Blind software development at 450 words per minute (2017)
I am the author of "Software development 450 words per minute". As it's been 2 and a half years since I wrote this post, I thought I'd give a little update as to the tools I use since my preferences have changed slightly. (I know this comment would be more useful as an addendum to the original post, but since I'm currently on holiday it's just quicker to type everything out here for now.)<p>I switched to using Eclipse as my Java IDE about a year ago. The reason for this is that Eclipse is much nicer to use with a keyboard and a screen reader. The state of Java GUI accessibility is a little convoluted and I won't go into that here (look up Java Access Bridge if you're interested), but basically Eclipse works better and faster because its UI toolkit uses the platform's native accessibility API's directly. I guess the reason why I picked up IntelliJ in the first place was that literally every Java developer I knew at the time was using it, so naturally I thought it couldn't be a bad choice. Also, I had used Eclipse briefly in 2013, and let's just say it was nowhere as nice as it is today.<p>I have also ditched Notepad++ for daily development work. I do use it for notetaking and other similar things, but for non-Java based coding Visual Studio Code is all I use these days. I had experimented with VS Code when I wrote this post, but back then it still had some accessibility-related bugs that had to be ironed out. However, they were fixed a long time ago and I've been very happy with my experience so far. VS Code's team has been incredibly committed to ensuring their work is accessible, and these days I just expect things to work right out of the box. And this is something I usually never, ever do.<p>Other than that things have stayed pretty much the same. I'm still on Windows 10 and  am using NVDA as my screen reader, neither of which is likely to change anytime soon. I've been slowly migrating to WSL from Git Bash but it hasn't really been a priority; for now I'm using both side by side.