your right the number of truly working blind programmers is small and in time can grow with needed tools. In the USA the government does have stats on blind workers in the fields of vending machines, food prep, and IRS. Its the private companies that give us the shot at telemarketing, hotel reservations, and different type of call centers. The unemployment rate is much higher then Matthew states. but that is for the general population. Witch I don't think will help you in what you want. And as far as sighted programmers. Well My college is just a community based one, but it kicks out about 1200 sighted working programmers a year. i know that colleges geared for tech like MIT, UCLA, and others in the top ten kick out even higher numbers. its a growing field and very fast. maybe to fast, because it seems as soon as something gets accessible. its already moved up again out of reach. The tools we need is a ide that is totally accessible and is multi language like microsofts visual studio. that way moving up with the changing languages would be just as fast. Just from the talk on this list. you can get the need for such tools and see almost how many would be working if could in programming. Getting the jobs would be a lot easier with tools that make those with VI do everything those with sight can do. To get the funding your hoping for won't be a easy task and will be a fight to prove. To bad sighted people don't have to prove as much as we do, because if they did, not many would be working in some of those jobs.
At 06:35 PM 10/20/2007, you wrote:
Yaa, I agree with what everyone is saying, that even the number of subscribers, addresses, etc, isn't that useful for judging the size of the community, etc. That's all completely true. However, many of my colleagues, for some truly insane reason or another which I can't for the life of me understand, question the existence of blind computer programmers in general. By far the most common argument I hear against doing this kind of research is that the community is very small ... or so I'm told by those that don't know any better ... But without any data on the topic at all, it's pretty tough to argue. Now, I can at least say, "Well, on a popular mailing list for blind programmers, there are 347 registered email addresses." Obviously, there are duplicates, some folks aren't active, and some folks are sighted impostors (like me), but hey, it's better than nothing! Thanks Jim for the number of addresses, that helps. Andreas __________ View the list's information and change your settings at //www.freelists.org/list/programmingblind
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