Wow. Another great successful conversion story.

Fluency on both layouts will slow down speed of both layout though.

That's fascinating, thanks for sharing.  You may be interested in the don't use the mouse thread, whose goal is to allow you to do everything using the keyboard. 

If you use a touchscreen device, may I ask which keyboard ends up being best?  Is messagease still a preferred choice, as some of us discussed in this thread?

Well that's how I read it, but because there's the expression 'blind typing', I was hoping for clarification.  I was further puzzled to then read lalop's question of which touch screen do you use.  But perhaps it is possible to use a touch screen given enough feedback to help train you.

My experience of Android is that it's frustrating enough as a sighted user.  The most accessible tool I bumped into was Knoppix/ADRIANE.  I watched a blind user demonstrate using his Mac, reading web pages didn't appear that friendly.

sorry for not posting here in a long time. I now intend to post here a little more often, so stay tuned. Seems like this thread had some more activity than I expected. I did try to post a response earlier, but never had the time to finish it. Here is an update and answers to the questions posted so far. If anyone has any more questions after reading this, ask here or write me privately. Note, I am not an expert with formatting forums yet. Sorry if I totally mess this up.
First of all, yes, I am blind, as in can't see anything. I have light perception, but that's all.
Slowly but surely I'm moving away from qwerty. I hope to keep a fluency in qwerty at least in case I need it. Nowadays I am typing Spanish and French, which Colemak does quite good with. my typing speed on colemak is about 60 WPM, with a few errors here and there. As time goes on, and I get more practice, the error rate should go down. I'm not so focused on typing speed as I am on comfort. Colemak is quite comfortable for me and my needs. I'm curious, any UNIX users out there? Is Colemak comforatble for things like Bash?
Tony_VN
I don't know if fluency in both layouts slows me down, but I notice mistakes in both layouts when moving between the two, that I've never made before. With time I think the error rate should go down.
pinkyache
It's definitely possible to use a touch screen being blind. Android uses TalkBack, and iOS uses VoiceOver. They both provide audible feedback to the user, as long as the application is written accessibly. Some are better than others. Reading webpages on the mac can be frustrating sometimes. It depends on the page and Safari. I did try Knoppix once, but found it rather strange. Most blind Linux users I know of use Ubuntu, Arch, or some other distro.
lalop.
Agreed. Although, With screen reading technology advancing, as long as developers are made aware of these technologies, hopefully things can be made a little more accessible. It seems to get better every year.

Hopefully I was able to answer all the questions.

DreymaR
Excellent. I'll be using Ubuntu. It seems that Colemak is pretty good for programming from what I've read.

I find I'm getting used to Caps Lock to backspace. I know that some screen readers can use the Caps Lock as a key to perform various screen reader related functions, however I feel backspace is more useful at the Caps Lock position. The numpad seems more efficient for screen reader commands anyway.

I'm using caps as backspace, but I've also moved to using space as control. It seems to me that this is a bigger emacs optimization than the traditional caps as ctrl.

bph, the way it works is that holding SPC doesn't generate a space, but instead the Ctrl modifier. Tapping Spc generates a space. On windows, I am using AutoHotKey with the BigCtrl script to accomplish this. On Linux, I am using a program called xcape.

Usually this works very well. Occasionally when I am typing quickly I will type an unwanted control character, but this happens very rarely. It's really a hackish substitute for what I really want, which is a keyboard with thumb modifier keys.

That would certainly be an improvement, but what I had in mind was something like an ergodox or keyboard.io.

I did make a post saying I was leaving colemak, but decided against it. I've been trying Dvorak recently but still feel Colemak is more comfortable on my hands and better for some aspects as mentioned on this thread. Lately I've been having some wrist pains especially in the right wrist with Colemak on some keyboards. The Microsoft ergonomic Natural 4000 is great with Colemak, however due to size restraints on my desk I have to use a normal laptop keyboard. The AltGr key is way too far to the right, which seems to be causing the wrist pain. Any ideas on what to do? On a side note I am debating on making a post about alternative keyboard layouts and screen readers, which definitely needs some thought if Colemak is to be used by more people in the blindness community.

Update. To help with the switch, I'm going to move away from qwerty for a while. I'll report as time goes by. So far I'm using colemak on Windows, OS X and Arch Linux. Even though it's built into OS X, I installed the version from the website so I can have the same international characters available everywhere. The placement of the international characters, while not always optimal, works for what I type. I have been typing in Russian lately so I'm using Rulemak. Does anyone know if implementations exist for OS X/Linux?

Thanks. DreymaR. I'll have to work at designing an OSX one. When I finish it it will be posted. In the future I plan to make a small post on screen readers and alternative layouts like Colemak. Some screen readers handle the layout better than others, and performance can vary between installed and PKL variants.