In my experience, programming, in general, has nothing to do with sight – its more about how you load the entire application (architecture/design/flow – whatever you may call it) in your head. Great description by PG on this particular phenomenon [0].
As far as accessibility goes, there are blind developers for all the 3 major OS – Mac/Linux/Windows. Basically you use a screen reading application to get speech output and rely on keyboard shortcuts heavily (in GUI environments).
Edit: Ok, let me give you a more realistic picture: yes, every other day could prove to be a challenge especially if you are programming in a gui environment – UIs are designed primarily for visual and pointer interaction; however, being a programmer, you have more tools and techniques at your disposal to find alternative ways of doing things than a basic blind computer user. You should always be exploring and shouldn't give up. That's my learning after having been working as a developer in .NET (web/windows) for 5 years and you know, with every new major release/product, Visual Studio and Windows constantly change and break accessibility support in one way or the other.
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Old thread on this topic: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4058761
SO discussion (linked in thread above as well): http://stackoverflow.com/questions/118984/how-can-you-progra...
In my experience, programming, in general, has nothing to do with sight – its more about how you load the entire application (architecture/design/flow – whatever you may call it) in your head. Great description by PG on this particular phenomenon [0].
As far as accessibility goes, there are blind developers for all the 3 major OS – Mac/Linux/Windows. Basically you use a screen reading application to get speech output and rely on keyboard shortcuts heavily (in GUI environments).
[0]: http://paulgraham.com/head.html
Edit: Ok, let me give you a more realistic picture: yes, every other day could prove to be a challenge especially if you are programming in a gui environment – UIs are designed primarily for visual and pointer interaction; however, being a programmer, you have more tools and techniques at your disposal to find alternative ways of doing things than a basic blind computer user. You should always be exploring and shouldn't give up. That's my learning after having been working as a developer in .NET (web/windows) for 5 years and you know, with every new major release/product, Visual Studio and Windows constantly change and break accessibility support in one way or the other.