How can you program if you're blind?

Question

I am a totally blind college student who’s had several programming internships so my answer will be based off these. I use windows xp as my operating system and Jaws to read what appears on the screen to me in synthetic speech. For java programming I use eclipse, since it’s a fully featured IDE that is accessible.

In my experience as a general rule java programs that use SWT as the GUI toolkit are more accessible then programs that use Swing which is why I stay away from netbeans. For any .net programming I use visual studio 2005 since it was the standard version used at my internship and is very accessible using Jaws and a set of scripts that were developed to make things such as the form designer more accessible.

For C and C++ programming I use cygwin with gcc as my compiler and emacs or vim as my editor depending on what I need to do. A lot of my internship involved programming for Z/OS. I used an rlogin session through Cygwin to access the USS subsystem on the mainframe and C3270 as my 3270 emulator to access the ISPF portion of the mainframe.

I usually rely on synthetic speech but do have a Braille display. I find I usually work faster with speech but use the Braille display in situations where punctuation matters and gets complicated. Examples of this are if statements with lots of nested parenthesis’s and JCL where punctuation is incredibly important.

Update

I'm playing with Emacspeak under cygwin http://emacspeak.sourceforge.net I'm not sure if this will be usable as a programming editor since it appears to be somewhat unresponsive but I haven't looked at any of the configuration options yet.

I'm blind, and have been programming for about 13 years on Windows, Mac, Linux and DOS, in languages from C/C++, Python, Java, C# and various smaller languages along the way. Though the original question was around configuring the environment, I think it's best answered by looking at how a blind person would use a computer.

Some people use a talking environment, such as T. V. Raman and the Emacspeak environment mentioned in other answers. The more common solution by far is to have a screen reader which runs in the background monitoring OS activity and alerting the user via synthetic speech or a physical braille display (generally showing somewhere from 20 to 80 characters at a time). This then means a blind person can use any accessible application.

So, I personally use Visual Studio 2008 these days, and run it with very few modifications. I turn off certain features like displaying errors as I type since I find this distracting. Prior to joining Microsoft all my development was done in a standard text editor like Notepad, so once again no customisations.

It is possible to configure a screen reader to announce indentation. I personally don't use this, since Visual Studio takes care of this, and C# uses braces. But this would be very important in a language like Python where whitespace matters. Finally, Emacspeak does make use of different voices/pitches to indicate different parts of syntax (keywords, comments, identifiers, etc).

I am blind and have been a programmer for the last 12 years or so. Currently am a senior architect and work with Sapient Corporation (a cambridge-based consulting company creating both Web-based and thick client based enterprise solutions). I use several screen readers but mostly stick with Jaws for windows and NVDA.

I have mostly worked on the Microsoft platform and visual studio as my environment. I also use tools like the MS Sql enterprise studio and others for DB access, network monitoring etc. I tried to spend some time with emacspeak but since my work was mostly based on the MS platform, never really spent a lot of time there. I have also spent a couple of years working on C++ on linux - mostly used notepad or visual studio on windows for all the coding and then samba to share files with the linux environment. Also used borland C for some experimental stuff. Have recently been playing around with python, which as other people have noted above is particularly unfriendly for a blind user because it is written using indentation as the nesting mechanism. Having said that, NVDA, the most popular open source screen reader is written completely using python and some of the commiters on that project are themself blind. A particularly interesting question I get frequently asked as an architect is how do I deal with diagrams - UML and visio and rational rose etc. Visio is probably the most accessible diagraming tool out there. I was able to write jaws scripts to read rational rose diagrams for me. I've used a tool called T-dub (technical diagram understanding for the blind) developed by some german university for accessing UML 2.0 diagrams. Have used a java-based ugly tool called magic draw for doing model-driven development and was a commiter on the androMDA project and helped develop the .Net code generator from a UML model.

In general, I find that I thrive most in a team environment where I can work on my strengths. For example, while a diagram is extremely useful to communicate/document a design, the actual design process involves a lot of thinking and brainstorming and when the design has been thought out, one of your team mates can help you quickly put together a neatly drawn picture out of it. People incorrectly mis-construe the above to be lack of independence or ability while I see this as pure inter-dependence -- as in I am sure that the team mate alone could never have come up with that design on his/her own and in-turn, if I depend on him to document the design, so be it. Most hurdles I face are tool-based inaccessibility. For example all oracle products have been progressively declining in accessibility over the years (shame on them) and a team environment basically allows me an extra layer of defense against these over and above my screen readers and custom scripts.

I am a blind developer and I work under Windows, GNU Linux and MacOS X. Each of platform has different workflows for blind users. This depends on the screen reader that the blind developer uses. Development tools are not completely accessible for blind developers. I can type code and use compiling functions in all IDEs but there are many problems if I have to design an interface using designing tools as Interface Builder, XGlade or other. When I was developing with Borland Delphi I could add a control, a Button for example, and I could modify each visual attribute of the control using object inspector window. Many IDEs use object inspector windows to modify visual and non visual attributes but the problem for a blind developer is add new controls because the method to add a new control consists of dragging and dropping a control from the palette to the canvas. Visual studio 200x uses alternative methods to do this but the interface of the IDE changes in each new version and this is a big problem because screen readers for Windows need special support, using scripts, to identify each area of some non standar applications. A blind developer can use Visual studio 2008 with his screen reader but when a new version of this IDE appears he has to wait for a new version of scripts for this version of the IDE. Xcode with Interface builder has no alternative for dragging and dropping tasks yet. I asked it to Apple many times but they are working in other things. I published 3 apps in the App store (Accessible minesweeper, accessible fruitmachine and Programar a ciegas RSS) and I had to design all the interface by code. It's a hard work but I can manage all features of each control. Eclipse has an accessible code editor but other development tools as debug console,plugins for designing or documentation area present problems for assistive tools for blind users.

Documentations is a problem for blind developers too. Many samples and demonstrations use images to show the explanation (set the environment settings as you can in the picture)

I think the question is not being blind. The question is the companies and development groups think accessibility affects final software but it doesn't affect development software. They think a blind user should be a client but a blind user can't be a development mate.

Blind associations ask accessibility for products and services but they forgot blind developers. Blind people can work as lawyers, journalists, teachers but a blind developer is a strange concept even for the blind. Many times I feel alone because some blind friends of mine can't understand my work.

You can read my opinion about this issue in this article, in Spanish, in my blog http://www.programaraciegas.net/2010/11/05/la-accesibilidad-en-crisis-para-los-desarrolladores-ciegos/ there is a translation tool in the web page. Sorry but I didn't translate it.

Emacs has a number of extensions to allow blind users to manipulate text files. You'd have to consult an expert on the topic, but emacs has text-to-speech capabilities. And probably more.

In addition, there's BLinux:

http://leb.net/blinux/

Linux for the blind. Been around for a very long time. More than ten years I think, and very mature.