What are some good computer science resources for a blind programmer?

Question

I\'m a totally blind individual who would like to learn more of the theory aspect of computer science. I\'ve had an intro data structures class and the general intro programming

Answer 1

personally I am just blown away by the questioner. I mean, the challenge alone of programming is too much for most people but being without the primary sense used in the task is amazing to me. What is ironic though is I bet that given this challenge the questioner is still FAR more adept at most CS tasks than the people I work with day to day. Just saying.

Answer 2

UC Berkley has a couple of computer science courses online for free as mp3 and video files (including RSS feed for each course). And if reading PDF files aren't an issue you could check out O'Reilly's Safari.

Answer 3

You might find the Experiences of a Blind Computer Scientist a good read.

MIT's Open Courseware would be a good resource for you with the amount of videos/audio they have.

Really though, for the core computer-science topics I find it pretty hard to beat some of the better textbooks out there. Some offer digital versions of their book with purchase and some don't. For those that don't, I would just purchase the book and then download via a torrent site a digital e-book equivelant. Since you already own the book I don't think this would be a major problem.

Answer 4

I'm also a totally blind programmer, currently working for Microsoft. The most valuable resource for te technical books is Safari (safari.oreilly.com). You can read thousands of computer science texts there. if you're in the USA, you can also get many of those titles for free from BookShare (www.bookshare.org). In both cases graphical images will be an issue, but there's no easy solution for that. Most good books have enough descriptive text that one can manage without the diagrams.