I am a blind developer and I work under Windows, GNU Linux and MacOS X. Each of platform has different workflows for blind users. This depends on the screen reader that the blind developer uses. Development tools are not completely accessible for blind developers. I can type code and use compiling functions in all IDEs but there are many problems if I have to design an interface using designing tools as Interface Builder, XGlade or other. When I was developing with Borland Delphi I could add a control, a Button for example, and I could modify each visual attribute of the control using object inspector window. Many IDEs use object inspector windows to modify visual and non visual attributes but the problem for a blind developer is add new controls because the method to add a new control consists of dragging and dropping a control from the palette to the canvas. Visual studio 200x uses alternative methods to do this but the interface of the IDE changes in each new version and this is a big problem because screen readers for Windows need special support, using scripts, to identify each area of some non standar applications. A blind developer can use Visual studio 2008 with his screen reader but when a new version of this IDE appears he has to wait for a new version of scripts for this version of the IDE. Xcode with Interface builder has no alternative for dragging and dropping tasks yet. I asked it to Apple many times but they are working in other things. I published 3 apps in the App store (Accessible minesweeper, accessible fruitmachine and Programar a ciegas RSS) and I had to design all the interface by code. It's a hard work but I can manage all features of each control. Eclipse has an accessible code editor but other development tools as debug console,plugins for designing or documentation area present problems for assistive tools for blind users.

对于盲目的开发人员来说，文档也是一个问题。许多示例和演示使用图像来显示解释(在图片中设置环境设置)

我认为问题不在于盲目。问题是，公司和开发团队认为可访问性会影响最终的软件，但它不会影响开发软件。他们认为盲人用户可以成为客户，但盲人用户不能成为开发伙伴。

盲人协会要求产品和服务的可访问性，但他们忘记了盲人开发者。盲人可以当律师、记者、教师，但盲人开发者即使对盲人来说也是一个奇怪的概念。很多时候我感到孤独，因为我的一些盲人朋友不能理解我的工作。

你可以在这篇西班牙文的文章中阅读我对这个问题的看法，在我的博客http://www.programaraciegas.net/2010/11/05/la-accesibilidad-en-crisis-para-los-desarrolladores-ciegos/ 网页中有一个翻译工具。对不起，我没有翻译。

I'm a postgraduate student in Beijing,China. I major in computer science and a lot of my work is programming. I am born with low sight, I need to use magnifying tools to see fonts on screen clearly. I use microsoft's mgnify tools on windows and use compiz's magnify plug in if on linux. I usally set the tool to magnify as three times many as the original font size. For me maginify tools is ok, the main problem is the speed,I have to move mouse to keep cursors follow the text I'm looking at, microsoft's magnify provides a option of "auto follow the text edit points",that set me from continuously mouse movement when editting or coding. But it doesn't always works because of the edit software or IDE may not support that. Magnifying tools on linux are hard to use. The KMag come with KDE has a terrible refresh rate which make my eyes unconfortable, compiz's magnifying plugs which I'm using now is OK,but has no function of auto focus(focus auto following). iOS provides quite perfect solution for me with full screen magnifying, especially on ipad's 9.7 inches screen. there auto focus is not necessary because I hardly use them to code or do other edit stuff. Android provides very little accessibility functions, only like shake feedback, which is useless for me. there is no any kind of good magnifying tools on android , not to mention advance function like full screen magnify on iOS. I used to study Qt, want to build a useful magnify tools on linux, even on android. But hardly have some progress.

Emacs有许多扩展，允许盲人用户操作文本文件。您必须就该主题咨询专家，但emacs具有文本到语音的功能。甚至可能更多。

此外，还有linux:

http://leb.net/blinux/

盲人的Linux。已经存在很长一段时间了。我想十几年了，而且很成熟。

请记住，“失明”是一系列的情况——有一些人在法律上是盲人，他们可以阅读一个非常大的显示器或在放大设备的帮助下，还有一些人根本没有视力。我记得大学时的一个同学有一种可以放大书本的特殊设备，还有一种可以放大屏幕一部分的特殊软件。她正在努力完成大学学业，因为她的视力越来越差，几乎要完全消失了。

编程也有一系列的需求——有些人擅长写出大量的代码，有些人更擅长看大局和架构。我可以想象，考虑到屏幕界面所施加的难度，失明可能会增强你获得大局的能力……

我不记得来源，但我听说过/读过一种可听语法“着色”的形式-这样，而不是字符串赋值被读为

Foo = quote这是一个字符串引号

字符串部分将用不同的音高或声音来读，以使元素的分离更清晰。

我是个盲人，已经在Windows、Mac、Linux和DOS上编程了大约13年，使用的语言包括C/ c++、Python、Java、c#和各种较小的语言。虽然最初的问题是关于配置环境的，但我认为最好的回答是看看盲人如何使用计算机。

有些人使用谈话环境，比如在其他答案中提到的拉曼和Emacspeak环境。到目前为止，更常见的解决方案是有一个屏幕阅读器，它在后台监控操作系统活动，并通过合成语音或物理盲文显示(通常一次显示20到80个字符)提醒用户。这意味着盲人可以使用任何可访问的应用程序。

因此，我个人现在使用Visual Studio 2008，并且运行它时只做了很少的修改。我关闭了某些功能，比如在打字时显示错误，因为我觉得这会让人分心。在加入微软之前，我所有的开发都是在一个标准的文本编辑器(如记事本)中完成的，所以同样没有定制。

可以配置屏幕阅读器来宣布缩进。我个人不使用这个，因为Visual Studio会处理这个问题，而c#使用大括号。但这在Python这样的语言中是非常重要的，因为这里有空格。最后，Emacspeak使用不同的声音/音调来表示语法的不同部分(关键字、注释、标识符等)。