Files
PowerShell-PSReadLine/PSReadLine
Andy Jordan 7b6f602405 Add accessible screen reader mode
This adds the `EnableScreenReaderMode` command-line switch which
defaults to true if an active screen reader is detected.

In screen reader mode, the existing `ForceRender()` function is replaced
by `RenderForScreenReader()` which uses a differential rendering
approach to minimize extraneous output to the terminal, allowing the use
of screen readers better than ever before.

The differential rendering relies on calculating the common prefix of
the `buffer` and `previousRender` strings. Nearly all necessary changes
are consolidated in the new rendering function.

Features known not to be supported:

* Colors: as this necessitates redrawing to insert color sequences after
  the input is received and the AST parsed.
* Inline predictions: as this by definition changes the suffix and thus
  requires endless redrawing.
* List view predictions: since the render implementation never calls
  into the prediction engine, this is not available either.
* Menu completion: well, it "works" since it's not disabled and does its
  own rendering, but no effort has been made to improve `DrawMenu()`, so
  it's not accessible (and I'm not sure it could be given our current
  constraints).

Features known to be partially supported:

* Text selection: mark and select commands work as intended, but provide
  no visual indication.
* Multiple lines: as in newlines work fine, but there is no continuation
  prompt.
* Visually wrapped lines: editing above a wrapped line redraws all
  subsequent lines and hence is noisy.
* Status prompt based commands: what-is-key, digit-argument, and most
  notably, forward/backward incremental history search all render a
  "status prompt" on the line below the user's input buffer. This _is_
  supported; however, it can be noisy since it necessarily has to render
  the whole buffer when the input buffer changes, including the status
  prompt (and search text). But what it's reading is almost always going
  to be relevant.

Everything else should generally work, even Vi mode, and the tests pass.
That said, this isn't perfect, and moreover the approach specifically
doesn't attempt to enable things from the ground up. There may be
features that are available but turn out not to be accessible (like
`MenuComplete`) and I believe they should be left as-is.

Specifically tested with NVDA on Windows and VoiceOver on macOS within
VS Code's integrated terminal, with shell integration loaded, and Code's
screen reader optimizations enabled.
2025-08-27 17:46:47 -07:00
..
2025-08-27 17:46:47 -07:00
2017-07-31 17:33:46 -07:00
2025-08-27 17:46:47 -07:00
2025-08-27 17:46:47 -07:00
2017-07-31 17:33:46 -07:00