As others said, the Arch wiki is so well made that it should be the only source you need. Videos will not bring you anything given your background. The main difference with other distros will be the package manager.
A video about the install process will just be someone reading the wiki to you, and a video to "explain" pacman to you will be overkill ;)
This recent post may be of interest to you: https://lemmy.ml/post/27474047
You may also find some ideas here or there.
I personaly use the power of neomutt and notmuch, but it's not a GUI option if that's what you're looking for.
I will not reiterate what others have well explained Re: the use of &, though it's surprising to see someone able to use dwm before getting control of the basics of the command-line :)
Coming back to your issue, have you applied the patch and recompiled dwm? Also, you may want to take a look at the note on this patch's github (which was last updated 13 years ago).
There are a lot of software alternatives depending on your needs and preferences. You may want to take a look here or there.
Linux is full of options to let you build the best system for you. That means you'll have to invest some time to decide what you want (starting with the distro). Moving to Linux is discovering a brand new world where it's easy to get discouraged and flooded by the freedom you're given.
In your efforts of developing a new desktop, I'd suggest to look around for already existing Linux desktops focused on visually impaired users. While they may go beyond what you're suggesting in your post (screen reader, text speech, braille output...) you may still get some inspiration from them.
Thanks for writing this response so I don't need to spend the time and efforts you did to write it :) Hopefully OP find it useful.
I'm in the same boat. I'm running the same Arch for 15 years now. The only cleaning is for old packages and config files. Also, if you remove the packages correctly, the maintenance should be minimal.
There should be no need to do a fresh install of the OS. This is another great benefit versus others. Even when I change my machine, I just install an image of my old system so it's fully functional right away.