[yaddayadda]

@zersiax

- Thank you so much for sharing!

- You mention,

>Premier tools that coders use every day, like the IntelliJ editor, as well as all its offshoots (PHPStorm, WebStorm, PyCharm), are completely inaccessible, due simply to the fact that the developers of these programs have not adhered to the accessibility guidelines. They've failed to give screen readers textual labels or accessibility descriptions to work with. The same goes for applications like SourceTree, which is slowly getting better, but is still a pain to use.

Have you tried VIM, eMacs, Sublime or Brackets; if so, how would you rate them?

What is your experience with HN's interface? I know I frequently wish there were more visual indicators of new/unread responses, but I can at least scan the beginning of messages and skip ones that I've previously read; do you have a corresponding way to skip responses?

[zersiax]

No, I have to read through all the comments over and over and quickly arrow along when I notice its a comment I've already seen. As for your editor questions: Brackets is sort of usable, but too much of a pain to actually be useful. Vim ...I really have no idea how to use it, and I think thats not a 'being blind' thing :P I should look into it more Sublime is, like the IntelliJ, completely inaccessible Emacs works well regarding you can get your braille display hooked up to Linux, which is a little tricky for me in my current configuration. Also, there's Emacspeak which I am having a hard time getting to run because I don't speak Lisp :)

[jcr]

Do you have trouble with voting up either comments or stories on HN?

If you check out the HN page source you'll notice the HTML anchors for voting are essentially empty save for an empty HTML DIV element with it's background image set to the arrow icon. Needless to say, the way it's designed is dead wrong and highly problematic for systems like terminal text browsers.

[zersiax]

Oddly enough no, I can read the vote up buttons just fine and should in fact use them more :) maybe some JS behind the scenes that is taking care of it

[tyrylu]

I'm not the original author, but a blind coder nonetheless, so i think it's worth responding anyway. Sublime is an accessibility disaster, unfortunately, Emacs can be used, but it's much more productive with EmacsSpeak or Speechd-el. Vim would likely need something similar, because the advanced cursor movement commands have no screen reader feedback by default. The HN ui is quite okay, but some semantic comment nesting (like disqus comments, perhaps?) would help. Might be some filtering for new comments since last visit.