IntelliJ accessibility is somewhat questionable with VO?

There a couple of bugs in the jetbrains bug tracker youtrack including one that is 8 years old about accessibility issues in the terminal - e.g. https://youtrack.jetbrains.com/issue/IJPL-58453/Terminal-is-not-read-by-NVDA-and-VoiceOver-screen-readers

Youtrack is an awful experience with a screen reader though. I've reported this to jetbrains on a number of occasions without them even being bothered to put on any button labels but that's another story.

PyCharm and IntelliJ are built on the same platform so as far as I know should work the same way for many things. I use PyCharm all the time and most of it works pretty well with VoiceOver. I never use the Terminal, though. I don't really see the point as it's easy enough to flip to the normal mac terminal and use that instead.

However I thought I would give it a go now as I've not tried it for years in PyCharm. I went to View > Tool Windows > Terminal (for me that's also Option+F12 but the shortcut might be different for you). This took me to the terminal. I tried typing in "ls" and I heard the keys I was typing and pressed enter and heard it output the results. What I'm not entirely sure about is how to then go and review the output line by line, but it is a lot better than how I remember it, which was that it didn't even speak anything at all.

When I use PyCharm I tend not to use VO shortcuts a lot for the day to day stuff. There are tons of keyboard shortcuts for the app and they can all be customised (although I'm not sure if I have dared try that with VoiceOver yet). But moving around the main interface can be done using Cmd+numbers for most panes (so cmd+0 for commits, cmd+1 for project view, cmd+4 for test runner, cmd+6 for problems etc), then Esc always takes you to the editor. I'll run unit tests with Ctrl+R or Option+R (depending on whether I want to select from the list or just run the last ones) and VO speaks the results. Then you have option_+enter in the editor for all sorts of quick fixes etc.

I don't use VO shortcuts much - maybe to get from the unit test results to the output pane, or to move around some dialogs, but I don't use it to get around the interface as a whole. I guess sVO+M and VO+Shift+M are the main VO shortcuts I use.

I have had a lot of contact with Jetbrains over the years and I would say its very hit and miss. Sometimes they are brilliant. I've had some really detailed replies that have given me alternative ways of working that have helped. Or they have reproduced bugs and filed bug reports on my behalf. But then other times it can go cold and you hear nothing. If you file a bug report then it's normal to get some kind of update as someone shuffles it somewhere but you might never get anything else.

I think it's always worth reporting things, though. There are a number of ways to do this.

They have an accessibility email address - [email protected] - which I have only tried once so far. Not sure if it is new. I sent them a list of thoughts a while back and received a detailed reply a few weeks later. I responded to that with more questions and comments and that was months ago and I've not heard back.

You can also contact support or raise a bug report from the IDE via the Help menu.

There is also the forums - I've had some good discussions in there but a few years ago I seemed unable to post replies any more so just gave up.

Probably contacting support from the Help menu is the way you'll be most likely to get a reply. But then I am on a paid plan so not sure how well it works if you are using the free product.

The frustrating thing about Jetbrains is how hot and cold they are about accessibility. There are some really good people there who seem to genuinely care and understand how to use VoiceOver. But there is also that disconnect between getting someone to reproduce and understand the problem, and then the person who is actually going to fix it. I guess this is similar to Apple accessibility except you get a little more continuity here (ie it's usually the same people you hear from).

I remember when I first dabbled in VoiceOver, it was almost unusable with PyCharm. But by the time I was needing it, things were beginning to get quite good. Then they announced a brand new IDE. I thought "Great, they will have learnt all their lessons and will have built accessibility in from scratch". Nope, not one bit of it - it wasn't even possible to get past the T&Cs. They promised to enable accessibility (or some other stupid way of describing it) soon but they never did and eventually the project was canned. But I think they have now reused some of it in an IDE called Air which is an AI agent thing and it's the same. I managed to get further into it using Codex but the whole thing is unusable so I uninstalled it.

On another random note, I just started to dabble with having Claude write me a plugin to add some extra features - e.g. speak indentation of current line, show me the context of where I am in the code without losing my place, speak the full path of an item in project view etc. Just little things at the moment but it's made me curious to know how far you could push it.

This might also be interesting - https://blog.jetbrains.com/platform/2026/05/improving-accessibility-in-jetbrains-ides-what-s-new-and-what-s-next-in-2026/

In particular the section about making the interface easier to use with just the keyboard as a whole. It's amazing to think that "you can get to the menu using alt on windows" should be newsworthy in 2026 but I hope they follow through with some of this.

Well, I am glad this isn't me. Those instructions mean nothing to me either and I usually give up every time I try to figure this out. However, I pointed ChatGPT at the accessibility page and told it to make sense of it, and it did explain it.

1. Press Option + Shift + 6 and release
2. Press f (without any modifiers)

This does put the cursor into the margin.

A few years ago I did report that these instructions were totally unhelpful as it sounds like you need to be pressing 0 in there somewhere, and it duplicates the modifiers when it speaks them out. But even though it would probably have taken someone significantly less time than it took me to report it, it's obviously too much work for Jetbrains to fix. I also reported it again in the email to accessibility that was ignored.

It must have taken a lot of effort to come up with something that unintuitive and then to explain it so badly.

Also ensure that screen reader mode is enabled - it probably asked you twice when you started it up for the first time if you wanted to do this anyway.