GitHub has been chosen by the majority of W3C working groups and task forces to serve as their central repository for all of their information. You will need some prior knowledge with GitHub in general and screen reader navigation in particular if you want to be able to see, download, and interact with the material that is presented here. In terms of user friendliness, accessibility is somewhat of a hit-or-miss proposition for both the GitHub website itself and the vast majority of the Git desktop apps. If you want to see an example of a bling friendly page, see https://bye.fyi/number/8663260950 or https://www.w3.org/standards/webdesign/accessibility.
At first, the procedure seems to be rather challenging; but, if one is equipped with the appropriate set of strategies, devices, and skills, as well as a good portion of perseverance, it can be mastered. This is the first of a two-part blog post in which we will discuss the most frequent Github procedures and how a screen reader may be used to navigate them. In this, the first section of the series, we will begin with the fundamentals. First, we will walk you through the process of setting up the environment, and then we will discuss forking, cloning, and submitting concerns.
In the next section of this blog, we will use these tools to make our way through the formidable jungle that is the process of creating branches, using those branches to make changes, pushing the branch with your changes to your fork, and generating a pull request so that your branch with your changes can be merged into the master branch.
In order to get started, you will need to sign up for an account on GitHub. In the event that your web browser does not sign you in immediately, the account creation form will be shown directly on the homepage of GitHub. If you already have an account but the site still requires you to enter your username, email address, and password, check for a link that says "Sign in" in the top of the page, and then use that link to log in to your account.
Users of screen readers will find that the GitHub website has a variety of oddities, puzzles, and annoyances, in addition to a few of more serious accessibility issues. James Teh, a member of the NVDA team, has developed a Greasemonkey script that addresses a lot of these difficulties. Go to the website in order to get a link to the script as well as instructions on how to install it.
Installation of a software that will make the Github site more accessible was kindly provided by Amanda Rush. You won't be completely lost if you choose not to install this script; all it does is make a few things more obvious to look for. Because the repository is hosted on GitHub, after you have gained some familiarity with using GitHub, you will be able to add your own updates to this script. Even so, our ultimate goal is for the individuals who are in charge of the GitHub website to find a solution that works for everyone.
You've decided that you wish to participate in a GitHub project. Your adventure will begin with the creation of a virtual duplicate of the project's repository in your own GitHub account, which is the first stage. Within the context of GitHub, this action is referred to as "forking the project." The act of downloading a repository onto your computer using the Git tools that you just installed is referred to as cloning. Forking a repository gives you the ability to do so (see next section).
The only thing you need in order to fork a repository is the URL of the repository's page on Github. Feel free to open up your preferred web browser and go to the location. It is recommended that when you fork the repository, you locate and copy its clone URL. This will come in useful when you need to update both your local copy and your fork with the most recent changes made to the master repository. For more information, please refer to the section under "Keeping your repositories up to date." The third button on this page ought to say "fork your own copy of x to your account" in the text that appears next to it (where x is the name of the repository). At terms of its physical placement, this button may be found in the upper right corner of the page. Simply clicking that button will begin the process of forking the repository.
Remember that clicking this button will take you to a new page and leave the current one. If you are not already logged in, clicking this button will take you to the page where you may sign in to your account; if you are already signed in, you can skip this step. For those of you who have already logged in, the forking process should be finished at this point. It ought to have brought you to the project page in your account at this point. The title of the page need to have been modified to "your username/the name of the repository," and the h1 header of the page ought to have had a number of pieces of information and links along the following lines: