Ask HN: Blind Programmers?
I'm curious to know if anyone has ever worked with a blind programmer before. Perhaps a non-blind programmer who became blind later in life? How does it affect their work? Any stories?
It makes me wonder how much effort is generally spent on developing accessible applications. I should really look into whether or not any best practice documents exist for accessibility.
I enjoy creating things and coding (whether simple/complex) has never created a problem for me (in fact, I often help my peers with there technical issues). But every now and then I come across a tool/application/website that is poorly accessible or not at all accessible and I have to waste my time adapting to it rather than using it for the task I originally intended. This is not a complain; I can understand that the interface of a app is limited to the worldview and needs of its creater. So if he uses an image for a button without an alt/title attribute is because his needs and worldview lack the knowledge that those attributes can be useful for people who can't see images.
A program can be made decently accessible without much effort, one needs to make sure only couple of things: 1) That every element is accessible via keyboard, and 2) every element has a textual information directly/indirectly attached to it stating its purpose. Be it an alt/title text for images, label for checkboxes, and so on. Note the first point doesn't apply to web page elements like p/ul/ol/etc.
If you want to do more, you may add shortcut keys for elements that you perceive will be used more than others (yes not to every odd element as it will exhaust available keys very quickly), for web pages structure content using ARIA regions, headings and ... well there are many things you can do if you desire to, but those couple of things are what you should at least be doing, and that should not be anything complecated to do if you try a little.