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/ -- https://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/python-list