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integrated development environments and accessibility

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From: deborah.kaplan
Date: Sep 15, 2010 2:09PM

Do any of you have recommendations for good development environments that are accessible? (In my case, accessibility means Dragon NaturallySpeaking which means keyboard-at-a-minimum, but I assume there are probably people here with other accessibility needs who'd be interested in other forms of accessibility as well.)

I've tried Oxygen and Eclipse, but I've had a lot of trouble controlling either of them hands-free. I always end up falling back on living without an IDE and just editing everything directly in a variety of editors.

I'd even settle for a format-aware editor that is select-and-say compatible. I tend to edit in Vim, which is not Dragon compatible, just because it's nice to have syntax highlighting.

I suppose I should try combining Emacs with the programming-by-voice kit, although I'm not sure how Dragon-compatible any of the Emacs versions are, either.

Thanks,

-deborah

(moderators, I hope this is acceptable. It's about having an accessible environment in which to make more of the web accessible, so even though it's not directly about web accessibility per se, I hope it falls under the "nothing is accessible unless both the user-facing and be backend are both accessible" umbrella. And I definitely know other web developers with disabilities who prefer better environments in which to do their development.)