Long-distance relationships are built on communication, trust, and good wifi. My girlfriend lives in the UK. I live in Portland, Oregon. There is an eight-hour time difference and an ocean between us. When you are 5,000 miles apart, you don't get date nights. You get FaceTime calls and shared media. You find ways to exist in the same cultural moment, even if you can't be in the same room. Right now, that cultural moment is Love Island All Stars. Love Island All Stars She’s watching it live in London. I wanted to watch it with her, but the show is geo-locked to the UK. There was another hurdle, too: I am legally blind. I have 20/400 vision in my right eye, no peripheral vision, and I rely heavily on NVDA (screen reader) and Windows Magnifier just to navigate a web page. Most people would just buy a VPN. But I’m an Adaptive Systems Architect. I don't pay for things I can build myself—especially when the motivation is love. So, I decided to spin up a free Oracle Cloud VPS and roll my own WireGuard server to bridge the distance. What followed was a battle between a blind man, an AI assistant, and one of the most inaccessible user interfaces on the internet. The "Free" VPN Struggle I started with the easy route: VPN Gate. It’s a network of volunteer relays. I spent an hour hunting for a UK server, zooming in on the "Line Speed" column with my nose touching the monitor. I finally connected. I felt like a hacker. I navigated to the streaming site, ready to impress her. Buffer. Buffer. Error. The speed was 0.56 Mbps. I could have flown to London faster than the video was loading. I needed real power. I needed a Virtual Private Server (VPS). Oracle Cloud vs. My Eyesight Oracle Cloud offers an "Always Free" tier that is actually quite generous—if you can find the buttons. For a fully sighted user, the Oracle dashboard is "enterprise-complex." For someone using Windows Magnifier at 400% zoom, it is a labyrinth. I logged in. My screen reader started announcing elements: "Button... Menu... Link... Main Content Region..." "Button... Menu... Link... Main Content Region..." "Okay," I thought. "Create Instance." I found the button. I selected Ubuntu. I had to settle for the AMD Micro instance because the high-speed Ampere ones were out of capacity. Then I hit the wall: Networking. Networking. The "Create" button was grayed out. NVDA just said "Unavailable." It didn't tell me why. "Unavailable." I was zooming around the screen, panning my mouse desperately to find the red error text. Was it the subnet? The VCN? The SSH keys? “Warning: You must select a public subnet to assign a public IPv4 address.” “Warning: You must select a public subnet to assign a public IPv4 address.” I spent 20 minutes clicking radio buttons that looked selected but weren't. I tried to "Assign Public IP," but the dropdown was frozen. It turns out, the interface had glitched. It thought I was creating a subnet, but it hadn't actually generated the IP range yet. I had to force the instance creation without an IP, hoping I could fix it later. Accessibility score: 0/10. The "Meatball" Menu from Hell I finally managed to click "Create." The server was provisioning. Success? Not yet. Because of the glitch, I had a server, but it was invisible to the internet. No Public IP. To fix it, I had to find a specific menu called "Attached VNICs." I asked my AI assistant where it was. "It's on the left side, under Resources," it said. "It's on the left side, under Resources," I panned left. Nothing. I panned down. Nothing. I zoomed out to 100% (which makes the text invisible to me) just to see the layout. Still nothing. It turns out, Oracle had hidden the menu inside a tab, under the instance name, below the fold. For a blind user, this is like hiding the door handle on the ceiling. inside under below When I finally found the "IPv4 Addresses" section, I had to click the "Three Dots" menu (the meatball menu) to edit the IP. NVDA announced: "Menu button submenu." Which one? There are twelve on the page. "Menu button submenu." I guessed. I clicked. I hit "Ephemeral Public IP." Update. Suddenly, a wild IP address appeared: 145.241.xx.xx. 145.241.xx.xx The Terminal is My Safe Space Once I had the IP and fought with the "Ingress Rules" to open UDP port 51820, I left the graphical nightmare of the web dashboard and opened PowerShell. The command line is the great equalizer. Text is text. High contrast, large font, no hidden buttons. I SSH’d into the box: ssh -i "my-key.key" ubuntu@145.241.xx.xx ssh -i "my-key.key" ubuntu@145.241.xx.xx Green text. ubuntu@ukvpn:~$. I was in London (digitally). ubuntu@ukvpn:~$ I ran the angristan/wireguard-install script. It’s a beauty. It asks simple questions in plain text. Port? 51820. DNS? 1.1.1.1. Client Name? pc. angristan/wireguard-install Port? DNS? Client Name? It generated a config file. I cat-ed the file, copied the keys, and pasted them into the WireGuard client on my PC. cat The Connection I clicked "Activate." I opened Chrome. I typed: "What is my location?" Google replied: "London, United Kingdom." "London, United Kingdom." I went to the streaming site. I clicked play. No buffering. HD quality. I texted her: "I'm in." She replied: "Georgia is already causing drama." "I'm in." "Georgia is already causing drama." For the next hour, we weren't 5,000 miles apart. We were watching the same screen, laughing at the same terrible decisions, connected by a tunnel of encrypted data that I built with my own hands. The Takeaway We often talk about accessibility in terms of "Alt Text" on images. But cloud infrastructure interfaces are some of the most hostile environments for disabled developers. Hidden menus, low-contrast gray-on-gray text, and reliance on visual layout over semantic structure make simple tasks a war of attrition. But I’m stubborn. And when you are in a long-distance relationship, you do whatever it takes to close the distance. Even if it means fighting Oracle Cloud in the dark. Worth it.

This story contains new, firsthand information uncovered by the writer.

Love, Long Distance, and Linux: Building a VPN Blind to Bridge the Gap

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