Hi, all. I am teaching a client who is wanting to learn VoiceOver and is a coder. He is using Visual Studio Code. On a recent Readit topic, I read that things are clunky with VoiceOver and keyboard commands. Can anyone shed light on whether Visual Studio is accessible with VoiceOver? If not, are there other options I don't know if he is able to change the platform on which he works, but it would be good to have any information I can obtain regarding coding and VoiceOver. I don't know much about coding, so any information would be appreciated. Thanks so much!
Comments
Does your client know braille?
I'm unsure exactly what hurdle your client is facing. As a former programmer with years of Visual C++ experience, I can say that there are keyboard shortcuts for most routine operations, which work regardless of screen reader.
Dev environments come out with new eyeball-centric features all the time, and Visual Studio is no exception. Examples include code completion that pops up above where you’re typing, like iOS typing suggestions, and all the visual programming tools for developing UIs. I can’t speak to how accessible these features are. But I know for a fact that programmers wrote code long before these features existed. If such a feature isn’t accessible, turn it off.
The bigger issue for me, and why I quit coding, was that I could not switch from using my eyesight to a screen reader. Seeing code and hearing it read by a screen reader are two very different things. With a screen reader, my brain could not make heads or tails of the code, regardless of how I customized punctuation announcements.
If I were to ever try coding again, which seems unlikely, I would use a combination of a screen reader and a braille display. I believe I’d be able to understand code better if I were reading it in braille. I’m aware this would come with its own set of challenges, such as having to pan the braille display to read long lines. Still, it seems like the best way for me to jump the comprehension hurdle.
Good luck to you and your client.
I think it will be doable
Last spring I Took an introductory Python class using VSCode and VoiceOver on a Mac. The previous commenter is right that if your client knows braille, a braille display would be a huge help, and there are some automatic features that can be confusing and might be worth turning off. On the whole, though, I got good feedback, and it worked well. Create a VoiceOver activity that speaks indents; it tells you the level of indent, which can be helpful. Best of luck!