TalkBack was created as a way to navigate and control Android devices without having to see the screen, with content read out to the user, who could use a Braille keyboard and gestures on the screen to operate the device. TalkBack helps people with impaired vision use Android devices, and Google is implementing the new functions based on requests from the blind and low vision community, further expanding Google’s ongoing expansion of tech accessibility tools. When I tried enabling talkback it made the emulator unusably slow although this was over a year ago so maybe things have gotten better? I'm a blind programmer and know Eclipse is accessible with Jaws so he should be able to program with either an IDE or command line and a text editor.Google has added voice commands and other interactive features to the TalkBack screen reader for Android. What I've gathered from it is that accessibility can be enabled with little to no sighted help. I am planning on testing out Android Studio and will update my answer with the results. So far Android accessibility is looking good for the standard Android SDK. I was able to use standard Eclipse functions to step by line once the breakpoint was hit and view variable values. I debugged the application on my Nexus and set a breakpoint in the body of the for loop. I created a method to be called when the button was clicked with a for loop so I could test debugging. It looks like layouts are doable, you will just have to reference the docs for proper XML a lot. I was unable to use the graphical layout editor to add Widgets to a layout, although I was able to edit the XML to create a button with no issues. I was able to create an Android project using Eclipse with no problems. Enabling developer settings on the Nexus was also fully accessible. I was also able to enable accessibility on my Nexus 7 with no sited help. Installing the Android SDK with the bundled Eclipse was completely accessible. I bought a refurbished first gen Nexus 7 to try and learn Android programming. I'm up dating my answer with my experiences.

Android accessibility screen reader