HACKER Q&A
📣 notkid

Anyone interested in helping blind/low vision individuals become coders?


I come across many blind people who are trying to learn coding but struggle due to accessibility problems. My startup develops an AI app for the blind and many blind people reach out to me for help as they are learning coding. I am not a software developer and I don't know much about how to make software development accessible. Is anyone interested in helping blind/low vision individuals become coders? If anyone is interested, I can connect you with individuals or help develop a more long-term solution.

Here is an example request:

"I am currently enrolled in a nonprofit computer boot camp program. I am taking the 12-week software development course. I lost my job in higher education last June due to the pandemic and wanted to change to a high-demand field. As the only blind student at the camp I have, however, found it quite challenging as I am trying to figure out accessibility issues along with coding and am never sure if my problems are because I don’t have all the tools my sighted classmates have at their disposal or if it’s because I don’t understand. As I have done some online research I have found that most of what is available are either short videos of people talking about how they code as a blind person but without enough detail to be really helpful for my purposes or references to projects that, when I look them up, haven’t been worked on for a few years or involve one-time courses that were taught here or there. Not only am I interested in this because of my desire to learn but I also think that coding would be a great field for many blind people whose unemployment rate continues to be unacceptably high."

(Unemployment among the blind is estimated to be around 70%)


  👤 streetcat1 Accepted Answer ✓
I tried to tackle this problem during startup weekend.

What is needed (I think) is some sort of voice based IDE, where the programmer will be able to navigate the code in 2D. This is not an easy fit.

Most of the Accessibility API are for reading, but it should be easy to navigate and create code.

Note that big companies do have blind programmers, so you might be able to contact them and do user research.


👤 bsldld
I would like to help. But I don't have experience teaching to blind/low-vision individuals. If someone has experience teaching blind/low-vision students then I would like to pair with them and then we both can teach. Do you know someone who has experience in this field?

👤 mardiyah
didn't know a well-known:

"Linux for the visually impaired: ADRIANE

The Knoppix distribution to provide an interface for computer users who are blind..." ?

Jul 4, 2016, google it for better information