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

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 in the Brave browser. The browser and screen reader commands may differ in another setup, but the GitHub shortcut works the same way.

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. For this example I use the Go crash course from Brad Traversy's Traversy Media channel, because the repository link is in the description.

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.

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 GitHub opens the repository in a browser-based VS Code editor. I do not need to install or clone the project first.

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 the fmt package for formatted input and output. After that comes the main function with fmt.Println("Hello World") inside, and a closing brace ends the function.

That's it. You're in VS Code in the browser without installing or cloning the project. You can read through the files, follow along with a video, or review how the project is put together. If you need to edit and run the code locally, you can still clone it. Here is how I create and clone a GitHub repository with NVDA.