Given Octavian's prior experience as a sighted web designer, I take him at
his word that he cannot do things he used to be able to do, and empathize
with his implicit frustration at not being able to compete favorably with
sighted web designers in every possible way.. With that said, however, I
think it is flawed reasoning to think that we compete against people who
have all of the same skills except for the addition of sight. As others
here have said, we compete with a combination of strenghts and weaknesses,
one of the latter being the lack of sight -- for both its physical and
prejudicial consequences. I submit that the combination of Octavian's
skills, by his own description, make him competitive as a web developer in
his country. I did say web developer rather than web designer, because I
infer that the latter refers to highly visual aspects of web development.
It is understandable that a blind person would be at a serious
disadvantage in primarily visuall-oriented artistic expression. I do
not think blind people can compete in painting, for example.
To me, a more important question than the competitiveness of web design,
thus, is the competitiveness of web development for blind people. I think
Octavian is right that a lot of web sites emphasize "sexy" visual appeal,
for which blind people cannot realistically compete in development.
However, I do not agree that such web sites are the primary means of web
site competitiveness. Google -- the most popular web site in the world --
has succeeded partly because of the usability of its design, which is not
visually sexy, but highly usable. Many other sites would similarly
benefit from principles that emphasize productivity rather than
entertainment of the user, and users would reward such sites with their
visitation and purchases.
Thus, I think it is more meaningful to conceive of us competing as web
developers rather than web designers. We cannot provide all the glitzy
subtleties that the best sighted designers can do, but we can master
principles of web site usability (including accessibility) that make the
sites we develop both productive and pleasing to visit.
These things said, I do think that we have to be extra good at nonvisual
aspects of a profession in order to compete -- again, because of both
physical and prejudicial adversities. We must, for example, know HTML,
CSS, and principles of visual asthetics, mouse, and keyboard usability
better than average in order to compensate for the disadvantages that we
will fase as a result of blindness. Doing so is within the realm of
possibility -- not just for the exceptions -- but it does require
additional dedication to the field.
Regards,
Jamal
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