Raspberry Pis are fine because you're just doing Linux programming.  The real advantage is that it lets you use any of a group of programming languages that aren't C/C++.  It also gives you the services of an operating system, i.e. the ability to connect to the internet, allocate memory, and do text to speech (not sure how to do this last one, but I believe Espeak compiles for it). Arduino is questionable, and I'd not go there anyway.  Arduino is apparently despised by the industry because it basically hides everything away.  I looked for command line tools, but everything I found for it was semi-unofficial.
That's not your issue though.  Sighted help will be needed for circuit assembly.  I've never, ever found a way to do circuit assembly without sighted help.  At best, this is a breadboard.  At worst, it's soldering.  But you can't get around it and, usually, the question as to whether it's your program or a circuit you can't fix is pretty open.  You have to be 100% confident in programming to determine that without sighted help, and you still probably need sighted help to fix it.

Thanks for your responses. It's good to know about the raspberry pi, but I'm not sure whether it's worth trying to use an arduino with sighted help really. I hope this won't be a problem at uni, though I'll probably have an assistant for some modules anyway, and hopefully we won't be using things like the arduino. Does anyone know of any kind of robot project I could try myself before then? I'm more interested in having something I can program than anything hard to assemble, since I'll probably have to rely on my dad to put it together.