I do some programming in PHP and C# as part of my day job, though I wouldn't call myself a full-time programmer. Personally, I find working with debuggers to be much more difficult than the actual programming portion of things. However, I think this has more to do with the fact that people don't bother to make the tools accessible, than it does anything else. At first blush, your idea just sounds more confusing than helpful. Writing code is the easy part of programming while blind. It's everything else, from laying out winforms to designing logos and icons to profiling and debugging that's hard. And as I say, that's only hard because people have no interest in making sure the tools are accessible, as the subset of people who program and are also blind is, sadly, much smaller than it should be.

Edit to add: you might find $1 (in post 46 of that thread) from someone who is a full-time programmer useful. Perhaps consider getting in touch with him directly.

It sounds like your interests coincide pretty nicely with the work done by $1 over at UW. For some of his work in this area, look up publications of his student Catherine Baker.

Greetings, I'm a legally blind software engineer. I'd suggest looking into a project known as $1, which aims to provide an audio-based interface for various common desktop computing tasks, including an extensive suite of audio-based developer tools. The project is maintained by blind computer scientist and Googler T.V. Raman.

I'm blind and I write code. I don't think addressing the AST is likely to be a very good way of going about it for a number of reasons. The AST is built on the basis of the needs for the compiler, and, in a sense, the final output. For example let us say that you have a class, which is further modified on the code. The AST will just contain the final result of that modification without regard to how the source is organised. And the way the source is organised is indicative of intent. So AST is usable, but it removes the possibility to understand intent.

I would say the things that would make life considerably easier are:

* A good accessible editor with good navigation (previous function, next function, folding of blocks...).
* Commands to present autocomplete information accessibly. For example a command that would present (in a way the screen reader can grab) which methods on a class begin with what we have on the cursor, or which variables in scope exist beginning that way, etc.
* Direct documentation access, so that one can place oneself on an identifier and get type, and if there's associated docstrings those too.

Some tool to help laying out GUIs would also be handy. How I envision this is having a tree view where you can add objects (lists, edit fields, menu items) and another frame where the GUI is previewed.