People naturally assume you would be interested in accessibility work, but I suspect if you simply say that's not what you are interested in, and demonstrate normal levels of ability in other work you'll be fine.
What could happen though, is if your ability is not in line with other programmers. For accessibility work people will hire you anyway (since you have unique experience), but for other work you'll have a hard(er) time.
And since there is an implied assumption that a blind programmer will be less productive, you are probably right about being pushed toward accessibility work.
The solution is of course obvious (and typical for any kind of disability): Show that your productivity is in line with others. People aren't malicious usually, just unaware.
> People naturally assume you would be interested in accessibility work
This is the problem. It's like going to a black person and saying "oh man, I assume you must like fried chicken!"
> Show that your productivity is in line with others.
This also doesn't compute -- I can't think of a link between "you must be interested in accessibility work" and "we'd like you to work on that because your productivity is probably low."
I've faced both of these problems as a mostly deaf developer -- people always assume I want to work on hearing-related things.
I explained that. It's not a link between low productivity and interest.
It's a link between low productivity, and willingness to hire only for specialized work. (i.e. if not for the specialization they would not hire at all, since productivity is low.)
I'm not trying to directly argue with you, so I may have missed the details of your post. I apologize for that.
Some of the points you make made me want to speak about the general perception and assumption that a disabled person:
1. Must have an interest/insight into accessibility work
2. Must have a lower productivity due to the disability
You even address the latter with:
> And since there is an implied assumption that a blind programmer will be less productive
and that "implied assumption" is what I want to talk about.
To me, that assumption is very close to racial stereotypes -- assumptions about someone based on their appearance. To keep it in the "disability" sphere, it would be like assuming Stephen Hawking (a clear outlier) is a complete vegetable and unproductive due to his disability. While his disability no doubt makes him less productive at specific tasks impacted by it, his overall productivity is made up for in other ways.
Many people want to put the onus on the disabled person to demonstrate that they're "normal" or "normally productive" in order to bust themselves out of a niche (accessibility work, a special team of "disabled people," a special reading level, etc.) rather than simply assuming that they are "normal" and waiting for a demonstration otherwise, as they would would with any other person.
To me, it's too close to saying "well, we'll see if this black guy is normally productive -- if he's not, we'll put him in the 'urban brainstorming division.'"
I'm speaking about this in an attempt to get a broader discussion on the idea as someone who's been pigeonholed exactly these ways in the past.
> And since there is an implied assumption that a blind programmer will be less productive, you are probably right about being pushed toward accessibility work.
> The solution is of course obvious (and typical for any kind of disability): Show that your productivity is in line with others. People aren't malicious usually, just unaware.
Should be enough in theory, not in practice. There are many factors affecting productivity and that are not personal; disabled people (among others) are rather prone to poor non-personal factors. In the other words, productivity is a function of the person in question and everything else surrounding that. We typically approximate this by assuming personal factors and non-personal factors are independent---of course, not in reality.
What could happen though, is if your ability is not in line with other programmers. For accessibility work people will hire you anyway (since you have unique experience), but for other work you'll have a hard(er) time.
And since there is an implied assumption that a blind programmer will be less productive, you are probably right about being pushed toward accessibility work.
The solution is of course obvious (and typical for any kind of disability): Show that your productivity is in line with others. People aren't malicious usually, just unaware.