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Open Any GitHub Repo in VS Code in Your Browser with NVDA

A walkthrough of finding a project on GitHub and opening it in VS Code right inside the browser, navigated with the NVDA screen reader.

What This Trick Does

I’m a blind developer, and I do most of my work with the NVDA screen reader on Windows. In this one I’ll show you how to explore a codebase on GitHub right inside VS Code in your browser. I’m using NVDA on Windows in the Brave browser, but the steps are the same anywhere. Once you get used to it, it opens up a new world, especially if you already spend time in GitHub.

Say you’re watching a video and you want the code that goes with it. A lot of creators link their GitHub repo in the description. I like Traversy Media for this. Brad does solid crash courses that give you the fundamentals and then deep dive with hands-on, practical knowledge, and he drops the code he writes as a link in the description.

For this walkthrough I pulled up his Go crash course. To pause the video, I go into focus mode with the NVDA modifier key plus Spacebar, then press K. Then I work my way down to the description. I press H to move by heading and Shift+H to move back up, starting from the main heading and arrowing down until I reach the description. Up top it lists what the course covers, things like loops, maps, range, pointers, structs, and interfaces, and below that are the links. I press K to jump from link to link until I land on the GitHub repository link, then press Enter to open it in a new tab.

Open the Repo in VS Code With One Key

Once the repo loads, I press H to land on the heading level one, which is the name of the repo. Then I press T to get to the folders and files table, and go into focus mode with the NVDA modifier key plus Spacebar. Here’s the trick. I press the period key, and it drops me straight into VS Code, running right there in the browser. Same editor you know from the desktop, with no install and no cloning required.

Explore the Files

Now I’m inside VS Code in the browser. As long as I’m in focus mode, I can press Ctrl+Shift+E to open the Explorer, which is the file tree. Pressing Home jumps me to the first item. Brad keeps all of his Go projects in the main folder, so I can move through the directories and open any file I want.

I open main.go. Ctrl+Home takes me to the top of the file, and I arrow down through it. It starts with package main, then imports fmt, which is a way to format strings and print them to standard output. After that comes the main function with fmt.Println("Hello World") inside, and a closing brace ends the function.

Why I Like It

That’s it. You’re in real VS Code in the browser, and it works just like it does on the desktop. You can read through the files, follow along with a video, review someone else’s code, or just dig in to understand how a project is put together. If you’d rather work locally, you can still clone the repo down to your machine. Either way, it’s a great way to get into a codebase fast.

Give it a try the next time a video links its code.