| I'm also a blind software developer. I scrape by building apps[0] and services[1] for other blind people, and running the occasional crowdfunding[2] campaign. First off, you're 100% correct when you talk about how devtools are inaccessible. This problem is an historic one, stretching back as far as early versions of Visual Studio, or other early IDEs on Windows. Basically, the people who build the tools make the tools for themselves, and not being blind, make inaccessible by default tooling. I do most of my work on Windows, using the NVDA screen reader, and consequently I have the ability to write or use add-ons for my screen reader to help with a variety of tasks[3]. This being said, this always means more work for equal access, if access is even possible. I'm interested in any sort of collaborative effort you might propose. Targeting accessibility issues in common devtools does seem to me like a reasonable place to start attacking this problem.
I had read a few months ago that Marco Zehe, a blind developer at Mozilla, was pushing some work forward for the Firefox devtools[4], but haven't heard much about that recently, and I think they might be distracted trying to get a11y and e10s working together. Basically, I'm interested in helping in any way you might suggest, and from the thread here it looks like there are some enthusiastic people at least willing to listen.
My email is in my profile, let's make something awesome. [0] https://GetAccessibleApps.com [1] https://CAPTCHABeGone.com [2] https://www.indiegogo.com/projects/nvda-remote-access/ [3] https://github.com/mohammad-suliman/visualStudioAddon [4] https://www.marcozehe.de/2016/01/26/making-the-firefox-devel... |
If it's closed source like a feature in Visual Studio or some other company, I'll volunteer to ask them for it.
Maybe low hanging fruit is the easiest way to convince people at first.