I actually interviewed a guy about 6 months ago who had passed the bar and had been practicing law for a few years, but he found it very boring. He was about the same age as your wife. He decided he wanted to make the switch over to programming since he had been very interested in it when he was in high school. About 4-6 months before the in person interview we interviewed him over the phone and found that he wasn't quite ready. He spent a few months studying before we did another phone interview with him again. He sounded like a strong candidate. However, the in person interview didn't go so well. On the phone he said he had been writing a ton of code in the particular language we were hiring for...but when he got to the interview, we found out he had only gone through a few tutorials and had never written anything on his own. Starting to dig deeper, he hadn't been doing as much coding as he had originally disclosed.
So that wasn't to discourage your wife...just wanted to say that people do make career changes from law to code. I am sure the guy will be coding for a living in the near future. A success story though...my buddy had never done any programming before and wanted to make a career change. He started self teaching and took a class or two at the local community college. About 6-8 months after he started learning to code after work and on weekends, he landed a job coding, making more than he was making at his current job.
I am sure your wife is very capable of learning to code. I would say the best advice is to find a friend who even hire a tutor to meet once a week to help her stay on track and get past any major walls. I know when I was first learning, there were little things that would take me days to figure out that someone could have helped me figure out in 10 seconds. Check out websites like codeacademy.com and codeschool.com to start diving in. HTML and CSS are for building and styling websites, but they aren't actually programming...but are very useful for someone starting out since it will be much easier for her to land a front end job building the front facing parts of websites and what not. Once she gets comfortable with html and css she may want to get familiar with bootstrap (getbootstrap.com). Bootstrap allows you to quickly style your websites and create a responsive design that looks good on all screen sizes. After that, she might want to pick up javascript. Once she learns the basics of javascript which is used for bringing interactions to webpages and is actually programming...then she can learn jquery which is a javascript framework which makes animations and API requests much simpler. With html, css, javascript and jquery under her belt...she should be able to make the jump to a front end dev job. That is all my buddy learned in 6-8 months and was able to find a job. Granted it probably won't be close to what she was making before, but at least she will enjoy her job and being to play ping pong and drink beer while she codes!