Accessible tools

[Tim Chase]

While not blind, I have an interest in accessibility and answer a
number of questions on the Blinux (Blind Linux Users) mailing list.

On 2015-02-19 08:33, Bryan Duarte wrote:
> A professor and I have been throwing around the idea of developing
> a completely text based IDE. There are a lot of reasons this could
> be beneficial to a blind developer and maybe even some sighted
> developers who are comfortable in the terminal. The idea would be
> really just to provide a way of easily navigating blocks of code
> using some kind of tabular formatting, and being able to collapse
> blocks of code and hearing from a high level information about the
> code within. All tools and features would obviously be spoken or
> output in some kind of audio manor. 

It would seem that the traditional Unix-as-IDE[1] would serve you well
here.  This is my method of choice, and it allows me to pick my
components and combine them.  I usually use tmux, though GNU screen
would do too.  Within that, I usually have the following:

- vim to edit my code.  Though swap in your favorite, whether
  emacs/emacspeak, ed/edbrowse, joe, nano, or whatever.  I know that
  at least Vim and emacs support "folding" away blocks of code (what
  you describe as "collapsing") which I usually prefix with a comment
  that would give you a description of the block

- a command-line (I use bash, some prefer zsh or tcsh or whatever)
  for things like version-control, running my code, and file
  management (move/copy/delete/rename/link/etc)

- a Python command-line REPL that allows me to do quick tests on a
  line of code as well as well as make extensive use of Python's
  built-in dir() and help() commands which are invaluable.

- when doing web-development (Django in my case), I'll often have the
  dev-server running in one pane, and a console browser like
  lynx/links/links2/elinks/w3m in another pane so that I can put my
  code through its paces

Another benefit of this is that I can run this on my development
machine, but then SSH into the machine from anywhere, reattach to the
tmux/screen session, and have the same configuration right as I left
it.

The entire tmux/screen session can be run within an accessible
terminal window (I know that some are more accessible than others),
within a terminal screen-reader session (like yasr, screader, or
emacspeak), or even remoted into via an accessible SSH program on your
platform of choice.

-tkc

[1]
http://blog.sanctum.geek.nz/series/unix-as-ide/