For those of you that use Pidgin, there's also a really great libpurple plugin that I've been using: https://bitbucket.org/EionRobb/purple-hangouts/
It works really well, but it doesn't have history scrollback. I'm happy when I don't have to open up my browser to chat with people.
I think it is totally reasonable that a blind person could code, but how does a blind person learn how to code initially? Did he become blind later on after learning how to code?
The last chapter in Oliver Sacks' book "The Mind's Eye" discusses this phenomenon and how people who became blind adapted and compensated. Highly recommend it. He suggests a phenomenon like this is primarily biologically predetermined.
Sine-wave speech reminds me of R2D2 from Star Wars. Does anyone know if sine-wave speech was used as an inspiration? Maybe R2D2 actually says coherent sentences in the movies, but we aren't used to that form of speech interpretation