An exploratory study of blind software developers

As a research community, we currently know very little about the challenges faced by blind software developers. Without knowing what those challenges are, the community cannot effectively address these challenges. In this paper, we describe the first exploratory empirical study, where we conducted eight interviews with blind software developers to identify aspects of software development that are a challenge. Our results suggest that visually impaired software developers face challenges, for instance, when using screen readers to look up information when writing code. We discuss a variety of implications, including that blind software developers need additional support in discovering relevant software development tools.