lightveil

I'm a college student, currently in the last year of my Economics degree. I followed the typical hacker path (found computers super neat when I was young, was messing around with things like Haskell and Prolog at 15 (not that I understood them completely, they were just really interesting), made small tools to optimize things I was doing). I very much wanted to study CS in university, but was blocked academically (long story, Tl;DR is I'm blind and live in India and our education system is relatively draconian w.r.t. allowing visually impaired students to study science and science-adjacent fields).

I'll be done with college next year, but I really don't want to go forward professionally in Economics. I don't have a formal CS education,, but I've gained some sort of gestalt by programming for a while and going through blog articles and following up on interesting things. I'd love to get into software development professionally, but I don't have a formal degree. What should I do?

I have recently been using the Linear Algebra book by Jim Hefferon to study the subject. This is because I'm taking a linear algebra course in college, I am visually impaired, and the books I get from college are literally unusable.

As a person who has to use a Screen Reader, math in PDFs is almost impossible to read for me. The problem is almost insurmountable if the PDF is a collection of images, but even if it is a LaTeX-generated PDF, reading anything but the simplest of equations is very, very hard. In these cases, having the LaTeX source to read is a godsend.

To the authors who publish the source of their books: thank you, thank you. I cannot express how grateful I am. To anyone who is related to /working in the publisher space: it would be incredibly useful if there was a process to get the LaTeX source of books upon request, although I understand how copyrights/etc might make this difficult.

Some other books I would like to point out for being open source: Apex Calculus, Open Data Structures.

I'm an Indian student who recently graduated from high school. Due to how our schools here work, your subject choices in your junior year constrain you as to which undergraduate degrees you are able to attain, and due to circumstances out of my control, I couldn't go for the subjects that would let me go for a CS degree. (I'll be going for an Economics (hons.) degree at this point.)

If I want to go into software development, how harmful will this be for me? is there anything I can do to offset the lack of a CS degree?