No, I have to read through all the comments over and over and quickly arrow along when I notice its a comment I've already seen. As for your editor questions:
Brackets is sort of usable, but too much of a pain to actually be useful.
Vim ...I really have no idea how to use it, and I think thats not a 'being blind' thing :P I should look into it more
Sublime is, like the IntelliJ, completely inaccessible
Emacs works well regarding you can get your braille display hooked up to Linux, which is a little tricky for me in my current configuration. Also, there's Emacspeak which I am having a hard time getting to run because I don't speak Lisp :)
Do you have trouble with voting up either comments or stories on HN?
If you check out the HN page source you'll notice the HTML anchors for voting are essentially empty save for an empty HTML DIV element with it's background image set to the arrow icon. Needless to say, the way it's designed is dead wrong and highly problematic for systems like terminal text browsers.
Oddly enough no, I can read the vote up buttons just fine and should in fact use them more :) maybe some JS behind the scenes that is taking care of it
