[nfbcs] Accessibility of Eclipse and How to Debug and use code completion

[Timothy Breitenfeldt]

Hi, I am a computer science major, in my last quarter of my degree. I
use Jaws and NVDA as my primary screen readers. I have used Eclipse as
my primary IDE of choice for the past year or so. I have struggled in
the past picking up modern mainstream IDEs do to the complexities of
the user interfaces, and I wasn't feeling like I was gaining much more
than what simpler code editors like ED Sharp, or Notepad++ had to
offer. Eclipse is the IDE that my university uses, and from my
research, is amung the most accessible.

I still frequently use ED Sharp, but I have started using Eclipse
because it does provide some useful features that I can't get in ED
Sharp. I know that Eclipse is far more complicated, and has far more
features than I am aware of, and some that I know of that are not very
accessible.

My main questions are how to debug in Eclipse? and has anyone actually
found the code completion in eclipse useful as a screen reader  user?

I regularly work with classmates who are using eclipse, and when we
are trying to debug our code, they will open up the Eclipse debugger,
and have the ability to step through the code and see the values of
the variables as the program runs. This seems very useful, but I have
never been able to figure out how to use any debugger with Jaws or
NVDA. I have just debugged the old fassion way, by dropping in print
statements in places where I believe the code is crashing. Has anyone
managed to use the Eclipse debugger, and found it to be useful when
using Jaws or NVDA? If so, can you share how to use the debugger?

My second question is about Eclipse code  completion. I have found the
Eclipse code completion system more frustrating than helful, at least
the part that I see. Eclipse will try to guess what I am trying to
type, and auto fil the rest of my statement, but I get no indication
through Jaws or NVDA that code completion just occured. I know of no
way to actually take advantage of code completion with Jaws or NVDA by
choosing out of a list of auto complete options. I have used visual
studeo a bit, and found that intelisense, microsofts code completion
tool, is very accessible. Can Eclipse achieve a similar effect? Is
there a way to make it accessible?

Visual studeo has its own issues that I found, that there are probably
work arounds for, but figuring out what my errors were, was the
biggest issue. That may be a topic for a different thread though.

What is people's experience using Eclipse, do you use Jaws or NVDA? I
have found Jaws to work the best personally because jaws will actually
notify you in line if there is a syntax error, then all I have to do
is press f2 on the code and it will provide options for fixing the
issue. I wasn't able to get that behavior using NVDA.

Does anyone have any suggestions of plugins, resources, or even other
IDE that would work better?

Sorry that this is such a lengthy post, as a senior computer science
student, it is just frustrating that I don't know how to use the tools
available for debugging code, and have the ability to take advantage
of a lot of the features that most sited programmers use every day.

Thanks,

TJ Breitenfeldt