What's it like to program without eyesight?

Question

At the urging of my father, I recently signed up for disability insurance. It got me wondering, if I were to become blind, what would it be like to write code without eyesight?

An old question on Stack Overflow deals with the tools that are available, but I'm more interested in the experience, especially of someone who lost their vision after learning to program.

I know that my own style is very visual: when writing code for the first time, I often write a big block of code, look it over to see what makes sense to split out, and then refactor it into separate functions by cut/paste. It seems like it would be hard to do that without seeing the code.

After learning to work with tools like a screen reader, is the experience basically the same? Or does it affect how you write code in a more substantial way?

Answer 1

To grasp the concept of programming is not hard when blind. However, debugging code and learning syntax is very difficult.

It would probably be more beneficial for a blind person to write the pseudo code and have a programmer interpret and input it. This way, you can still get the logic rush of writing the code. Stress your brain of how to complete different tasks and functions, but leave the missing semicolon to the programmer tasked with inputting the code.