After months of looking at a screen, with meetings requiring even more screen time, I am again dealing with my concussion symptoms. Using sick time for breaks and getting a special e-ink monitor have been helpful, but not enough.
Thread.
#a11y #accessibility #coding #concussion

In addition to getting a meeting with a specialist, I'm trying out using VoiceOver (Apple's built-in screen reader) to work with my eyes closed. I have to slow down the speech a lot to get where it doesn't hurt my brain, but it at lest changes up my processing center some.
#a11y

I thought that the easiest thing to handle would be programming, since it's all text, and text is in many ways the lingua franca of accessibility. Unfortunately, no.
#a11y

I ended up testing out a dozen different text editors, many of which (even my usual favorites!) are flat-out awful when it comes to accessibility for the blind and partially sighted.
Here's what I found about each one, in alphabetical order, with commentary.
#a11y

@AtomEditor - Roughly as accessible as Firefox, as one might expect. It's pretty bad. The cursor and the VoiceOver focus are disconnected. Moving the focus around does unpredictable things. 1/10
#a11y

@BBEdit - A non-starter. Does not let you know you've typed, does not read back text to you. I was surprised by this, especially given the long pedigree of the editor and the company motto. 0/10
#a11y

Brackets - Another non-starter in terms of accessibility. Just doesn't work in VoiceOver.
#a11y

emacs - No longer included in MacOS, so you'll need to install it. If you already know emacs from head to toe, you might be ok using it. Otherwise, give this a pass, because while it will read your text, it's not going to read off any of the commands you type in. 4/10
#a11y

Espresso - Another non-starter in terms of accessibility. Just doesn't work.
#a11y

@panic's Nova - Fairly accessible. I can get to all the buttons. I can access the text. (God what a low bar.) If I move right one with the VoiceOver key combo, I get the "current symbol", which will tell me useful things like what HTML tag I'm inside. 6/10
#a11y

@sublimehq's Sublime Text is another non-starter when it comes to accessibility. It was a real surprise to me that I simply couldn't access any of it with VoiceOver. 0/10
#a11y

@macromates TextMate - Excellent accessibility. Can access the buttons with VoiceOver movement commands. Has lots of key combos for things like "insert closing tag" and tab-completion for things like "give me a boilerplate Python function."
#a11y

Two pieces of functionality I wish TextMate had right now are reading off those key combos in VoiceOver (because right now I have to read them with my eyes) and adjusting the style sheet (which I may still try to fiddle with myself). 8/10
#a11y

@UltraEdit - Another accessibility non-starter. Doesn't speak the text, can't tell what you typed. 0/10
#a11y

vim - Not as bad as the non-starters. The biggest issue for me was (as with emacs) a lack of indicators for when I changed modes or entered almost any command. The fact that it doesn't read whole lines is tough too. 4/10
#a11y

Visual Studio @Code - It mostly works. I feel like I got some weird misdirection from it at various times. Early use will be more difficult than later use, because it has to install a bunch of things and the install dialogs are not focused when they appear. 5/10
#a11y

@Apple's XCode - Excellent accessibility as one would hope. Uses VO commands to move around, lets you dive in to find punctuation. Adjustable font size for the partially sighted. Starting whole projects creates a maze, but works just fine for single files. 7/10
#a11y

I'm very disappointed that such a high percentage of editors simply did not work at all. There are blind programmers out there. I've worked with one. VoiceOver is a useful feature for me and working around my (hopefully temporary) issues, but it's a must-have for them.
#a11y

In the end I went with @macromates TextMate. I considered putting in the time to learn XCode, but I'd rather just be able to start work instead. TextMate had what I needed and put it closer to the surface.
End Thead.
#a11y