Help a fellow blind student get setup for programming classes

Question

I'm a computer science student at a large university. The department has had it's first blind student enroll in the program. The department is not sure how best to support this student. The first struggle is getting a development environment setup on his laptop. He has a Mac with a screen reader program. I'm looking for the best programs for this student. He is currently enrolled in a web class (html/css) and a C# class and needs a text editor for both. He also needs an ftp program that will work well with the screen reader.

Me and another student has volunteered to help him as much as possible. I've considered console based text editors like VIM and using the command line utilities to upload files to the server.

I'm glad to see there are individuals who have had great success with programming that share his disability. I'm here to ask for advice in order to help this student.

This is the first time I've worked with a blind student.

Any help would be appreciated.

Answer 1

As a blind developer myself, I'd be happy to help.

I assume he's using Voiceover (http://apple.com/accessibility/voiceover). This will work with any application that implements the accessibility APIs (including most cocoa apps).

To get started, I'd keep things simple: * TextEdit.app for text editing. He won't get autocomplete, but for a web dev class that's probably ok. Syntax highlighting won't matter. * Just start with Finder for FTP. It should work for simple scenarios. * Terminal is mostly accessible.

For C# I find Visual Studio on Windows with the JAWS screen reader really good. On the Mac, however, I don't think that MonoDevelop is accessible. The only solution I can think of right now is TextEdit and Terminal.

There's a very active mailing list for Voiceover users at www.MacVisionaries.com.

Finally, I'd be happy to help another blind developer - if you can find my contact details, I'd be happy to hear from you.