[rosejn]

We had a blind classmate all through my undergraduate program in CS, and he was a very capable hacker. He lived inside emacs using emacspeak with a high speed synthesized reader voice, and you could often hear his terminal talking to him in the front row if you listened carefully during class.

Blind people develop good memories because they are constantly building detailed mental models of spaces they need to navigate, and I think this might give them a leg up programming because they are used to working with mental models rather than referring to maps, diagrams and documentation. Their are obvious drawbacks, but I think programming is probably a pretty good choice of profession for blind people.