Accessibility: VS vs VS Code

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dmazzoni@reddit

I'm an experienced developer, I work on accessibility for my career, and I've worked with many blind programmers.

The short answer is: both. They are both accessible and they both work with JAWS and refreshable braille displays.

I think which one to choose depends more on what programming languages someone wants to use. Visual Studio is awesome for C, C++, C#, and a few less common Microsoft languages like F# and VB.NET but not really good for anything else. VS Code works with pretty much any language.

For a language that both support, here are roughly the pros and cons:

Visual Studio has been around for a really long time. It's stable and mature and doesn't change much. It's been accessible for a very long time, so it's reliable.
VS Code is newer and hotter. While the core UI is accessible, there are thousands of plug-ins and not all of those plug-ins will be accessible. However on the flip side there are plug-ins specially for accessibility. Because it changes so frequently, occasionally accessibility will regress. However, there's more of a community there now and bug fixes will come more quickly too.

I hope that helps.

Note that while both are accessible, that doesn't mean they're easy. The learning curve will be steep, and learning to use them effectively will mean memorizing dozens of keyboard shortcuts and figuring out workarounds for challenges.

In addition to an IDE, getting comfortable with the command-line terminal is also really important.

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violetx38@reddit (OP)

Thank you! This does help. I started working with VS Code but was wondering if VS would offer more accessibility features given that it’s a Microsoft program. Makes sense that it would depend on the coding language. Do you have any resources you recommend for blind coders?

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dmazzoni@reddit

I know there are discussion forums online for blind coders. Reach out if you're unable to find any.

I'd also recommend checking out NVDA and learning to use that in addition to JAWS. It's free and open-source. It makes sense to prefer JAWS if you have it, because it's more widely used by professionals and has good support, but NVDA has a good community and does some things better than JAWS. In particular it was developed by two blind programmers, so it has particularly good support for coding.

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violetx38@reddit (OP)

Thank you! This does help. I started working with VS Code but was wondering if VS would offer more accessibility features given that it’s a Microsoft program. Makes sense that it would depend on the coding language. Do you have any resources you would recommend for blind coders?

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Ronin-s_Spirit@reddit

What's a braille display? Is there actual tech that pops up dots on a surface you you can finger read it? I use VSCode but I've never thought of accessibility for.. blind people? Gonna be tough to code like that.
You could install vscode and open up the extensions menu and search for something that works, or maybe it even accessible from somewhere on the internet.

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dmazzoni@reddit

Yes, exactly. They've been around for more than 20 years.

https://www.freedomscientific.com/products/blindness/braille-display/

Gonna be tough to code like that.

It's challenging to learn to code using speech and braille, but honestly coding can be a great job for people who are blind because code is just text.

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DreamDeckUp@reddit

That's so cool

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Character-Note6795@reddit

Visual Studio makes loading assemblies much easier. With VS Code, you also run into the quirks of .NET core. To each their own. I don't know specifics about accessibility or JAWS, and frankly don't care either.

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bestjakeisbest@reddit

Visual studio is an ide/compiler made for windows by Microsoft.

Visual studio code is a text editor based on sublime made by Microsoft it cannot compile stuff on its own, but it is light weight and has some nice features for programming

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The_4ngry_5quid@reddit

I've never used VS. I always use Visual Studio Code.

Perhaps VS Code has plugins for accessibility.