Re: Accessible C++ Compiler
I honestly think there are quite a number of myths surrounding what it would really take to make most applications accessible. I think the cases in which there would be cost approaching anything close to "hundreds of thousands" are the minority.
Case in point, I had an interesting discussion with a developer over at Project Pokémon, a site dedicated to Pokémon hacking research and development. His program, PokéGen (a save game editor for Pokémon games) had an excessibility issue. I gave him some suggestions and then asked him to download Jaws and just play with it for a little while. To my surprise he did, and quickly realized that the only problem was that his icons were purely graphical with no textual supplement.
All he did was create text icons, which he hid "underneath" the graphics to hide them from sited users completely, and that made PokéGen completely accessible (the hidden icons could receive tab focus, so you could press enter on them). The best part? It took him a couple of hours at most.
Now I'm only talking about windows here, but most of the design mistakes that result in problems for us are generally minor and easily reversible. For instance, in Visual studio class we were assigned to write a program in which the output was to be displayed to the user on a label. Unfortunately this approach resulted in Jaws being unable to detect it, so I suggested to the prof that I use a text box with read only property set instead. Result? you could tab to it and read it just fine. If he had really insisted on the label approach for appearance I'd have hidden the text box underneath of it and made it small for at least enough accessibility to make it manageable.
For another assignment, we were to create a text box for output and set it's "enabled" property to false to prevent users from typing in to it. This made it only accessible via the root curser. Solution? keep it enabled, just set it to read only and then you can tab to it and read it with standard reading keys; mind you, having to root isn't the end of the world so for what it's worth I could have gone with the original approach which was at least better than completely inaccessible labels.
Granted custom controls are a new kind of evil, but hiding an alternative control still works in a pinch.
I think it all goes back to the simple fact that most people have never met a blind person, and many still think we're bumps on a log who sit at home and wait to die (many people are downright shocked when they ask me how much assistance I require in order to bathe and I tell them none at all). I guess people think that making their software accessible means rewriting the entire program which is just a total myth. Of course there are exceptions (Microsoft in all their glory couldn't make their flight simulator excessible no matter how hard they tried) but these are special cases and let's face it, what good is a flight simulator to a blind fellow anyway.
Most of the time, we're talking a day or two for one person, and the real cost involved isn't so much financial as it is pride (convincing someone to do a little bit of research and risk the "embarrassment?" of being educated by a blind guy isn't easy). I guess just giving the canned and uneducated response of "Helping a minority would break the bank" takes less effort than sitting down with the Jaws demo for a few hours and learning how to think outside the box.
Just my $0.02 but this topic is one I've been passionate about for a long time.
Now as for c++ compilers and ides... visual studio really isn't all that bad once you get used to it's querks. Jaws comes with scripts for it out of the box (can't comment on accessibility with other readers), and as long as you're just doing code you shouldn't run in to too many problems.
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