Were you born blind or did you lose your vision later in life? I was born totally blind and grew up as computers became accessible. While I don’t use braille much now, I don’t understand how someone born blind can have basic literacy using only speech. Growing up reading books allowed me to understand basic sentence structure, spelling, etc. These are all important as a programmer considering a large part of the job is communicating your decisions and opinions. I also found braille to be very useful in math. I think that braille is critical for early education if you are blind. It’s less important if you lose your vision later in life and already are literate do to reading print growing up.
I was born blind. I have read only a single book in Braille in my life, though I used it at school for notetaking. I switched to using the computer in last year of secondary (age of 15). I wanted to do so before, but I was in a very backwards special school for the blind. For math, I have been using LaTeX, which, coupled with some speech dictionary hacks in my screen reader, works pretty great. Braille is still useful when drawings are concerned, but only if you have the right books, which is not always the case. Most book reading was either done by my parents (before the age of ten) or by audiobooks afterwards. I don't have that many spelling problems, and those I do have are usually detected by Word, which is what I use when I really do care. I think the warning beep that my screen reader plays when typing a misspelled word is actually a much better learning tool than any form of reading.
