On the SitePoint PHP blog Parham Doustdar has posted a look at accessibility in PHP tools or how easy they make it for those with disabilities (such as his own blindness) to do their development work.

Usually when I tell people that I’m blind, many people ask me how I can use the computer. “Is someone reading you my messages?” I remember someone asking. Many people imagine that I have this super-nifty speech recognition software that I can just talk to, and it would do anything, even write code. Imagine dictating code to a speech recognition system! [...] I gave an answer on Quora, to someone who had asked How does a visually impaired computer programmer do programming? I recommend you go through that answer to have a better context on what I’ll be talking about in this post.

He starts with a look at how visually impaired people could normally use a computer using screen readers, interaction with the software (all through the keyboard) and some things that just can't be done with this setup. He covers some of the issues screen readers have when parsing web applications and links to the WebAIM articles page for more information there. He then gets into the IDE comparison covering essential, assistance and supplementary features as well as community engagement around accessibility issues. He compares:

• PHPStorm
• SublimeText
• NetBeans
• Eclipse-based IDEs (Zend Studio, Eclipse PDT)
• Notepad++

Unfortunately, most of the software on his list received a rating of "zero" on the scale with the exception of Notepad++, though it still has places it falls flat.