accessibility

SKILL.md

When to Use This Skill

Use this skill for any VS Code feature work that introduces or changes interactive UI.
Use this skill by default for new features and contributions, including when the request does not explicitly mention accessibility.

Trigger examples:

"add a new feature"

"implement a new panel/view/widget"

"add a new command or workflow"

"new contribution in workbench/editor/extensions"

"update existing UI interactions"

Do not skip this skill just because accessibility is not named in the prompt.

When adding a new interactive UI surface to VS Code — a panel, view, widget, editor overlay, dialog, or any rich focusable component the user interacts with — you must provide three accessibility components (if they do not already exist for the feature):

An Accessibility Help Dialog — opened via the accessibility help keybinding when the feature has focus.

An Accessible View — a plain-text read-only editor that presents the feature's content to screen reader users (when the feature displays non-trivial visual content).

An Accessibility Verbosity Setting — a boolean setting that controls whether the "open accessibility help" hint is announced.