1. Understanding VS Code’s speech feedback and sound effects

Central to VS Code’s screen reader accessibility are its thoughtful and highly customizable feedback mechanisms. The IDE provides realtime information through alerts that are spoken by a screen reader or displayed through a braille display, and sound effects that are played through the user’s speaker. I will now show you ways to get familiar with these feedback mechanisms.

Sound Effects

VS Code provides many sound effects to become aware of the status of the code and commands that are executed in near-real-time. I will list a few below, and introduce functionality that enables you to explore and customize them. You can listen to the audio cue by pressing the play button.

Enabled by default

Enabled by default

  • Error at Position or error at line: Plays when VS Code detects syntax errors or compilation errors in your code.
    error signal
  • Warning at Line or Warning at Position: Plays when VS Code detects warnings in your code.
    warning signal
  • Task Completed: Plays when a task finishes running successfully. You will encounter this when running Jupyter notebook sells.
    Task completed signal
  • Task Failed: Plays when a task encounters an error and fails to complete. You may hear this sound if a notebook sell contains an error.
    Task fail signal
    .
  • diff line inserted: you will hear this sound when you are in the diff editor and are on a line that has been added.
    Diff line inserted signal

Note that this is not an exhaustive list of every sound effect enabled.

Try it yourself

Here, I will show you the steps to explore all the sound effects that VS Code provides.

  1. Open the command pallet.
  2. start typing “sound”.
  3. You will find an option
Help: List Signal Sounds
  1. press enter to select this.
  2. You will now be in a control that is a searchable edit combo box. The screen reader announcement for this may be similar to:

Select a sound to play and configure Edit Has Popup blank placeholder Select a sound to play and configure Type in text. 35 Results

You can navigate the list of sounds by using the down arrow key. Each sound effect is listed as a checkbox. The sound effect is played as you go through the list. The checkbox indicates the enabled or disabled status of the particular sound effect. In other words, a checked checkbox means that the sound will be played when the action correspond to it occurs as you work in VS Code.

announcements

VS Code provides several announcements. You can list them by going to the command pallet and invoking the command

Help:List Signal Announcements

This command opens a searchable list of all available announcements in VS Code. Similar to the sound effects list, you can navigate through the announcements using the arrow keys. Each announcement is presented as a checkbox indicating whether it is enabled or disabled. When an announcement is enabled, VS Code will speak the relevant information through your screen reader when the corresponding event occurs.

Common announcements include notifications about file saves, task completions, error detection, and other important status changes that occur while you work. You can enable or disable specific announcements based on your preferences and workflow needs.

Reflection Questions: sound effects

Reflect on this module by asking yourself the following questions:

  1. How many sound effects are available in your VS Code installation?
  2. Identify one sound effect that would be useful in your workflow and explain why.
  3. Is the sound effect you identified in step 2 enabled by default?
  4. Is there a sound effect you would like to disable? why?

What’s Next

Next, we will perform the last step to set our IDE up, by adding support for the Python programming language. In doing so, you will learn how to install extensions – a core capability of VS Code to be adaptable to your coding needs.