A couple of years ago I was staring down the barrel of giving up a 20 year career in software development due to a degenerative eye condition.
I can't tell you how many hours I wasted chasing parse errors in PHP code because I literally couldn't see the difference between a "." and "," anymore.
My solution ended up being transplant surgery to replace one of my corneas, which has largely restored vision in one eye. I still use a lot of large fonts, high contrast, etc, but I'm able to manage much easier on a day to day basis.
I had a wonderfully supportive employer, so when it was clear to me that unless something changed dramatically (i.e. surgery) I would no longer be able to do my current job we sat down (at my instigation) and discussed what this might look like in terms of both what sort of role I could continue to do, and what I wanted to do (not always the same thing, and the latter is important).
My manager at the time said something which has stuck with me. He said that (paraphrasing) the thing he really valued was the care, thought and attention I paid to the work I did. And that the way that had been expressed was through fingers on keyboard writing code. We just needed to find a way of capturing that thought and turning it into code a different way.
We never fully made the transition into a completely different role because my surgery meant I was able to continue (after 20 years I still love coding and didn't want to entirely give that up). But for me, that was going to mean spending more time with junior developers, coaching, mentoring, etc. I didn't want to manage people, so moving up the chain into management wasn't an option for me. But Project Management, might be an option that allows you to leverage some technical skills, but be less dependent on your vision.
So, if your employer is amenable, don't try to do this alone. See what changes can be made to accommodate your needs. Having a degenerative condition where you're not going blind overnight is an advantage, because it means you can work with your employer to adapt your role over time to suit you.
Partially sighted people are less productive than blind people. You had problems with seeing difference between characters, but if you would have used a screenreader it would just unambiguously tell you which one it is... From my experience people with very low vision will generally do far more spelling errors when typing on a phone than me (and I am not comfortable typing on a touch screen).
I can't tell you how many hours I wasted chasing parse errors in PHP code because I literally couldn't see the difference between a "." and "," anymore.
My solution ended up being transplant surgery to replace one of my corneas, which has largely restored vision in one eye. I still use a lot of large fonts, high contrast, etc, but I'm able to manage much easier on a day to day basis.
I had a wonderfully supportive employer, so when it was clear to me that unless something changed dramatically (i.e. surgery) I would no longer be able to do my current job we sat down (at my instigation) and discussed what this might look like in terms of both what sort of role I could continue to do, and what I wanted to do (not always the same thing, and the latter is important).
My manager at the time said something which has stuck with me. He said that (paraphrasing) the thing he really valued was the care, thought and attention I paid to the work I did. And that the way that had been expressed was through fingers on keyboard writing code. We just needed to find a way of capturing that thought and turning it into code a different way.
We never fully made the transition into a completely different role because my surgery meant I was able to continue (after 20 years I still love coding and didn't want to entirely give that up). But for me, that was going to mean spending more time with junior developers, coaching, mentoring, etc. I didn't want to manage people, so moving up the chain into management wasn't an option for me. But Project Management, might be an option that allows you to leverage some technical skills, but be less dependent on your vision.
So, if your employer is amenable, don't try to do this alone. See what changes can be made to accommodate your needs. Having a degenerative condition where you're not going blind overnight is an advantage, because it means you can work with your employer to adapt your role over time to suit you.