I am using IntelliJ Idea for developing scala and Java programs. I am also a screen reader user.
One of the most useful features that IDEs provide is code linting and displaying error and warnings in your code, along with descriptions. I understand if you are a sighted user, you can just hover your mouse over an erroneous line of code and you get a tooltip with the description.
I haven't been able to figure out how to access this description as a screen reader users. So far, to review errors/warnings I would just build the program and look at the command line output, however this is pretty inefficient compared to just hovering over line of code.
Could someone share a better way of reviewing errors/warnings in IntelliJ using a screen reader? Ideally how to access the error tooltip, or how to access a better UI for reviewing them instead of looking at raw command line output.
Importantly, make sure to turn on screen reader support: settings (ctrl + alt + S) > appearance and behaviour > Appearance > Support screen readers (requires restart)
Then when your caret is on an error/warning, you can press ctrl + F1 and a dialogue will pop up with the description. Press escape to close it.
If you want to make sure the caret is on an error/warning, use F2 to jump to next error/warning.
As noted by lukaszgo1 in his answer, the description is also printed to status bar, but NVDA cant find it using its normal command, because JAB GUI applications are lacklustre in their implementation of accessibility, however if you want to access the status bar of IntelliJ to read the description you can use an NVDA addon which I developed, that adds a command for reading IntelliJ status bar and fixes list items not being labelled properly.
I actually forgot I asked this until I got an answer recently.
Thanks to lukaszgo1 for his answer.