Seeking Blind Programmers

By Dan M., 26 November, 2014

Forum
App Development and Programming

Hello Apple Vis Users,
My name is Daniel Mitchell and I am a rehabilitation counselor with The Bureau of Services for Blind Persons in Michigan. I work with a consumer who has been working as an Apple Programmer for 20+ years. He is struggling with finding a text editor which accurate enough for him to write computer/programmer code. My hope is you can assist me in finding a programmer who is blind and uses voice over.

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Comments

By rareBlackMagic on Saturday, December 6, 2014 - 02:32

Hello,
I would seriously recommend TextMate. I've used this for years and have been in contact with MacroMates the developers and they have done a great job of making it accessible with VoiceOver. It's a native application and uses the Accessibility framework Apple sets out for developers of Mac and iOS programs.
It is now open-source and supports a massive collection of programming languages, markup languages and scripting languages.

Other than that I hear very good things about TextWrangler and it's paid (and better counterpart) BBEdit (which is a long-standing Mac application stretching back to the early days of the Mac and has incredible support.)

In my opinion, if you use any one of these, you'll get great support wherever you go because so many sighted developers use them, so if there is anything particularly specific you'd need help with, chances are you'll find a blog post or tutorial explaining how to do it. And navigating these programs are fairly easy since they are text editors.

TextMate: http://macromates.com/download
TextWrangler: https://itunes.apple.com/us/app/textwrangler/id404010395?mt=12
BBEdit: http://www.barebones.com/products/bbedit/

If the programmer you are corresponding for is looking for a more advanced solution like an IDE, there really as far as I know, only 2 that are accessible, however, there may be other blind programmers here who can correct me on this. But I would recommend either Apple's own Xcode which supports obviously C, C++, Objective-C, Swift and Git (and a few other things if I recall, but it's primarily a C IDE)
Other than that, I would recommend Eclipse, an open-source project that's been around for as long as I can remember and is primarily a Java IDE, but can be modified to support C, Python and others.

Xcode: https://itunes.apple.com/us/app/xcode/id497799835
Eclipse: http://www.eclipse.org/downloads/?osType=macosx

I am primarily a Zoom user and only really use VoiceOver for reading my code, however I know for me at least the applications I have mentioned above are accessible with my limited use of VoiceOver features (if it works with basic VoiceOver commands, then, great, right?) However other blind programmers can add their experience with full VoiceOver usage.

Regards,
RBM