Managing accessibility settings

GitHub's user interface can adapt to your vision, hearing, motor, cognitive, or learning needs.

In this article

About accessibility settings

To create an experience on GitHub that fits your needs, you can customize the user interface. Accessibility settings can be essential for people with disabilities, but can be useful to anyone. For example, customization of keyboard shortcuts is essential to people who navigate using voice control, but can be useful to anyone when a keyboard shortcut for GitHub clashes with another application shortcut.

You can decide whether you want to use some or all keyboard shortcuts, and control the display of animated images and how links are displayed.

You can control whether links in text blocks are underlined and therefore more distinguishable.

  1. In the upper-right corner of any page on GitHub, click your profile photo, then click Settings.

  2. In the left sidebar, click Accessibility.

  3. Under "Content", manage settings for link appearance.

    • To enable underlines on links in text blocks, under "Link underlines", select Show link underlines.
    • To disable underlines on links in text blocks, under "Link underlines", select Hide link underlines.
    • To disable hovercards for previewing link content, deselect Hovercards.

Managing keyboard shortcuts

You can perform actions across the GitHub website by using your keyboard alone. Keyboard shortcuts can be useful to save time, but can be activated accidentally or interfere with assistive technology.

By default, all keyboard shortcuts are enabled on GitHub. For more information, see "Keyboard shortcuts."

  1. In the upper-right corner of any page on GitHub, click your profile photo, then click Settings.

  2. In the left sidebar, click Accessibility.

  3. Under "Keyboard shortcuts", manage settings for your keyboard shortcuts.

    • To disable shortcut keys that don't use modifiers keys like Control or Command, under "General", deselect Character keys.
      • If you disable character keys, you may still be able to trigger shortcuts for your web browser, and you can still trigger shortcuts for GitHub that use a modifier key.
    • To customize the keyboard shortcuts for triggering the command palette, under "Command palette", use the drop-down menus to choose a keyboard shortcut. For more information, see "GitHub Command Palette."

Managing motion

You can control how GitHub displays animated .gif images.

By default, GitHub syncs with your system-level preference for reduced motion. For more information, see the documentation or settings for your operating system.

  1. In the upper-right corner of any page on GitHub, click your profile photo, then click Settings.

  2. In the left sidebar, click Accessibility.

  3. Under "Motion", manage settings for motion.

    • To control how GitHub displays animated images, under "Autoplay animated images", select Sync with system, Enabled, or Disabled.