[jscholes]

The solution you've settled upon (text editor plus CLI) is pretty much the best you and your student can hope for at the moment. When I was at university, speaking as a screen reader user myself, the very first thing I asked my tutors was whether I could skip all the Eclipse learning and jump straight into command line compilation.

Further down the line, the student might find that programming is no longer so new to them that they can afford to explore something else. But at the moment, if they're a beginner, trying to learn a tool like an IDE, which is supposed to make your life easier but generally has the opposite effect for blind devs, is just going to confuse matters. So I would stick with what you're doing, because you probably won't get any better support from the disability services team at the university because it's not an area they know.

Your student needs to learn, sometimes the hard way, that if you're blind and want to make things, you have to be prepared to do things in ways which go completely against the grain - having to basically use Windows to be productive is one of them - and to solve these boilerplate accessibility problems without becoming discouraged.

[russomf]

Thanks. That is very helpful.