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Re: visually impaired front end developer

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From: JP Jamous
Date: Sep 19, 2017 5:20AM

I am going to throw my own 2 cents based on experience. Simply do not do it. I am totally blind as well and I had my own business doing just that. Web design from the back-end to the front-end. I had no problem with the back-end even when it came to the markup of the front-end. When CSS was applied, I fought it hard and for years. Heck, I won't waste my time on that anymore, because it is not economically worth it. I'd rather hire someone to do the CSS based on my recommendations and handle the other parts myself. That's how you build synergy.

As Roel was stating, Slicing is a darn nasty task. As a business owner, I used to have my interns explain to me their designs and I got heavily involved in that myself. However, I was paying them and they had to report to me directly.

Imagine that you are in a corporate and the design come to you through the UX design team and you have to figure it out. You ask the UX designers and your team mates, but they all have full plates. They will help for a while, but after that it would become an inconvenience to them. Not because they are rude, but because they are busy and need every bit of time to spend on their projects.

You can dive into DB design and coding, writing back-end code, and much more. If you like coding, those are 2 things that come to mind. So yes, there are alternatives besides HTML. You can code in XML and JSON so servers can communicate data through them.

As a friendly advice, I'd steer you away from front-end design. You will not be as good as a sighted person and a sighted person will never be as good as you are with a screen reader. If you realize that fact and you trade your services with your sighted counter-part, then both of you come out winning at the end as each is efficient in his or her area. If you want to get stubborn about it and refuse to accept this fact that each is an expert in his or her own area, then you'd be purchasing a ticket to hell. Look at countries that get isolated from the rest of the world, economically they suffer, because they cannot produce everything as good as their neighbors. That's a fact of life and will never change. Just as trading is important between countries, the same concept applies to jobs in general regardless whether you have a disability or not.