Visual Studio Code and Tahoe 26.4

By Donal, 30 March, 2026

Forum
App Development and Programming

Hi all,
Wondering if anyone else has noticed a degradation in performance between VS Code and Voiceover in 26.4? I'm finding that in some files (primarily Markdown), when I use the up/down arrow keys to read-by-line, VO does not read the line but instead reads single characters. It appears to read the character at/under the cursor. for example, if I am at the beginning of a line, and the first character in the line below where the cursor is located is "T", and assuming I press down arrow, then 'T' will be spoken and not the entire line. I have checked the various accessibility settings, and it is optimised for Screen Reader. To be honest, it has been so long since I set it up on my previous Mac that I have forgotten any additional steps that I may have gone through, and as this is a new machine I suspect that I've overlooked something.

It may be as simple as installing a Markdown extension or something, or disabling some syntax highlighting, but I'm not sure. I have my entire 11ty project (including Markdown) in one codebase, so I'd rather not use a separate editor for bits and pieces of this. Anyway, if anyone has thoughts I would appreciate hearing them. cheers.

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Comments

By TheBlindGuy07 on Tuesday, March 31, 2026 - 11:09

This bug affects the editor no matter what the file is.
TLDR: do command down arrow to go to the end of the file. Then press left arrow once or twice. Go up or anywhere in the file and you can navigate normally. Just know you'll have to redo this once you've reached the complete end of any file. Knowing it is enough already + this workaround.
I'm not clever enough to know what causes this and who's to blame but as far as I know this has worked for me so far. And this was already there in the 26.3 or even .2 update cycle, and I'm pretty sure I wrote a small post about it a couple months ago.
I also think it would be a great idea if you move it to the app dev and programming forum but it's up to you.

By Donal on Tuesday, March 31, 2026 - 17:34

Thanks @TheBlindGuy07. Moved as per suggestion. I hadn't seen this particular bug on the previous version of the operating system, either with the 26 releases, or those before. It's a nuisance.

By Donal on Tuesday, March 31, 2026 - 20:16

In short, nope. :-) However, it only seems to kick in for me when there are blank lines at the end of the file.

By TheBlindGuy07 on Tuesday, March 31, 2026 - 21:48

For me it happens whenever I reach the complete end of any document.