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Comment by sebtron | Hacker News Reader

Interesting. I thought blind developers would be working 100% on a UNIX command line, using tools like ed for text editing (no GUI or TUI).

Related: "Command Line Programs for the Blind", by Karl Dahlke [1]

[1] http://www.eklhad.net/philosophy.html

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I actually tried using Ed and didn't like it very much. My main gripe with it is that you strictly have to operate on a line-by-line basis, there's no way to go word-by-word, do option+backspace to erase the word that you just went past and then replace it with something else. Sure, there's the s command, but then turning "Eric" into "Daniel" also turns "American" into "Amdanielan", and you have to be extra careful around that sort of thing.

This may have been a better option in the early 90's when GUI screen readers were not as good. I did z/OS Assembly programming for several years using ISPF as a text editor and submitting jobs to compile my code. I"ll gladly take an IDE with features from 1995 like renaming variables, moving to the next error, and jumping to a function definition.

If you don't mind me asking, what kind of Mainframe stuff were you working on where writing assembly was the best way to go about it?

I was working on profiling and crash analysis software. The software had existed since the late 70's or early 80's. It was written in assembler so that's what was used to update it. If it was written from scratch it's unlikely the majority of it would be written in assembly.

Did IDEs in 1995 actually support renaming variables? I thought that was a more modern thing like 2000s.

IDEs where mostly non-existing in 1995.

I believe Smalltalk could have been considered an IDE? Just vague memories from people using it those days, I have never used it.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Integrated_development_environ...

Turbo Pascal, Mac Programmers' Workshop, QuickBASIC, and a variety of others would like to say hi.

I would hate to have to do any editing in ed. Just reading a file line by line would be painful.

GUI programs are actually often easier for blind people in the same way they are for everyone else as long as they have good keyboard navigation and use a toolkit with good accessibility support.

I currently mainly use VSCode for development; they are putting a lot of effort into accessibility.

Unfortunately, accessibility under Linux at least is considered lagging and problematic. Microsoft Windows seems to have better accessibility support all round than Linux.

See:

https://scribe.rip/@r.d.t.prater/linux-accessibility-an-unma...

Unix people can just use Emacspeak for everything.

Those don’t expose semantics and state in the same way that well coded GUIs do.

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