Workers taste success despite limited opportunities to find employment

For the visually impaired, a good job with a steady income is needed to take advantage of the range of barrier-free devices that are on the market.

However, only a limited number of job opportunities are open to the visually impaired.

According to one saying, the best that a visually impaired person can hope for is to own a blind massage company.

In 2017, the Beijing municipal government carried out a survey on jobs taken by the visually impaired. The survey found that 26.36 percent of them took up blind massage as an occupation, while 12.73 percent had performed such work previously.

In some sense, the limited number of employment options has prevented the visually impaired from living a better life.

Yang Qinfeng, who runs the Golden Cane program to help the blind and visually impaired, said many blind people who are trained on his course live such a simple life that they only do three things every day－eat, sleep and perform massage.

This view is echoed by the company running the Rebuild Eyes app. An executive at the company, surnamed Zhou, said the majority of calls for help are made in big cities, where the blind and visually impaired have more opportunities.

Some blind users installed the company's app, but never used it, because they stayed in the same room every day and did not need help, Zhou added.

Zhang Junjun and Zhang Shuaishuai are programmers at the China Braille Library. Both are visually impaired, but this disadvantage did not prevent them gaining their degrees and the ability to program.

They type by using a normal keyboard and "see" their codes via screen-reading software that reads them aloud.

The programming team is headed by Zhang Junjun, who is responsible for checking the codes drafted by his colleagues and helping them improve. Three of the five programming group team members have disabilities, while another has cerebral palsy, but they have all served the library well with their ability.

Ma Yinqing, 28, a blind woman who has more than 1 million followers on the Himalaya audio-sharing platform, owns a company that mainly records audio clips for the blind, sharing the clips online. The company has more than 30 employees, 75 percent of whom have disabilities.

Tao Yong, a senior ophthalmologist and director of the ophthalmology department at Beijing Chaoyang Hospital affiliated to Capital Medical University, said: "The visually impaired naturally have the strongest compassion for people in the same situation. The entrepreneurs among them tend to hire other visually impaired workers."