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Comment by jareds | Hacker News Reader

Microsoft has done a lot of good work with VSCode for blind developers. I'm totally blind and used Eclipse for many years. I started using VSCode when I was learning Go. I watched audio queue's be added and thought it was a thing I'd never use because I am set in my ways. Now that I'm using VSCode to do Go programming professionally I'm glad they exist. It's not a game change but it is a nice quality of life improvement.

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I definitely second the VS Code recommendation. I'm doing a lot of work with Jupyter these days, and Jupyter's accessibility really sucks. The VS Code Jupyter plugin is just as good as the rest of the app.

I'm also a fan of the IndentNav[1] addon. It essentially allows you to navigate code like a tree, using indentation levels for hierarchy. This is very useful to skip over functions or blocks of code you're not currently interested in, get a quick overview of what a large function is doing without getting into the nitty-gritty details, or quickly figure out what if statement an "else" belongs to.

[1] https://marketplace.visualstudio.com/items?itemName=TonyMaly...

Off topic, and I hope it doesn't cause offense, but Im very curious; what do you find to be good domains to work with as a blind developer? As a nonblind web developer whose domain is highly visual, I'm sometimes irrationally worried that I'd be out of a job if my vision went for one reason and another, and it gets me speculating about what the programming life is like for blind developers. Other visual aspects that I'd maybe worry about are graphical presentations made by other parties in my org.

I've done a lot of web API development in both legacy applications and micro services. It's pretty accessible since I don't need to rely n a UI and can use CURL.

I know a blind man who works at Google and sometimes does 3D graphics programming.

That's a modern day Beethoven :) That's awesome. I think a lot of folks would find that amazing to read about!

Do you mind walking me through your setup?

Blind programmers are always so impressive with their skills and tooling. I’ve tried to adopt some stuff I’ve learned, but it’s hard and y’all make it look so easy

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