Accessible tools
Tim Chase
python.list at tim.thechases.com
Thu Feb 19 13:43:46 EST 2015
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/
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