Learning HTML and iOS app development as a blind person

By Pat Pound, 2 June, 2013

Forum

App Development and Programming

As a blind person who as self taught all my tech stuff, I'd like to find a way to learn html and to learn how to develop iOS apps. I'd prefer books or online courses or to trade work with someone... I'd also like to know what works best with Jaws or VoiceOver. Pat

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RE

Hi, When it comes to development, it's really a matter of experimenting and finding out what you prefer working with. Different developers will tell you different things, so it's a case of you trying the various options out and figuring out what your most comfortable with, so here I go! for iOS development, I would recommend you download XCode from the Mac App Store (presuming you have a MacBook or something similar). This is an IDE which allows you to compile and debug iOS applications... It can be quite tricky to use with VoiceOver at the beginning, but once you have built your first simple app its a breeze from there on in. If your looking to develop iOS apps on Windows, there are a few options, like phonegap, but I won't really go into any detail on these as I cannot vouche for their accessibility... If your looking to develop iOS apps that you someday hope to distribute through the App Store, I recommend you go the Mac route. In terms of html development, I just typically use a text editor like TextEdit on the Mac or notepad on Windows... there are other options available but I'm not too sure of them, maybe other users could suggest some. Anyway if you want more information on what I said or want me to go into more detail, you can private mail me. Cheers. D

HTML is easy enough

I haven't yet really begun setting foot into the land of IOS development, though it's on my to do list. I can offer this about html , however. It's really quite simple to learn and practice, and I advise just writing it in notepad or text edit, or whatever your favorite plane text editer happens to be. Here is a link to a tutorial on W3 schools HTML page, and last I checked it was very good. http://www.w3schools.com/html/ Once you're writing HTML, all you need to do is save your file as example.html, then open that file and you will view it like you would a webpage. This makes it easy to debug, at least anything that's not alignment or color based! Hope that gets you off to a good start. Good luck!

RubyMotion and CLI

I really like RubyMotion. It lets you write apps in Ruby and just ses the command line. http://rubymotion.com has more info. It costs $200, but I consider it worth it. You can also find some awesome command line tools (not related to RubyMotion) for XCode at http://github.com/mattt

Also interested

Thanks for this thread folks, I'm also interested in learning this. I'm pretty computer literate, preferring Mac but can use Windows too, but an absolute beginner when it comes to development. So where might you recommend I start my learning? Many thanks.

If your starting off, I would

If your starting off, I would suggest you sign up as an apple developer. This can be done for free, and you can gain access to many useful tutorials and guides to app development with Objective C. Also, if your like me, and prefer to teach yourself, I would also advice you to take a look on the appress website. You can purchase many eBooks here, and there are some very useful ones related to iOS development.