If I am blind, how do I see the error indicators in Eclipse IDE for Java

Question

I am currently helping a blind person to learn Java using Eclipse as their IDE. However, when there are errors, e.g. a typo, the red underlines indicating an error are not useful/apparent.

How can blind users be made aware of errors or other visual indicators within Eclipse?

Answer 1

In eclipse you can use Ctrl+. and Ctrl+, to navigate forwards and backwards through underlined sections.

When the cursor is in an underlined section, the error is shown in the status bar which your screen reader may be able to read (with JAWS use Insert+PgDn or CapsLock+PgDn).

There are some more tips for Eclipse's accessibility features in the Eclipse Help pages.

Answer 2

Jaws normally says "invalid" before each invalid part of code in the code editor as you navigate with arrow keys. You have nothing specific to configure for this. At least for me, it worked out of the box from day 1.

IN case of doubt or if it doesn't work out of the box, you can customize the way Jaws behaves by going to the setting center. More specifically, in the speech and sound scheme, you might pick a modern scheme different than classic, or want to customize the way the "invalid" font style is announced.

You will also certainly need to pay triple attention to things that eclipse automatically insert for you as you type, like closing parens and braces, as they aren't announced at all by Jaws when they are automatically inserted. They can easily make you enter unwanted extra characters. As a blind user I prefer to completely disable all autocompletes like this and only keep it on demand with shortcuts like F2, but that's a personal choice.

Unfortunately, I can't help if you are using NVDA, but there certainly are solutions as well.