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Re: visually impaired front end developer

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From: Bryan Garaventa
Date: Sep 13, 2017 11:30AM

Hi,
Yes it is possible, though it's important for employers not to expect a blind front end engineer to be able to accomplish all of the same levels of visual design that a sighted person can such as visual styling entails. Unfortunately as a result, many in the field don't think this means that a blind front end engineer can do the same level of work as a sighted one, so they are often overlooked in the job market. This is ironic however, because speaking personally I have skills as a blind front end engineer that only the smallest percentage of the total pool of front end engineers globally have, which is that I know how to make front end components that are guaranteed to be accessible for the simple reason that they have to be in order for me to use them, and I don't see the point of building anything that I can't use myself. So blind front end engineers specialize in the field of functional accessibility where focus management, keyboard functionality, and intuitive user interaction is the most important aspects to concentrate on, whereas in contrast the majority of sighted front engineers focus on sighted and mouse related functionality and are often surprisingly lacking in basic knowledge regarding these skills, which is the primary reason why most of the most popular frameworks and libraries are still inaccessible to this day even though all of these concepts have existed for many years.

Here are some tools that I use daily for these tasks.
http://dlee.org/bx/bx.htm#intro
I use this for DOM rendering analysis when applying CSS, markup examination, and MSAA/UIA accessibility tree examination when applying ARIA and the like.

This is a code editor built specifically for blind programmers. I've been using it to write all that I have in the last ten years.
https://github.com/jamalmazrui/EdSharp

I guess I'm somewhat of a minimalist. Others here can provide additional tools to help.

All the best,
Bryan





Bryan Garaventa
Accessibility Fellow
Level Access, Inc.
<EMAIL REMOVED>
415.624.2709 (o)
www.LevelAccess.com