosis, why would that change now?

Going blind doesn&#x27;t preclude OP from having to make a living, right? We&#x27;d all rather be optimizing for other matters than employment, but most of us don&#x27;t seem to have that luxury.

I just want to throw this out there, just in case you haven&#x27;t deeply considered it. I&#x27;m sure others will answer your question more properly.Have you considered that maybe you don&#x27;t want to be doing software engineering and with this precious remaining time would rather prepare for something entirely different? Not sure what your financial situation will be or if you live somewhere with sufficient social support, but if you&#x27;re going to be blind for life (and you&#x27;re very young), optimizing for employment (ie. &quot;I&#x27;m already a software engineer, may as well commit to that&quot;) might not be the best way to live a full and fulfilling life.

Counting parents without being able to see indentation sounds like hell but surely there are alternative solutions.

You should try out a lisp. They have the simplest syntax and the code is quite concise.&gt; This code turned out to be a lot more complicated than I anticipated. The patch ended up adding a hundred lines of Arc. A hundred lines of Arc! Do you have any idea how many lines of Arc that is? I just looked through the history and the last commit that added that many lines of code was over two years ago when we got Arc to compile to JS. [1]Clojure is quite well documented, and you can do full stack development with it (clojurescript). Intellij has good support for it, and it stores the state of code as an ast. I think there are addons for dealing with ast (search&#x2F;replace) as well.Also, you might want to &quot;settle down&quot; wrt your dev setup (tech, tools), since jumping from project to project, tool to tool won&#x27;t be that easy. Maybe pick a self contained environment you can learn inside out (smalltalk, tools.deps).Emacs seems to check all these points, but it&#x27;s still visual oriented. Maybe build one yourself.[1] <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;news.ycombinator.com&#x2F;item?id=22767204" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;news.ycombinator.com&#x2F;item?id=22767204</a>

If you are in the USA then I think the best profession for the blind is the legal trade. Do you have it in you to change careers?Courts in the USA are by and large accommodating thanks to the ADA.Your technical background, with the loss of vision, with a legal degree, and I think you’d have a very long, lucrative, and fulfilling career.

Yes, there have been professionals offering all types of services for 508 ever since it came out. Might be wrong, but none of the companies I have seen offering these services seems notably successful as a result of their 508 services. Compliance based services are rarely a money maker, though in some situations given predictable need and clients, compliance based services are frequently a way to build relationships that lead to more lucrative deals.

Are there consulting firms that specialize in 508 audits? Seems like a potentially lucrative field given the activist lawsuits that happen in this area.<a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.natlawreview.com&#x2F;article&#x2F;ada-website-litigation-likely-to-increase" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.natlawreview.com&#x2F;article&#x2F;ada-website-litigation-...</a>

Yea my first programming job was translating word docs to accessible html for universities. The jobs around section 508 compliance seem mainly government related

Sighted developers should use a screen reader on their own sites to get an idea of what&#x27;s up. Very simple changes with semantic HTML can make a world of difference. It&#x27;s sometimes as simple as swapping tags for their semantic counterparts.

The W3C&#x27;s Web Content Accessibility Guidelines (WCAG) are the basis for many accessibility laws and more useful for actually learning what makes a site accessible.If you don&#x27;t already place an emphasis on using semantic HTML markup, learn more about that, it&#x27;s the foundation of accessible design.

I would recommend trying to study up on Section 508 compliance <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.hhs.gov&#x2F;web&#x2F;section-508&#x2F;index.html" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.hhs.gov&#x2F;web&#x2F;section-508&#x2F;index.html</a>. It&#x27;s a set of rules that all government orgs in the US must follow for making sure their content is accessible. If you do end up becoming visually impaired you&#x27;ll end up with a unique perspective on building accessible websites.

edbrowse(1) is developed by seeing-impaired person - it&#x27;s a webbrowser with ed(1)-like interface which also does JS. I&#x27;ve heard it&#x27;s awesome for scripting! Though it requires som ed(1)ucation.

I just learned how to make my website accessible to screen readers (using aria labels, tabindex, etc). You should definitely check it out now to learn how it works. I only did part of my website and it seems like a full-time job. I&#x27;m not blind, so I am sure I could have done much better if I was more familiar with tools like Mac&#x27;s VoiceOver. I am sure there&#x27;s a market for these skills, especially in any company that has a decent amount of users. Best of luck!

edbrowse(1) is developed by seeing-impaired person (Karl Dahlke) - it&#x27;s a webbrowser with ed(1)-like interface which also does JS. I&#x27;ve heard it&#x27;s awesome for scripting! Though it requires som ed(1)ucation.<a href="http:&#x2F;&#x2F;edbrowse.org&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;edbrowse.org&#x2F;</a>

<a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.vincit.fi&#x2F;en&#x2F;software-development-450-words-per-minute&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.vincit.fi&#x2F;en&#x2F;software-development-450-words-per-...</a>

I don&#x27;t know if this is helpful to you, but recently I stumbled across this[1] post by a blind developer. He&#x27;s touching briefly on his setup of choice and what tools he chose and why.[1]<a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.vincit.fi&#x2F;en&#x2F;software-development-450-words-per-minute&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.vincit.fi&#x2F;en&#x2F;software-development-450-words-per-...</a>I wish you the best of luck.

Consider getting a job at a fortune 100 company or with the federal government, or with a company that does contracting for the federal government.

There are quite a few blind engineers at my company.Most of the folks I&#x27;ve worked with are either backend engineers or working on frontend accessibility-related features. (Frontend engineering doesn&#x27;t just include design for sighted users!)While I don&#x27;t have any experience myself, I&#x27;d recommend looking at braille displays in addition to screen readers: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;Refreshable_braille_display" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;Refreshable_braille_display</a>

I&#x27;m so sorry to hear that. I&#x27;m curious what people&#x27;s opinions are specifically around frontend. How can software enable someone who&#x27;s blind to ensure that a frontend matches a design? Can we as a community develop new tools for this?

I&#x27;d suggest making the focus being what you need in order to support yourself as a blind person, not being a software engineer.There may be particular things blind people excel at and do very well with. Use a list of those things as your starting point.Perhaps software engineering is on that list, but I&#x27;d make sure.

Accessibility engineering perhaps.I&#x27;m fairly certain I&#x27;m going to get ARMD because of genetics and family history, and won&#x27;t have anyone to care for me. It&#x27;s going to suck.As my late grandfather said: Getting old isn&#x27;t for wimps, but the alternative is worse.

There is this guy who is pretty well known in the spanish dev community:<a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;twitter.com&#x2F;kastwey" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;twitter.com&#x2F;kastwey</a><a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.xataka.com&#x2F;otros&#x2F;soy-ciego-nacimiento-asi-mi-trabajo-como-desarrollador-informatico" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.xataka.com&#x2F;otros&#x2F;soy-ciego-nacimiento-asi-mi-tra...</a>He often talks at conferences about his situation and setup, so if you understand spanish you might be able to find quite 
a lot on this. Also it might be worth a shot contacting him for more info.Best of luck with your new adventure.

First, I&#x27;m very sorry this is happening to you. I hope to later read where you have been very successful.I work for Red Hat, we have a successful executive named Chad E. Foster (<a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;chadefoster.com&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;chadefoster.com&#x2F;</a>), he has some recorded talks that outline some of the pitfalls he&#x27;s encountered and the ways he found around them. Maybe his advice can be of use. (You might even consider reaching out. He seems a very approachable guy.)I worked closely with another person who went blind. He relied on big monitors and monitor settings to help him.Good luck, we&#x27;ll all be rooting for you.

I can&#x27;t imagine how hard it is to keep positive in this situation and I think it&#x27;s great that you&#x27;re asking these practical questions to help your future self out. I hope you get some really useful answers from the rest of the community.I don&#x27;t have the answers to those questions but I did want to drop a line of encouragement and say this; your hard work up until now will not be wasted, whatever you end up doing. You can — and will — find ways to continue to stretch and apply your engineering mind, and most likely in ways that you can&#x27;t predict right now.Later on, you will look back and find that nobody would be better placed for whatever you&#x27;re doing at that moment than you.Finally (and I&#x27;m not saying this to deter you from continuing down the SE route, there are plenty of examples online of partially-sighted or blind SEs doing very well and you&#x27;re attitude is indicative that you should experience no different), but everyone of us has so much more to give to this world than just our skillset, and you don&#x27;t need a qualification for the things that truly matter in life.Keep going and I echo the other commenter, take car of your soul, it&#x27;s important.

There is a lot of good advice here, and I know you can continue to do SE if you’re committed. In addition to the advice here, you could consider- finding businesses who would benefit from employing a blind SE. I have no idea who, but probably companies who care a lot about accessibility- you could become a tech project manager or another career that is tangential to SE. I know there will be obstacles to overcome, but maybe not as many as in SE, idk.

While I don’t have this my grandmother became blind so there could be a genetic disposition and I’ve wondered (worried?) about what would happen if I did. I would focus on the things I could manipulate with my mind rather than a keyboard and monitor. Basically this boils down to the algorithms and mathematical aspects, they are more about thinking and logic than writing code.All too often we get stuck in the tools and not the thing we are trying to do. I remember a quite about photography (sorry for a story about vision): “I wanted to become a photographer so I took a class. We learned all sorts of things shutter speeds, aperture, film types, etc. But of all the things we learned, we never learned where to point the damned camera!” The computer science take on this quote is “Computer Science is no more about computers than astronomy is about telescopes.&quot; I try to keep these in mind when I feel myself drifting towards the tools side of things and come back to what’s important.As also noted, there’s never been a better time for accessibility than now. It’s an opportunity to advance that area and become an expert.

<a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;clinicaltrials.gov&#x2F;ct2&#x2F;results?term=retinitis+pigmentosa&amp;Search=Search" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;clinicaltrials.gov&#x2F;ct2&#x2F;results?term=retinitis+pigmen...</a>i hope the link can help you trials of new medications

Good luck man. I&#x27;m mildly visually impaired myself and the average person gives it no consideration whatsoever.

I agree with those that reference the govt policies that all orgs are suppose to follow.  This could really turn into your career.  I went to school with a blind network engineer and he was top of the class.  Stay strong brother.

I’m really sorry that you have to face that and wish I had better advice.My employer is the U.S. federal government and I would highly recommend considering looking at government (or contractor) jobs: we take very seriously the need to serve ALL of the public and front-end engineers who deeply understand and value accessibility are extremely valuable contributors since they can provide the subjective guidance which no level of automated tool or guideline can provide.The GSA’s 18F has a great guide to building accessible websites:<a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;accessibility.18f.gov&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;accessibility.18f.gov&#x2F;</a>(The BBC guide is also good: <a href="http:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.bbc.co.uk&#x2F;guidelines&#x2F;futuremedia&#x2F;accessibility&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.bbc.co.uk&#x2F;guidelines&#x2F;futuremedia&#x2F;accessibility&#x2F;</a>)I’d treat that as both an area to learn the tools for personal reasons - e.g. get comfortable with the accessibility tools in your favorite operating system - and as an area to learn more. There’s a pretty good story for web accessibility these days but a lot of people do not make much use of it and someone who can make an entire team more efficient has a somewhat uncommon selling point.

Any tips on how to start then? I used to know all the letters in Morse code but it was basically just learning the chart as you mentioned. I&#x27;ve since forgotten most of the alphabet.

Similar experience for when I taught myself the Dvorak layout years ago. My fingers learned the common motion for whole words first. Actually, I&#x27;m not sure I could draw the layout of the qwerty keyboard I&#x27;m typing on right now from memory either.

A while back I worked for a team that had wired up Jenkins to a speaker in the office. Each type of event would trigger a different Zelda sound effect. Victory music for successful deployments, game over music for breaking the build, etc. Notably, dev server exceptions were connected to sword clashing sounds.It led to debugging situations like this:&quot;Okay, so that&#x27;s two clanks when we click on this button, but if we do it on this other page it&#x27;s only one clank. Hm.&quot;Turns out, there are some bugs that are easier to detect this way. Looking at timestamps doesn&#x27;t really give a &quot;sense&quot; of whether two events are in a tight causal link. With sound, you can immediately &quot;hear&quot; that two adverse events are occuring at identical intervals every time. What&#x27;s great is that the sound information doesn&#x27;t take up any additional attention. It just fades into the background if you don&#x27;t need it. When there is a pattern, it stands out.

You reminds me about learning a foreign language you need to think in the foreign language without the translating part.

I wonder if the same thing is possible with sight reading music.

Your comment about proof reading and errors not sounding right reminds me of the &quot;proper&#x2F;best&quot; way to learn Morse code for ham radio. Most everyone is familiar with the charts that show A=.- B=-... etc. Lots of beginners try to actually interpret the sounds in their ears and convert that to a letter and then convert a bunch of those to a word. Obviously, that is very processor intensive and has a high failure rate. The best way is to treat each audio pattern as a letter in a new language and skip the conversion process. Eventually, you recognize entire words just from the sounds.

Relatedly, are there challenges or benefits to reading diffs in this model?

&gt; Also, because code is no longer represented visually as blocks, you&#x27;ll find you&#x27;re building an increasingly detailed memory model of your code.does refactoring by other team members have an outsized negative effect on this?

It is entirely possible I&#x27;m still using my visual cortex. I was once sighted. When I&#x27;m in flow my wife tells me that my eyes spasm as though they&#x27;re following some kind of pattern in space. I&#x27;m not aware I was doing this until she mentioned it. I can say, however, that I&#x27;m not visualizing the way I once did. In fact, because I don&#x27;t have a visual input, conjuring up some kind of imaginary visualization would actually slow me down and be a cognitive burden.

I tried that as well and it does not work for me. What works is association with some stories. For example, to remember a credit card number I associate each 2 digits with a year that gives an event and then the number is a sequence of events.What also works for me to train memory is to learn phrases in a foreign language that I do not understand. Surprisingly combining those with text I do understand leads to better recall of the whole text. It is almost as understanding harms memory.

because code is no longer represented visually as blocks, you&#x27;ll find you&#x27;re building an increasingly detailed memory model of your code. Sighted people do this, too, but they tend to visualize in their mind. When you abandon this two dimensional representation, your non-visual mental map suffers no spatial limitsThat&#x27;s a really interesting idea to me, because I have been trying to improve my memory and recall (mostly of things like telephone numbers) using the Major Memory system and the emphasis behind that and similar techniques seems to be constructing visual imagery which encodes other information. So, it sounds like you are saying that you have found other pathways&#x2F;techniques that do explicitly do not do this.

I find myself going quieter when I read faster. I do take pauses to think through what I’ve just read.
You may want to try separating reading and thinking, and see if that helps you no longer need to think aloud reach word.

FYI that process is called &quot;subvocalization&quot; - I&#x27;m only passingly familiar, but if you search that term there&#x27;s lots of literature about it.

I also rely on the &quot;inner voice&quot; for reading and writing. But I can skip that when programming. I think it&#x27;s related to how you learn that language in the early stage.

I have this inner voice when reading English, which is my second language. However, if I am reading stuffs in Chinese, I can skim through without the inner voice.

I can’t speak to physical blindness, but I have aphantasia[0] which basically means I cannot voluntarily invoke my minds eye. Up until I found out about it last year, I thought that “visualizing” things was a metaphor for thinking, as I didn’t realize people could actually see things without looking at them.There are varying degrees of aphantasia. For context, I am completely unable to “see” anything in my mind. I do not dream either. If I close my eyes and think of something, nothing happens visually, though I can more easily remember things about whatever it is. I would describe it more as complete emptiness, instead of darkness (as darkness implies there is something there at all). I have been like this since I was born.One thing that stood out to me in GPs comment was that programmers tend to visualize code to reason about it. I asked a bunch of my friends after finding out my minds eye is blind and they all said they do it at least sometimes, some of them do it constantly.I obviously don’t, but I can say that I have a very good memory (in general, but also for code), and often find myself capable of context switching between related bits of code faster than many of my peers. I rarely reach for a diagram for explanation, however I do use them very regularly for documentation and explaining designs because I find other people seem to be able to process that format better.I don’t know if my aphantasia contributes to any of this, these are just things I’ve noticed I’m good at. One thing I am terrible at, however, is design.[0] <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.m.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;Aphantasia" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.m.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;Aphantasia</a>

&gt; You&#x27;ll be amazed how good your memory will get without the crutch of sightThat&#x27;s all really interesting. I personally have a problem with my thoughts in that I need to &quot;sound out&quot; or read them aloud in my head. This sometimes really slows me down, I mull over a thought until it sounds right. Especially when I&#x27;m tired I can get stuck in a loop. And it applies when reading too, I can force myself to read faster but usually I slow down and hear every word out of habit.I know some people don&#x27;t have this inner voice. I wonder if it means they can think more freely.

I&#x27;ve heard screen readers going way faster (I don&#x27;t know quantitatively) than what it sounds like when I listen to videos at 2x.I also think it&#x27;s important that the screen readers use a &quot;old school&quot; synthesized voice, instead of a voice that sound natural, because each of the phonemes is articulated distinctly.

I&#x27;ve had the same experience with audio books. I find it&#x27;s easy with entertainment. In normal speech there is a lot of redundancy. You can miss entire sentences and still follow. I don&#x27;t this would be the case with a screen reader.

I worked with a blind dev and his screen reader is incomprehensible by everyone but him. It had to be at like 5-6x. Guy was a wizard. Sure he had some disadvantages with vision but the guy was wicked fast and would pump out the most code

You got me curious.I just put some news interview on YouTube at 2x.It is fun how even the accents are easily recognizable.Anyway, this is in Spanish. My guess by reading the comments is Spanish is a much easier language to listen at a faster speed.

As someone who also does this, I find that the problem becomes not processing the information, but retaining it, and I haven&#x27;t found a solution to that yet.

If you want to try it, older tts voices such as eloquence are intelligible at much higher speeds than the modern natural sounding voices.

I do that, too.Especially presentations. For most movies, I am only comfortable with 1.25x. In presentations people talk extra slowly. It is a classic advice when learning to give presentations, talk slower. After getting used to 2X speed, it becomes extremely frustrating to listen to a live presentation.Although even 2x presentations still feels slower than my reading speed as kid. But I cannot speed read anymore since I need glasses

&gt; you&#x27;ll be bumping the speech rate up to 1.75-2X normal speech. You&#x27;ll be the only one who can understand your screen readerHuh. I already listen to most podcasts and recorded presentations at 2x. Now you make me wonder if I could process information faster with a screen reader even though my sight works just fine...

Do you use the screen reader for your code, too? How do you debug your code?

Can you please recommend software for this? which screen reader should I use? how should I configure it? how do you code with it?

This is incredible!
If you have a couple of minutes, would you mind sharing some of the Mac tool recommendations? I&#x27;m not blind, but as someone working on consumer apps, good examples really help!

I imagine it is like representing code with a flowchart. Suddenly you are a lot less restricted by your mental representation and you can draw arrows any way you want.I often experience something similar, even though I&#x27;m not blind: When I&#x27;m doing algebra I sometimes get stuck &#x27;looking&#x27; at the equation and systematically trying patterns on it. But what works much better is to really load the equation into your brain so that you have an intuitive idea that guides your pattern matching. If you are blind, I suppose you always need to load it up.

I don&#x27;t have this super-power but I can imagine that it could work.When I&#x27;m digging into foreign code especially, I always find myself overwhelmed by the intricacies of the call stack. I get lost in layers, confused by indirections, I lose track of where I was a few steps before or what specific conditions lead me down a particular path.I guess that if you&#x27;re blind you need to become a lot better at keeping track of things for basically the entirity of your daily routine. Imagine merely cooking without sight. You need to know where all the ingredients are, you lack a lot of feedback on what you&#x27;re doing to catch mistakes (did you add the pasta to the water yet or not?). I assume that you need to constantly build a fairly detailed map of the world in your mind where the rest of us can just wing it, basically. I can believe that this skill might make you a better coder.

&gt; My visual representation is definitely 3 dimensional and I am not sure what you mean by abandoning it? I mean, code is statement blocks and controll flow elements. It is data and connections between them at execution. I can imagine, not being visual gives you much more focus and fewer distractions on the mental map, but is it really different?An earlier commenter described it like a directed graph. I think that&#x27;s a pretty good way to describe it. As for whether it is different, I don&#x27;t know how others think. But one thing I do know is that this is how my mind worked for non-analytical thought before I went blind and still does. I&#x27;m just more aware of it now that I don&#x27;t visualize as much. I only really visualize things these days as a way to communicate ideas with sighted engineers.

&quot;When you abandon this two dimensional representation, your non-visual mental map suffers no spatial limits. &quot;My visual representation is definitely 3 dimensional and I am not sure what you mean by abandoning it?
I mean, code is statement blocks and controll flow elements. It is data and connections between them at execution. I can imagine, not being visual gives you much more focus and fewer distractions on the mental map, but is it really different?

I don&#x27;t really find one easier than the other, but I do use indentation in the same way sighted people do.  I find it a lot easier than counting braces in my head.

Just curious, is it harder to read white space indentation code like python versus curly bracket code like JavaScript?

&gt; My blind friend was doing law, but I&#x27;m sure she did something similar to help her map the dependencies between laws.Nobody calls them dependencies, but yes, you would be able to hear if `Re Estates Croft, deceased [2018] NSWSC 1303` were wrong.

&gt; Try 5-6x. I&#x27;ve met some blind people who listen to audio so fast, it sounds like noise to me. As someone who isn&#x27;t blind, I regularly listen to lectures and audiobooks on 1.75-2.5x (depending on the base rate) without issues, but 6x is just something else entirely.Yes, indeed. I was writing that original comment for someone just getting started. What ends up happening is no matter how fast the speech rate is, you&#x27;ll eventually get used to it and your brain will grow impatient. So you&#x27;ll bump the rate up another 0.25 and rinse and repeat. Pretty soon it&#x27;s incomprehensible to anyone but you.I&#x27;m pretty sure anyone can get used to 2X+ without much effort. After a while you&#x27;ll wonder how you ever listened to speech at a normal rate. Be careful, though, as I&#x27;ve found myself grow impatient listening to people in real life and can trace it back to my high-speed listening habits.

i&#x27;m sighted and super adhd. i run my kindle at 4x. its super annoying because they speed the words but not the spaces. half a god damn sentence could go by during their spaces

&gt; you&#x27;ll be bumping the speech rate up to 1.75-2X normal speechTry 5-6x. I&#x27;ve met some blind people who listen to audio so fast, it sounds like noise to me. As someone who isn&#x27;t blind, I regularly listen to lectures and audiobooks on 1.75-2.5x (depending on the base rate) without issues, but 6x is just something else entirely.&gt; Typos will be easily spotted as they just won&#x27;t &quot;sound right&quot;.Really good way to describe this. It&#x27;s almost like listening to an audio fingerprint which magically indexes the answer in your brain. My blind friend was doing law, but I&#x27;m sure she did something similar to help her map the dependencies between laws.

Since I work on the D programming language design, I&#x27;m interested in any advice you can give on what would make a programming language design more accessible to blind programmers.

Hi, I am in a similar boat, I still have sufficient vision to code without a screen reader, but my concern has always been about the non-programming tasks that any modern developer is faced with on a daily basis.In my job I typically spend 3-4 hours a day in the IDE, but but rest of the day is spent looking at production issues and servers, looking at RabbitMQ management UI, etc. The emphasis being on &quot;looking&quot;.I&#x27;m just curious as to how a screen reader would allow you to do those things, in a high pressure environment?

&quot;Now I will have less distraction.&quot; - Leonard Euler upon losing his right eye vision

Wow. Great response. These comments are why I come here. Thank you!

This makes me wonder if we would benefit from forcing children to occasionally train their brains via partial sensory deprivation. Maybe there are aspects of the human brain that go unexercised because we strive to constantly and always use all of our senses for everything simultaneously as much as we possibly can.

Would you be willing to chat privately with a colleague of mine going through a similar lost of sight transition?

You can definitely continue as a software engineer. I&#x27;m living proof. It won&#x27;t be easy, especially at first. For a while it will feel like you&#x27;re working twice as hard just to keep up with your sighted peers. But eventually, the better you get with your tools, you&#x27;ll find you have some superpowers over your sighted peers. For example, as you get better with a screen reader, you&#x27;ll be bumping the speech rate up to 1.75-2X normal speech. You&#x27;ll be the only one who can understand your screen reader. You&#x27;ll become the fastest and most proficient proof reader on your team. Typos will be easily spotted as they just won&#x27;t &quot;sound right&quot;. It will be like listening to a familiar song and then hitting an off note in the melody. And this includes code. Also, because code is no longer represented visually as blocks, you&#x27;ll find you&#x27;re building an increasingly detailed memory model of your code. Sighted people do this, too, but they tend to visualize in their mind. When you abandon this two dimensional representation, your non-visual mental map suffers no spatial limits. You&#x27;ll be amazed how good your memory will get without the crutch of sight. Good luck. If you&#x27;re a Mac user you can hit me up for tool recommendations. My email is my username at gmail dot com.

So sorry to hear this! I have no expert advice to offer, but have you thought about developing a very high level of expertise in some area (preferably in some areas of back end architecture) which allows you to consult without having to write code (unless that is what you truly want to do).Best of luck!

In a similar situation though as not as bad as what you have and have thought I should prepare for the worst. I have CSR(Central Serous Retinopathy) for the last 3 years. It come and goes but my eyesight gets worse every time it comes back. Stay strong.

I am a Software Engineer and my spouse has limited vision. These is based on my experience
1. Use your remaining time with vision to be really really good at touch typing. I mean, you should be able to any character without looking at the keyboard.
2. My spouse finds these magnifiers really useful to read small text. Hoping you can use these if you can retain some vision. <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.amazon.com&#x2F;gp&#x2F;product&#x2F;B01EV0XP8S&#x2F;ref=ppx_yo_dt_b_search_asin_title?ie=UTF8&amp;psc=1" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.amazon.com&#x2F;gp&#x2F;product&#x2F;B01EV0XP8S&#x2F;ref=ppx_yo_dt_b...</a>. 
3. Learn how to use the Accessibility features in Windows, Mac, Android, Linux and ios. Learn the shortcuts. You should think about how to use the tools for low vision (magnifier) and no vision (Audio aids and other stuff)
4. Learn the ADA standards for applications and be an advocate for visually impaired. At my own work, I try to use every opportunity to push for more accessible applications. However there so many software applications deployed to Enterprise every day, without any accessibility considerations. Being a software engineer, I implore you to be a champion for this cause. 
5. People who grew up using computers from the 90s are turning older now. Next 10 to 20 years they will demand the applications they use to be accessible. As an industry, we will need to change the way we do business. 
6. Know that this is going to be Mental Health &#x2F; emotional challenge as well. Get help if needed

This site has resources oriented towards learning braille while you still have sight:<a href="http:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.dotlessbraille.org&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.dotlessbraille.org&#x2F;</a>

You should really talk to Lucas Radaelli, a very tallented blind programmer working at google. He calls himself Brazilian Daredevil (marvel character).<a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;twitter.com&#x2F;lucasradaelli" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;twitter.com&#x2F;lucasradaelli</a>

As I&#x27;m already an Emacs user, I&#x27;d start by looking at what Emacspeak (<a href="http:&#x2F;&#x2F;emacspeak.sourceforge.net" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;emacspeak.sourceforge.net</a>) can offer. Since Emacs itself is way more than a text editor this package is also much more than that. It isn&#x27;t just a screen reader, instead it is an audio based desktop that does email, web, news, plays games, keeps notes, calendars, writes computer languages, etc.

I have no experience with being blind, and I can&#x27;t imagine what it&#x27;s like. I can only wish you the best, and hope it progresses as slowly as possible.I do know one reason why a blind front-end developer can be very valuable for a company: there are a lot of blind people out there, and they need to be able to use the web too. For this reason, a lot of companies care a lot about accessibility, and so do a lot of developers. But despite those best efforts, those developers keep dropping the ball without even noticing, because they don&#x27;t experience it. As a blind developer, you will notice when something your team has built, doesn&#x27;t work for blind people. This can be very valuable in the right situation.

Sorry to hear that! Not sure if you&#x27;re familiar with algolia, but you can search of all of hacker news for blind programming resources:<a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;hn.algolia.com&#x2F;?dateRange=all&amp;page=0&amp;prefix=true&amp;query=I%20am%20blind&amp;sort=byPopularity&amp;type=story" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;hn.algolia.com&#x2F;?dateRange=all&amp;page=0&amp;prefix=true&amp;que...</a>Hope this helps and best of luck!

Because I honestly think that most discrimination is unconscious. Many people conducting interviews have never met a legally blind person and it can make them uncomfortable. Generally, I have found people don’t hire others who make them uncomfortable, or at the least, would put other candidates ahead of them.Once hired and able to demonstrate ability, people are less likely to let that initial uncomfortableness get the better of them.

Curious, while I agree discrimination is wrong, deeply impacts everyone in a number of ways, why at the very least would you not want to know prior to interviewing, being hired, etc - if a company was biased?If it’s not clear, there are ways to detect this, it’s legal, and if I thought there was any opportunity to easily detect biases that might impact me, I would do so.

I have just the visual component of Ushers, I’ve got about 5 degrees left of my visual field. I never really did front end work, but I still regularly do back end, and project management.I haven’t moved to non visual coding yet. Instead I have optimized for the vision I have left. I have a very bright monitor, very bright lights in my office (overhead) and have learned to make a place for everything, and always put things back in their place.Never underestimate the amount of time you can lose from looking for something that is only slightly out of place. Be it a pen, your glasses, or a USB stick.So long as you are able, don’t disclose your impairment to anyone in an employment situation during the interviewing or new hire phase. Discrimination is awful and frustrating and illegal, but it is still the norm and it’s easiest to just avoid it if you can.

Yes, exactly this. I am working on this. Nothing big to announce yet, but slowly getting there.What is it that you love doing? Mind sharing a bit?

I had a similar experience with my career, and after a lot of trying and moping, I recognized it as an opportunity to work and do what i love, without compromise. is there anything that you&#x27;ve been dreaming of working on?

&gt; discovering I&#x27;d be going blind in the parking lot post appointmentThat is devastating.Did you get a second opinion?

This experience has been so humbling. I grew up in a rough household and when I had barely scraped myself past high school graduation and gotten work as a SWE and eventually made it to some fortune 50 companies I thought I had life figured out. Then I started bumping into things and struggling playing my favorite games. My eye doctor casually telling me I have RP and discovering I&#x27;d be going blind in the parking lot post appointment really knocked me on my ass.But there are silver linings. I was born with severe hearing loss but it&#x27;s stable and corrected with hearing aids. I don&#x27;t have any balance issues (I have USH2A, which only results in hearing&#x2F;vision loss). I&#x27;m so fortunate to have experienced all that I have and all that I will. Thank you for the kind words.

&gt;I&#x27;m sipping a decent morning coffee, I&#x27;m in Japan, whereas my home is San Francisco. I&#x27;ve been here for ~5 weeks, trying to escape the coronavirus disaster that is unfolding in the US, and trying to enjoy spring in Japan as well. I&#x27;m lucky enough to be able to afford a few weeks abroad without too many money worries.I would say you&#x27;re selfish or dumb enough to be moving in a time where people should just stop those behaviors and stay wherever the fuck they are... And this is not even considering you know, GHG and stuff.But globally this comment is so full of oneself I&#x27;m amazed.

I don&#x27;t have any answer for Zach (the poster), but I feel a big need to share my feelings about this.I&#x27;m sipping a decent morning coffee, I&#x27;m in Japan, whereas my home is San Francisco. I&#x27;ve been here for ~5 weeks, trying to escape the coronavirus disaster that is unfolding in the US, and trying to enjoy spring in Japan as well. I&#x27;m lucky enough to be able to afford a few weeks abroad without too many money worries.Work is a disaster. The last ~4 years of my life have been both unlucky (e.g. recently I was offered a highly lucrative executive job in SF, only to see the CEO change his mind on the whole operation - not on me specifically - at the last moment) and badly handled by me.My professional career essentially came to a halt and so far didn&#x27;t recover. I still keep my cool, but I am a bit worried about what&#x27;s going to happen in the future, especially given the current situation with the virus.And now, in all of this, few minutes ago I&#x27;ve read &quot;I&#x27;m going blind, how to prepare&quot;, and my perspective suddenly changed. It&#x27;s as if something clicked, and I can now &quot;see&quot; the world as it is.I&#x27;m incredibly lucky. Most of us here are incredibly lucky. Zach, you probably didn&#x27;t mean it, but today you somehow triggered a very positive reaction in me. I wanted to let you know.I also wish you best of luck with your condition, and hope that you will manage to have a great life despite a deteriorating health.

Building up a financial foundation as an employee can take years. The OP may not have that much time.
I therefore suggested algo trading ( their programming skills come to use ), and creating and selling off products ( where they build things and sell them off, instead of building a SaaS business and getting caught up in all the business building).

I’m not sure I agree with this advice though I have no experience with being blind. Possibly creating&#x2F;selling products&#x2F;running a service would be a good way to have an income stream which is reasonably sustainable but I would worry about any graphical front end to any software product, and my general worry would be about loss of income because my expectation would be that finding a job while blind would be hard. I would expect working for a large tech company would have two advantages: 1. This would likely be the most reliable easiest way to actually build up a decent amount of capital; and 2. I would expect a larger company would be more accommodating of your going blind because they would be much better able to cope with a loss of productivity and adjustment period and they may be more nervous of the legal risks of not supporting you. If you run your own business or work for a company with little spare money, it will be much harder to have a loss of productivity or adjustment period.

It&#x27;s silly that this comment is being downvoted. Building up capital is good advice for anybody, if only because you may have a surprise medical condition (or, you know, global pandemic) impact your career and cashflow. In this case OP is &#x27;fortunate&#x27; enough to have early warning. IDK if algo trading etc is the right path, but a solid savings account and investment portfolio never hurt anybody.

Unorthodox suggestion: build up lots of capital ASAP, so that you don’t struggle later commuting to terms with loss of vision as well as potential loss of revenue.Some approaches to consider: Algo trading , creating and selling off products, creating stuff for startups for a stake in the profits.
Right now, you may want to consider all options rather than regretting not doing so later.I have seen two blind persons in my work life: one is a guru with emacs and gnome programming and today runs his own Python training and also sells an accounting package ( called GNU Khata). He was born blind.Another is an architect and advisor at a consulting company. He lost his vision to an accident. He was fortunate to have already built up capital, and used that as a buffer to take a year off to learn how to cope and to continue.Until I’d met them both, I’d thought that suicide might be the only feasible approach were I to go blind. I am now completely positive about living even after blindness, but I do understand the benefits of having a capital base and being financially independent.All the best.

I wasted a bunch of time attempting to start making a mobile single page app accessible. Much of that was due to Safari 12 on an iPad, because I had believed that Apple VoiceOver was good. I found VoiceOver to be incredibly buggy. With iOS system apps, I was able to see where the voice feature was totally misleading or just wrong. And trying to use the ARIA markup to get Safari to voice the UI correctly felt like a dark art, and I gave up after weeks of effort.If Apple VoiceOver is the best, god help the blind, because our software is failing them (and that includes the software I was responsible for).

On the other side of this, I’ve heard that the software Apple makes tends to be very good from an accessibility standpoint. An advantage of not needing to look at it is that you can have your phone screen permanently off and get a massively extended battery life.

I have heard anecdotally that Apple in particular does hire a lot of blind software engineers - in large part to help make its products accessible to the blind.

I go temporarily blind at various unpredictable times, so I&#x27;m not 100% in the non-visual bucket, but I am sometimes. (Simplifying grossly).I find next to no difference between vim, nano, and Sublime Text for useability under a screen reader. You can focus, grab menus, issue macros, all the same.For the most part, the reader won&#x27;t jump back to re-read something to you, unless you ask it to. But you can make it jump between real panes and text panes in much the same way.(There can be a little configuration involved, for both curses and graphics based applications, depending on your reader, but it&#x27;s generally a one-time setup that someone else has done first.)

Emacs has a unique feature as well, it can become the entire gui for anything you are trying to do; web browser, email client, IRC client, etc. all converted into plain text.I even had it setup a few years ago to send and read tweets.

&gt; Emacs and Emacsspeak in particular. Emacs is the richest text-based user experience out there;My naive expectation is that non-visual editors like ed and ex would be easier to use than visual editors like emacs and vi, but I&#x27;m curious to learn more about how people work here. How well do visual editors interact with screen readers? The screen readers would presumably need to offer an interface to reread parts of the screen, and this seems redundant with the non-visual editors that take commands to print like ranges.

If i went blind tomorrow I would invest heavily in:1. Emacs and Emacsspeak in particular. Emacs is the richest text-based user experience out there; imagine if all Terminal apps were configurable and scriptable under the same coherent framework. This is why Emacsspeak is an incredibly valuable asset that I would lean heavily on in the event of vision loss.2. I would invest heavily in making sure that I have a very trivial way to deploy Chrome user extensions or similar such that I could write my own screen readers, document explorers, etc. tailored to my own liking. The only thing close to Emacs is the DOM with JavaScript as it’s Elisp. A lot of people gripe about the web, but the fact that almost all my apps come under the same pliable DOM means I can manipulate without vision almost everything. See e.g. vimperator.These two things mean that you could do most of your job as-is, with assistance from colleagues.As you’re a full stack developer, you’ll find point 2 easy. And point 1 is hard but a worthy investment. Emacs is older than the web and will probably outlive it.I would probably also look at using tree sitter to make screenreading code more efficient at the AST level, because code is parsed linearly but we read it with random access.I’d start working with my screen turned off or covered with paper if I knew ahead of time, that way I could start training. Honestly, computing-wise I wouldn’t be that worried about losing my vision. It’s the rest of life that’s harder.Best of luck to you! Drop me a PM if you’d like some pointers on my two bullet points.

I spent last summer working remotely traveling a lot of Western Europe mostly by myself and it changed my life. I&#x27;d never left the country before and here I was dropped off in Oslo at 1am by myself. Now I have so many memories and I take time most days to look at the pictures I took to try and build stronger mental imagery that I can remember. I wish everyone had the opportunity to do so.

SAP had or has a blind developer at their Walldorf, Germany headquarters. As of 2000, he was using a Braille line.Perhaps back-end work is easier without vision, in particular databases.I hope you get to travel a bit whilst you can still see - catch some beautiful memories (nature) while you can... that&#x27;s what I would do. All the best!

This presentation by a blind software engineer at Microsoft has always stuck with me: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.youtube.com&#x2F;watch?v=94swlF55tVc" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.youtube.com&#x2F;watch?v=94swlF55tVc</a>

I don&#x27;t have any experience programming without visual aids; and you&#x27;ve probably already thought of this aspect though I&#x27;ll mention it just in-case: if I were facing a similar situation, I would look into long-term disability insurance and see if there&#x27;s anything I can do on that front. That way, I could still pursue being productive with blindness or deafblindness, but would have less economic pressure while doing so.Many employers offer a combination of short-term and long-term disability that will provide income (in some cases until you retire) in the event that you can no longer work.

I have hired blind developers in the past and would do so again. Happy to share thoughts on an accessible workplace or discuss a position any time: alex@gatepay.coI would also echo the comment made regarding government positions. There are quite a few compelling coding jobs in the public sector and the government seems to take their responsibilities with regards to workplace needs quite seriously.

Basic on a C64 in the 80s.  I had just enough sight to read the screen if I set it to all caps and adjusted the contrast on the TV.

This is a bit off-topic, but may I ask: how did you get introduced to programming?Feel free to not answer :D

This was my biggest concern. I&#x27;m so relieved to hear this and have very high hopes for you!

Fortunately my hearing loss is stable and correctable using hearing aids.

You might also want to check out &quot;dragonfly&quot;, which is a Python based system for integrating applications with speech recognition and synthesis, and includes a large library of pre-existing modules for many popular applications:<a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;pypi.org&#x2F;project&#x2F;dragonfly&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;pypi.org&#x2F;project&#x2F;dragonfly&#x2F;</a>Project description:Dragonfly offers a powerful Python interface to speech recognition and a high-level language object model to easily create and use voice commands. Dragonfly supports following speech recognition engines:Dragon NaturallySpeaking (DNS), a product of NuanceWindows Speech Recognition (WSR), included with Microsoft Windows Vista and freely available for Windows XP

I&#x27;ve come to understand that this is actually a very powerful reason to actually use tabs instead of spaces for indentation. I used to have the irrational preference of using spaces, but once I learned that screen readers work better with tabs, it was a no-brainer from then on.

Not only is Python not problematic when using a screen reader, but there are blind programmers who gladly choose Python over other languages. The NVDA screen reader, mentioned in the parent comment, is developed primarily by blind programmers, in Python. The Orca screen reader for GNOME was written by a blind friend of mine, in Python. I have another blind friend who wrote and sold several accessible apps for Windows and Mac using Python. And those are just a few anecdotes that I&#x27;m aware of.

I have been blind since birth. I recommend downloading NVDA, a free screen reader for windows, and getting used to using it for basic computer use. Getting used to hearing the speech as fast as possible is key to being able to use it efficiently.You said you have hearing loss. Is it bad enough to make speech output useless? If so you would need to learn braille.I would never try front end design as I have no idea what it should look like, but you may still be able to do it if you have an image in your head of what you are trying to achieve. You would just have to ask someone to check it.Python is not a problem with screen readers, contrary to what someone else said. The screen reader can be set to report the indentation level. In fact I can&#x27;t think of any text based language that wouldn&#x27;t be usable with a screen reader. Tools are a different story. Some work and some don&#x27;t.Feel free to contact me if you would like any more information, weather it&#x27;s about computers or not. rob at mur.org.uk

We do offer a custom version of our OCR reader app for Vision Impaired persons. The app require minimal interaction with the user. Just a single will trigger the phone camera, you have to take a picture and the text language is automatically recognized and played back aloud in your default language and accent with built-in translation powered by Google.The OCR is powered by PixLab[1] and is damn good. The application homepage is <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;i2s.symisc.net" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;i2s.symisc.net</a>. If you are interested in trying the Vision Impaired version, let me know via chm at symisc dot net.[1] <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;pixlab.io&#x2F;cmd?id=docscan" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;pixlab.io&#x2F;cmd?id=docscan</a>

Someone on lobste.rs posted a few days ago that they are doing an month-long experiment programming with their voice. Maybe get in contact with them.<a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;lobste.rs&#x2F;s&#x2F;qi5dmk&#x2F;how_does_your_current_dev_workflow_looks#c_qgak0s" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;lobste.rs&#x2F;s&#x2F;qi5dmk&#x2F;how_does_your_current_dev_workflo...</a>

&gt; don&#x27;t discount yourself even if you&#x27;re blindOne of the strongest programmers I&#x27;ve ever met was blind, and they were working on security software, not accessibility issues.

Apple definitely has blind employees both working in accessibility and in other groups.I only mention that to say don&#x27;t discount yourself even if you&#x27;re blind (or deaf, etc). There are plenty of engineering teams at Apple that would be happy to have you.

I work at google, and have had the privilege of working with some amazing blind programmers. Apple and Google are both investing a lot in a11y.

I’m not sure if you’re willing to consider a change of employer, but when I worked at Apple, their accessibility team never ceased to amaze me. They have several blind, as well as deaf and paralyzed engineers on their A11Y team. I’d argue that’s a large part of why the accessibility story on iOS is as good as it is. Having engineers that have various disabilities work on the accessibility of their products helps ensure that solutions genuinely solve problems in an effective way.I know you may not want to have your disability define your career, but if working to help others that have the same affliction appeals to you, let me know. I’m not there any more, but still have connections I could reach out to for you.

For navigation in the real world, make sure to check out echolocation. Some blind people have been navigating the world using sound reflections like bats. I was recently watching [1] and it blew-out my mind. You could start training now. Apparently after much practice people could be independent to the point of riding bikes.[1] <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.youtube.com&#x2F;watch?v=08smCjKWNL0" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.youtube.com&#x2F;watch?v=08smCjKWNL0</a>

Only tangentially related to your question perhaps, but it&#x27;s good time to become a musician, and to learn all the various software and digital elements involved in making modern music.

Get off the computer and enjoy the sensory world while you can. You will have adequate time to hone your comprehension of process, formalism and other manner of abstract erudition thereafter, which will have its own beauty. Travel is a bitch if you can&#x27;t see. Get out there now. I can recommend from first hand experience cycle touring with a tent and sleeping bag as a good way to see much of the world at a leisurely pace and very cheaply which does not require you to waste time saving money. Having that geographical reference to hang subsequently acquired knowledge on is golden. Get out there. <a href="http:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.artoftravel.net&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.artoftravel.net&#x2F;</a>

Maybe focus more on software design &#x2F; general architecture.
Or teaching programming concepts. Or some other job that you would be using your knowledge while not having to stare at code for hours on a screen.

I&#x27;m interested in hearing more about that as well.

Sorry I have not been monitoring this.Here is what I learned back then. What we were working on was an automated system to monitor data circuits, which back then were basically modems connected to a dedicated audio circuit. They called it a private line data circuit.The problem back then of course was that you essentially needed a way to sample the audio modem circuit and do analysis of it. We had written some code on a Symbolics computer that could do the analysis (that was the old timey LISP type AI computer).The trick was how to get the samples without a person having to jack in and record it or whatever. Today this seems trivial but it was more complicated back then. We brainstormed on it (he had a sharp ear BTW). We ended up building a device that had some custom hardware on it that then interfaced the ADC over DMA to a 68000 processor and could monitor multiple circuits etc. and fed that to the Symbolics which could predict all sorts of things.Anyhow, it taught me how you could sort of combine the two to offload some stuff to HW but still keep the flexibility of SW.I see a lot of similar types of trade offs today. Now of course we have FPGA&#x27;s for hardware that can do a lot but you still need interface circuitry to the real world depending on the application. I have worked on a lot of projects where there is a tendency to always reach for software or vice versa.What I think happens is you might have a company let&#x27;s say company &#x27;G&#x27; that is basically a software company and everyone they hire knows software really well. And they interview and hire more software people. Then if they were to let&#x27;s say... buy a company that makes HW, perhaps phones, they have a difficult time. Or they try to build out a network and struggle.Then maybe you have another company &#x27;V&#x27; and they are good at building a network but they don&#x27;t understand software so if they buy a software company it is difficult for them.Then you have a company Apple that has always done both and they seem to make better choices.I am sure a lot of you out there can think of similar examples.This is just my observations based on my experiences. The more a team has a diverse set of experiences and background (HW, SW, Network) the better the chance of getting an optimal solution.

I think now it would be comparable to having good clue which workload should be server side vs which workload should be client side in web dev. Back end devs want to do all on back end and front end guys want to do all in front end. Then you get issues like API returning too much data that someone can abuse or hundreds of calls with ajax to setup something....

Meat of your comment to me is this phrase, “he had this insight about the balance between when to use hardware and when to use software that I think is somewhat lacking today” - would you attempt to clarify what you’re expressing he would have said about balancing the design of how software &amp; hardware work together? Thanks.

I did as well. I can&#x27;t find a reference at the moment, but I&#x27;m almost positive the authors of the screenplay said as much in the early 90s.

I always assumed Whistler in Sneakers was a reference to <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;Joybubbles" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;Joybubbles</a>

&gt; but in a way, that was his secret power because his code almost never failed in testing.Reminds me of the stories about Stephen Hawking and how it seemed like he was just sitting there miserable but he instead he was thinking very deeply and how his disabilities forced him to be able to think visually in his mind and compensate because he would only get a quick chance to absorb input.

Me too, I have always been slower, not a fault at all. If you code slow and make fewer mistakes then you may end up being faster in the end than someone who cranks it out but has to redo it 3 times when problems are found in testing. Of course there are I am sure super programs who can do both, but I haven&#x27;t seen one yet.

&gt; coded slower [...] his code almost never failed in testing.Huh. I&#x27;ve had this most of my career as well, especially in the latter years. I do consider this a secret power, but many of my colleagues (especially the younger ones) view it as a fault.

That 80s guy sounds like a genius, but this guy is probably not, like most of us. He may be intelligent and hardworking, but a genius is on a different level. Another thing is that progressive myopia is something different than going completely blind and deaf. That is this guy&#x27;s fate. How do you communicate then?

I started my career at Bell Labs in the 80&#x27;s and one engineer there made a huge impact on me. I learned more from him that any other single person I have worked with since. He suffered from progressive myopia so he had a rig with a camera and a big screen and a huge monitor. He coded slower than everyone else, but in a way, that was his secret power because his code almost never failed in testing. Also, he was brilliant and I learned more about hardware and software from him that I did in Masters EE program. Also, he had this insight about the balance between when to use hardware and when to use software that I think is somewhat lacking today (discussion for another day).  A lot of people have said that he was the inspiration for the character in the movie Sneakers (Whistler) could be he was really well know but passed away some time ago.  I recall a time when we had a big meeting with a lot of executives and he had long hair and a beard and after the meeting one of the big wigs said to me &quot;who is the guys that looks like Jesus, he is a genius&quot;.  Sorry that I am going on a bit, I cannot even begin to understand what you are going through, but I can tell you that you should not underestimate the impact you can have on others.  I wish I had better words here, I wish I knew more about what to suggest to help you technically, but all I know is that someone dealing something with something similar to you meant a great deal to me personally and professionally. Best wishes.

Sometime back, I worked with a colleague who was completely blind. As I was introduced to this new would-be-teammate, I instinctively tried to thrust my hand forward for a handshake, only to stop myself short with a horrifying realization that might not be an appropriate form. Fortunately, to my great relief, he was used to such situations and offered his hand first. This moment particularly struck me.The experience of working with him was exciting and as challenging as it was enlightening, as I think I learnt a bit more about myself and all the things around me I took for granted.Anyway, here are some of my observations1. Navigating a busy open-layout office is possible, but hard. My colleague was really great at doing so without using his stick.2. Often it is the sighted who would hesitate at water-cooler chat for fear of offending or saying something untoward, but the colleague took the initiative to put them at ease, so it was always fun. No one could slip out unnoticed by him. The puns were mortifyingly entertaining, which I think only a blind person can make.3. The written form of communication goes great lengths in bridging the communication gap (This is applicable in general as well)4. ASCII diagrams and SVGs are great ways of making content such as flow charts and architecture diagrams accessible. Tools such as PlantUML, dotviz, mermaidjs are helpful.5. Statically typed languages make it much easier to work within a screen-reader environment. We were working with Go, and he had much better success with it than a language that was used in other parts of the company.6. Emacs seems to have a lot of tooling to facilitate the use of screen-readers.7. Open-office chatter (in-person and chat) can become overwhelming very quickly, so setting expectations ahead on how you&#x27;d plan to work helps your teammates.8. Monitoring is hard (in a server-side environment) as the notion of &quot;taking a look&quot; at the graphs doesn&#x27;t translate for someone who is not sighted. I wish there were better ways that are more accessible.Losing sight is perhaps one of the most terrifying prospects anyone can face. However, seeing (see what I did there) my colleague also gives me hope that all is not futile. It is possible to live a fulfilled life. It is possible to have a successful career as a software developer. Being blind does not have to mean disabled but merely differently-abled.I wish you the best of luck.

<a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.youtube.com&#x2F;results?search_query=blind+software+engineer" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.youtube.com&#x2F;results?search_query=blind+software+...</a>

I suggest practice with voice readers without looking e.g. start with web browsing and NVDA. When you get confused, try to resolve without looking. If that fails, use your sight to work out why you went wrong: especially learn what heuristic you could have used to correct yourself without needing sight? You would need someone else to help if you try to learn after your sight went - I found that the accessibility software had a lot of showstopper usability bugs.If your balance issues are manageable, perhaps start joining blind social or support groups in your area. Potentially you could help them with their technical issues, since maybe you would learn a lot by helping others, and there are always people that really need help with tech!And a supremely left-field idea: Perhaps investigate changing states or countries if you find that your local systems are not helping you? Some places have better infrastructure for the blind or sight impaired - do you see pedestrian markings locally <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;Tactile_paving" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;Tactile_paving</a> or are they dangerous: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;99percentinvisible.org&#x2F;article&#x2F;death-tactile-paving-chinas-precarious-paths-visually-impaired&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;99percentinvisible.org&#x2F;article&#x2F;death-tactile-paving-...</a> also it is rumoured that some wealthy countries with socialised health may help you more?Good luck. PS: I’m not sight impaired.

<a href="http:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.alteraeon.com&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.alteraeon.com&#x2F;</a> may be of interest.Alter Aeon is a text-based online roleplaying game (a MUD). I believe that over half of their players are vision-impaired. Perhaps they could be a source of information as well as community.

I have no real advice. But I want to wish you good luck. And let you know that at my modest level, I will always advocate for good accessibility in software and hardware.

Curious, when doing your research on the syndrome, did you encounter following article in Nature: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.nature.com&#x2F;articles&#x2F;jhg201029" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.nature.com&#x2F;articles&#x2F;jhg201029</a>And did you read majority of articles that cite this article? <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;scholar.google.com&#x2F;scholar?hl=en&amp;as_sdt=0%2C5&amp;q=Genetics+and+pathological+mechanisms+of+Usher+syndrome&amp;btnG=" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;scholar.google.com&#x2F;scholar?hl=en&amp;as_sdt=0%2C5&amp;q=Gene...</a>

Partially sighted people are less productive than blind people. You had problems with seeing difference between characters, but if you would have used a screenreader it would just unambiguously tell you which one it is... From my experience people with very low vision will generally do far more spelling errors when typing on a phone than me (and I am not comfortable typing on a touch screen).

A couple of years ago I was staring down the barrel of giving up a 20 year career in software development due to a degenerative eye condition.I can&#x27;t tell you how many hours I wasted chasing parse errors in PHP code because I literally couldn&#x27;t see the difference between a &quot;.&quot; and &quot;,&quot; anymore.My solution ended up being transplant surgery to replace one of my corneas, which has largely restored vision in one eye. I still use a lot of large fonts, high contrast, etc, but I&#x27;m able to manage much easier on a day to day basis.I had a wonderfully supportive employer, so when it was clear to me that unless something changed dramatically (i.e. surgery) I would no longer be able to do my current job we sat down (at my instigation) and discussed what this might look like in terms of both what sort of role I could continue to do, and what I wanted to do (not always the same thing, and the latter is important).My manager at the time said something which has stuck with me. He said that (paraphrasing) the thing he really valued was the care, thought and attention I paid to the work I did. And that the way that had been expressed was through fingers on keyboard writing code. We just needed to find a way of capturing that thought and turning it into code a different way.We never fully made the transition into a completely different role because my surgery meant I was able to continue (after 20 years I still love coding and didn&#x27;t want to entirely give that up). But for me, that was going to mean spending more time with junior developers, coaching, mentoring, etc. I didn&#x27;t want to manage people, so moving up the chain into management wasn&#x27;t an option for me. But Project Management, might be an option that allows you to leverage some technical skills, but be less dependent on your vision.So, if your employer is amenable, don&#x27;t try to do this alone. See what changes can be made to accommodate your needs. Having a degenerative condition where you&#x27;re not going blind overnight is an advantage, because it means you can work with your employer to adapt your role over time to suit you.

My company (prgmr.com) gave a presentation about hiring our first blind engineer at SCALE last year:<a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.socallinuxexpo.org&#x2F;scale&#x2F;17x&#x2F;presentations&#x2F;accidentally-accessible-mostly-foss-workflow" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.socallinuxexpo.org&#x2F;scale&#x2F;17x&#x2F;presentations&#x2F;accid...</a><a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.youtube.com&#x2F;watch?v=FvrQPdt1X30&amp;feature=youtu.be" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.youtube.com&#x2F;watch?v=FvrQPdt1X30&amp;feature=youtu.be</a>We hired another blind developer who occasionally does some frontend work. If any sort of visual layout is involved, that obviously needs review, but he&#x27;s able to add on to existing pages. He&#x27;s also trying selenium for testing the visual layout.It will probably be more of a challenge for you since you&#x27;re having to learn to deal with lack of vision as an adult rather than having been blind since a young age. In your position I&#x27;d seek out advice specifically from others who have gone through the same process.

Like some of the other comments, I’d focus on developing skills in web accessibility and areas that will help you be more productive.I’m not sure how severe your hearing loss is but if podcasts are your style check out <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;drunkenux.com&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;drunkenux.com&#x2F;</a>. The hosts have done a lot of episodes speaking from their backgrounds building education sites, where accessibility in development is required (also it’s funny and who doesn’t need a little levity).More than anything, experiment with the suggestions here, different input methods, track your progress, Etc. For managing the anxiety especially, dedicating time weekly to work on your system can lead to some of the biggest rewards and occasionally, key insights.Carpe Diem and keep us posted as you find the hacks that work for you!

I recommend you work on your support network now. As you get less able you begin to retreat more on to yourself and your family and less towards the people outside your comfort circle. Make an effort to meet new people and make new friends, now. Also, you will want to stay home more as you feel less comfortable with your abilities, so create habits that will force you to go out and interact with people.
For whatever reason, many people are uncomfortable with the disabled, they aren&#x27;t trying to be jerks but it&#x27;s hard for many, so if people get used to you early then it will be so much easier on you in the long run. One advantage of knowing what&#x27;s coming is that you can change your behavior now so you can better deal with your changing abilities.If you haven&#x27;t yet, get in contact with the local Braille Institute so they can help you.An interesting thing about humans is that we get used to whatever life brings us. Problems that seemed impossible to accept and deal with when you are facing them will suddenly be very manageable once you have to deal with them directly.Be strong and good luck!

Look into becoming an ADA consultant for web&#x2F;mobile.  It&#x27;s a growing market that companies are forced to pay attention to due to lawsuits.  There is recurring work every time they redesign parts of the front end, which is often.

I don’t have any experience, but I had a girlfriend in the late 1980s who’s dad was a totally-blind programmer. Surely in the past 30+ years technology has made a lot of strides so that it should be even more doable now than it was back then. Or in other words, if a guy who had been totally blind from birth could be a programmer in the 1980s, you can definitely do it in the 2020s.

No advice, just offering moral support and letting you know that you&#x27;re not alone.  I have macular degeneration so I&#x27;m not going completely blind, but I&#x27;m losing my foveas so that still presents some significant challenges when it comes to coding.  At the moment I&#x27;m compensating with larger fonts.  I don&#x27;t know what I&#x27;ll do when that&#x27;s not enough any more.

&gt;Are there blind frontend engineers?I&#x27;m sure this has been mentioned, but front ends need to be usable by blind users so I would imagine a blind front end developer would be extremely useful in that case, at a minimum.

&gt; I&#x27;m a 24 y&#x2F;o full stack engineer( I know some of you are rolling your eyes right nowIt can be tough some times being a younger person in the industry, but know that there is no reason anyone here should be rolling their eyes at this. I was working full time in software development at 17 myself.&gt; What kinds of software engineering lend themselves to someone with limited vision? Backend only?There is a growing market for front end web accessibility. Especially for software that meets the needs of both sighted and non-sighted individuals. Not only do I think there is a place for non-sighted individuals in front end software development if that&#x27;s something you are interested in, but I think it&#x27;s vital to have these individuals having a role in developing front end software.&gt; Does your company employ blind engineers? How well does it work? What kind of engineer are they?We do not currently employ any blind engineers, though we would be very happy to hire one. We have customers that require visual accessibility compliance and right now this compliance is largely being implemented by sighted people. I would consider this a non ideal situation.With this said, I also don&#x27;t want it to be felt like you have to specialize in your own disability either. I have known some really badass back end engineers that are entirely blind. With the right tools and some experience, they are able to consume content at the same speed as any sighted person. Hell, in some cases... significantly faster.&gt; I&#x27;m really trying to get ahead of this thingI think this speaks for your character. It&#x27;s easy to get caught up in denial and to hold out until the very last moment.I can&#x27;t personally speak to how it feels to deal with going blind, so I&#x27;ll let those with much more experience in this area speak to that. One thing I can say though, is to start using the available tools now and full time, even if you don&#x27;t require them yet. By the time you find yourself depending on them, you will already be accustomed to using them.I&#x27;d be happy to speak about my own personal struggles with disability (I am rapidly becoming deaf), but honestly... I&#x27;ll spare you that unless you actually want me to. It&#x27;s obviously a very different experience and I don&#x27;t want it to feel like I am diminishing the significance of what you are going through. :)&gt; Since my diagnosis I&#x27;ve slowly developed a crippling anxiety centered around a feeling that I need to figure out the rest of my life before it&#x27;s too late.This is a very reasonable and understandable reaction to what you are dealing with.

On the question of tools:1. Emacspeak, a text-to-speech system developed by T.V. Raman (a developer at Google) who was blind since childhood: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;Emacspeak" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;Emacspeak</a> &amp; <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;T._V._Raman" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;T._V._Raman</a>2. How a completely blind dev&#x2F;manager uses Emacs daily (talk at a recent Emacsconf) -- <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.youtube.com&#x2F;watch?v=i8dBvssptP0" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.youtube.com&#x2F;watch?v=i8dBvssptP0</a> &amp; <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.parhamdoustdar.com&#x2F;2016&#x2F;04&#x2F;03&#x2F;tools-of-blind-programmer&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.parhamdoustdar.com&#x2F;2016&#x2F;04&#x2F;03&#x2F;tools-of-blind-pro...</a>3. Google has an app called &quot;Lookout&quot; which they suggest using while wearing your phone attached to a lanyard around your neck, that uses ML (not fully perfect) to identify objects in front of you.To the extent that you stay within some homogeneous environment and avoid fragmentation in your tools, you might be able to get good text-to-speech. (The quality of AI solutions will hopefully continue improving drastically over the next few years)Also, probably experiment with and invest into one of the software ecosystems (Google&#x2F;Apple&#x2F;Amazon&#x2F;etc) so they get comfortable with understanding your voice.You probably want to avoid the mouse, and get comfortable with a fully keyboard based workflow. To that end, check out browsers like Qute and Next.----Beyond software and tools, would you want to relocate to some place where there is dependable public transport (or cab service)? Once you move, it might take a while to get familiar with the surroundings.Good luck, and hope you manage to stay ahead of the curve. I&#x27;m sure finding community would help. Try reaching out to some of the people mentioned in this and other comments -- I&#x27;m sure they would love to help.----PS, HN&#x27;ers: It would be great to find a few interviews with accessibility-oriented guidance on &quot;Usesthis&quot;. To that end, I&#x27;ve opened a Github issue with this request. Feel free to comment there and add suggestions of people to interview, or other recommendations <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;github.com&#x2F;waferbaby&#x2F;usesthis&#x2F;issues&#x2F;97" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;github.com&#x2F;waferbaby&#x2F;usesthis&#x2F;issues&#x2F;97</a>

First off, I&#x27;m so sorry to hear that you&#x27;ve been diagnosed with this condition. I haven&#x27;t read through any of the replies to your question aside from a quick read through, so I&#x27;m sorry if any of my advice is redundant, helpful or not.My immediate advice to you as an engineer is to remember that your most powerful and valuable tool is your mind. The ability to solve software engineering problems starts with the cognitive aspects of your knowledge, intuition, experience and who you are. An engineer&#x27;s cognitive ability to solve problems and guide outcomes is the most valuable thing that we bring to any project we join or undertake.Look for a team or project that values critical thinking to drive execution over just banging out code. Don&#x27;t sweat being hands on in the long run, i.e. writing code and pushing features. Make the most of the work you&#x27;re doing now to start honing your skills to be able to drive things like architecture, implementation choices, etc. based on experience, lessons learned, people you enjoy working with etc.Also, keep in mind that you have a unique albeit unfortunate set of circumstances that can bring a perspective as you&#x27;re going through this to what works and doesn&#x27;t for others in similar circumstances that want to have careers in software technology. Be open to an awareness for areas where you can help solve problems and be involved in building solutions for others in a similar circumstance as you&#x27;re in. Look for ways to develop products, tools, advisory groups, training, etc. that can help engineers with similar disabilities.I wish you the best and again, I&#x27;m very sorry you&#x27;re facing this. I hope that my thoughts help in some way.

I only have a little to offer:First, in college I knew a guy with RP. He was hands-down the most brilliant coder I knew at the time. Aside from blowing up the screen (screenreaders did not yet exist), he ended up simply memorizing his code. He held the whole thing in his head.I also knew -- internet-only -- a woman with the more severe form of Usher&#x27;s (born deaf, go blind) -- who was quite techy even in the early 1990s and now works doing tech stuff for libraries, last I checked. She, also, had it going on.In short, I can tell you this: other people have done it, so you also have a shot at it.

I read a blog post a while ago that was quite remarkable. From memory it was someone going blind (your age) while studying law, and halfway through couldn&#x27;t read any more.Determined to finish his degree he developed the ability to listed to audiobooks ludicrously fast, way faster than reading, and it opened up a whole new world to him that was previously hidden.Chumhumming around today I&#x27;m pretty sure the man&#x27;s name is Isaac Lidsky. He&#x27;s done TED talks and been interviewed on podcasts, written blogs posts, etc.Go check him out and even try and contact him.Good luck. I reckon you&#x27;ll be strong enough, prepared enough, and with a little help from lots of people be able to thrive.

Hello! I have Type I Usher myself and my vision tanked when I was 27 (~8 years ago). I&#x27;m a writer, so I can&#x27;t give you much programming advice but I&#x27;ve been through the gamut in terms of technology and life changes. I&#x27;m happy to share what has and hasn&#x27;t worked for me. My email is in my profile.I do want to say one thing, though: It absolutely sucks at first but you&#x27;ll adapt. One day at a time.

Sorry to hear about what&#x27;s happening to you. Read once about this guy who&#x27;s using screen reader to code:<a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.vincit.fi&#x2F;en&#x2F;software-development-450-words-per-minute&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.vincit.fi&#x2F;en&#x2F;software-development-450-words-per-...</a>One of the interesting things here is the mention of web frontend frameworks which may make the frontend work possible even without seeing the frontend.Hope you&#x27;ll get through the life change. Take care.

Seek out HN user CAMLORN. Quoting from a response in an old thread about screen readers:I&#x27;m the blind dev who refactored a huge chunk of the Rust compiler [0]. I&#x27;m at roughly 800 words a minute with a synth, with the proven ability to top out at 1219. 800 or so is the norm among programmers. In order to get it we normally end up using older synths which sound way less natural because modern synthesis techniques can&#x27;t go that fast. There&#x27;s a trade-off between natural sounding and 500+ words a minute, and the market now strongly prefers the former because hardware can now support i.e. concatenative synthesis.<a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;news.ycombinator.com&#x2F;item?id=20883169" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;news.ycombinator.com&#x2F;item?id=20883169</a>

You should consider setting up a well known and repeatable folder structure for your email inbox.You will need to file everything into a phonetically distinct structure for efficient navigation through your folder hierarchy. Nested directories in this case is not a bad idea.I have seen this type of structure used very efficiently with a screen reader and Outlook in person.

Sorry to hear this Zach. Best of luck and I hope you will pull through this stronger.I would look into positions at Microsoft. Since the current CEO Satya Nadella took over, there has been a big push to improve the accessibility of Microsoft products, and I know that there are quite a few blind developers working there.

Try and read Borges’ essay on blindness.Some excerpts:There were the books, but I had to ask my friends the titles of them. I remembered a sentence from Rudolf Steiner, in his books on anthroposo­ phy, which was the name he gave to his theosophy. He said that when some­ thing ends, we must think that something begins. His advice is salutary, but the execution is difficult, for we only know what we have lost, not what we will gain. We have a very precise image-an image at times shameless-of what we have lost, but we are ignorant ofwhat may follow or replace it.I made a decision. I said to myself: since I have lost the beloved world of appearances, I must create something else. At the time I was a professor of English at the university. What could I do to teach that almost infinite lit­ erature, that literature which exceeds the life of a man, and even generations of men? What could I do in four Argentine months of national holidays and strikes? I did what I could to teach the love of that literature, and I refrained as much as possible from dates and names.<a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.gwern.net&#x2F;docs&#x2F;borges&#x2F;1977-borges-blindness.pdf" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.gwern.net&#x2F;docs&#x2F;borges&#x2F;1977-borges-blindness.pdf</a>

I&#x27;m a 24 y&#x2F;o full stack engineer (I know some of you are rolling your eyes right now, just highlighting that I have experience on frontend apps as well as backend architecture). I&#x27;ve been working professionally for ~7 years building mostly javascript projects but also some PHP. Two years ago I was diagnosed with a condition called &quot;Usher&#x27;s Syndrome&quot; - characterized by hearing loss, balance issues, and progressive vision loss.I know there are blind software engineers out there. My main questions are:- Are there blind frontend engineers?- What kinds of software engineering lend themselves to someone with limited vision? Backend only?- Besides a screen reader, what are some of the best tools for building software with limited vision?- Does your company employ blind engineers? How well does it work? What kind of engineer are they?I&#x27;m really trying to get ahead of this thing and prepare myself as my vision is degrading rather quickly. I&#x27;m not sure what I can do if I can&#x27;t do SE as I don&#x27;t have any formal education in anything. I&#x27;ve worked really hard to get to where I am and don&#x27;t want it to go to waste.Thank you for any input, and stay safe out there!Edit:Thank you all for your links, suggestions, and moral support, I really appreciate it. Since my diagnosis I&#x27;ve slowly developed a crippling anxiety centered around a feeling that I need to figure out the rest of my life before it&#x27;s too late. I know I shouldn&#x27;t think this way but it is hard not to. I&#x27;m very independent and I feel a pressure to &quot;show up.&quot; I will look into these opportunities mentioned and try to get in touch with some more members of the blind engineering community.

Ask HN: I'm a software engineer going blind, how should I prepare?