Determined blind programmer becomes a guiding light for visually impaired

A blind man has become a top computer programmer in China after learning to code by ear.

Cai Yongbin, 33, was born in Dongguan, Guangdong province, in 1988 and lost his sight at age 6 due to an accident. He attended a special school in Shenzhen, Guangdong, when he was 14, where he set out to become a programmer.

Initially, he found it hard to use the internet.

"I wanted to read news on the internet, so I asked my classmates and teachers how I could do this. They told me that websites such as Yahoo and Sina carried all kinds of news," Cai said.

"But when I connected my screen reader to these websites, all I could hear were the words 'picture' 'link and 'button', along with some garbled messages that did not make any sense."

The same thing happened when Cai tried to listen to music and watch videos online. He found that high-end technology offered no support for disabled people, so he decided to learn coding to develop software that would enable him to freely enjoy modern technology.

"At the time, it was so difficult for me to read news or play games online. Few resources were available to help blind people use the internet, so I thought: 'I want to change my life. I want to learn coding'," he said.

Most of the time he learned by himself, but this wasn't easy. Because he could not see the computer screen, he had to memorize the coding combinations after they were read out repeatedly by his screen reader.

Cai also searched online for lectures on programming.

"I could not read physical books, so I had to listen to digital versions, but this presented some difficulties. There were many scanning errors. For example, in one case it should have been the number '1', but the character 'l' was used instead. The same thing happened with 'o' and '0'," Cai said. "There are so many numbers and English characters in coding, so these errors made my self-learning more difficult."

However, Cai refused to give up. He spent at least 12 hours studying, seven days a week. He even dreamed about coding.

"One time, I had to do very complicated lines of code. I tried several times but failed. At night, I dreamed about this. In my dream, I accidentally came up with an idea and I wrote it down. Next morning, I put it into practice," Cai said.

"I was amazed and thought that perhaps my body was taking a break while my brain was still working that night."

In 2009, Cai developed his first software, PC Secretary, which enables blind people to access the internet quickly to search for news and check the weather.

In 2014, Cai started work at the Information Accessibility Research Association in Shenzhen. He quit this job to start his own business in 2018, when he also won Alibaba's top coding prize.

Now, after spending more than a decade surfing the internet and coding, he has become a guiding light for more than 17 million visually challenged people in China.

Not only have he and his team developed their own programs, they have also provided information accessibility testing services for companies such as Tencent, Baidu, Alibaba and Kugou, allowing tens of thousands of visually impaired people to shop online, order takeaways and hail taxis.

"In the beginning, I thought I could not surf the internet because I could not see what sighted people can, but that's not true. I could not surf the internet because websites and software ignored people like me," Cai said.