@NVAccess a couple of things…

Visual Studio and Visual Studio Code are completely different products. Just throwing that out there for those who may not yet know.

VS Code is pretty dedicated to screen reader accessibility. Here are their docs on that:

code.visualstudio.com/docs/edi…

Visual Studio is too, but it’s harder to learn, in general, regardless of accessibility concerns.

I’ll be pinging a friend who’s been using VS Code with NVDA for a while, to get some first-hand insight.

Accessibility in Visual Studio Code

Visual Studio Code user accessibility features. Learn here about the various ways VS Code aids user accessibility.

^{code.visualstudio.com}

@MostlyBlindGamer @NVAccess I'll be using simplified language for this reply since I don't know skill levels. Visual Studio Code, or VScode, is very different from Visual Studio. Yes, I agree that them having similar names is silly. VScode is written with a lot of JavaScript and is much friendlier to approach as your first text editor. It has fewer features than Visual Studio, but it will do most of what you need to do and is shockingly accessible with a screen reader: extension management, file browser, notifications, file status, a bunch of other stuff. It can all be accessed either through moving focus from pane to pane with f6 or by using a specific shortcut. Don't know a shortcut? Use the command palette. Vscode can't do something specific? Find an extension to do it. Having trouble changing your settings? Open up the json and avoid any weird GUI dropdown nonsense by editing them directly.

I do Python, JS, HTML, CSS, SQL, C++, and even some C# through VScode. The text editor will let you write anything you want. I supplement it with code formatters/linters, framework integrations, command-line interface tools, and any other tooling I might need for a given project/workspace (an entire IDE in the case of C++ for Arduino in VScode). Visual Studio includes a lot of this stuff in it already, and you can absolutely use it to write your first hello_world.py if you really want, but it's total overkill for that: you'd be driving an 18-wheeler to the supermarket to pick up a carton of eggs.

I would recommend reading the links that @MostlyBlindGamer posted. They are what helped me get started on VScode with NVDA. Also drinking coffee and yelling obscenities at my keyboard for 2 hours before realizing I forgot the semicolon on line 211.