Data analyst (entry level, certificate route) — 3 out of 5 stars

• What it is: Turning raw business data — sales records, survey results, website numbers — into answers: cleaned spreadsheets, SQL queries, and reports that tell a company what is happening and what to do next.
• Certificate or training: The Google Data Analytics Professional Certificate on Coursera is the standard no-degree entry route; it teaches spreadsheets, SQL, and the basics of R. No employer license exists or is needed.
• Cost to get qualified: About $300 total — roughly $49 a month for about six months of Coursera; the certificate is priced for career-changers
• Time to job-ready: 4–8 months of part-time study
• Typical pay: $60,000–$85,000 a year at entry level, rising with SQL and statistics depth
• Why it works for a blind person: Analysis is logic, not looking. SQL is plain text, spreadsheets are keyboard-driven, and the thinking — what does this number actually mean — happens in your head, where blindness is no disadvantage at all.

Job 9 of 100 · Tech and IT support

Start here, step by step

1. Learn the words first: a query is a question you ask a database in SQL, the language databases answer. A dashboard is a live summary screen — the one part of this field that leans visual, and the part you will lean away from.
2. Get fluent in a spreadsheet first: sorting, filtering, pivot-style summaries, and formulas, all by keyboard. This is the daily tool and the cheapest skill to prove.
3. Work through the Google Data Analytics certificate, doing every hands-on exercise with your screen reader rather than watching someone else do it.
4. Build two portfolio projects from free public data sets — clean one messy spreadsheet and answer three real questions with SQL — and write up what you found in plain sentences.
5. Apply toward the data-cleaning and analytics-engineering end of postings, where the work is text and tables, rather than dashboard-design roles built around visual chart styling.
6. In interviews, demo your portfolio live with your screen reader. Showing the workflow answers the accessibility question better than any promise.

How AI can help

Use AI to explain unfamiliar SQL, suggest formulas, and draft the plain-language summary of findings you already reached. AI cannot know which number in a messy export is lying — spotting the bad data is the analyst's actual job.

Rating: 3 out of 5 stars

Strong pay and pure-text core skills, held at three stars because some business-intelligence dashboards are rough with screen readers and some postings quietly expect visual chart design — aim at the data-cleaning end and the fit is much better.

Pros and cons — the honest version

Pros

• SQL and spreadsheets are fully keyboard-and-text work
• Certificate costs about $300, not thousands
• Pay starts well above most entry roles on this list

Cons

• Some BI dashboards are poor with screen readers — workaround: target roles centered on SQL and data cleaning, and test the employer's stack before accepting
• Chart-styling expectations appear in some postings — workaround: bring a portfolio that shows analysis strength, and offer accessible data tables as your chart format
• Entry postings are competitive — a real portfolio matters more than the certificate alone