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Improve the accessibility of output in PowerShell

Most terminal environments only display raw text. Users that rely on screen readers are faced with tedious narration when consuming large amounts of raw text because the raw output doesn't have the accessibility metadata to characterize the format of the content.

There are two ways to improve the accessibility of the output in PowerShell:

  • Output the data in a way that it can be viewed in another tool that supports screen reading technologies.
  • Reduce the amount of output displayed in the terminal by filtering and selecting the data you want and output the text in a more readable format.

Display the data in a tool outside of the terminal

For large amounts of data, rather than output to the host, consider writing output in a format that can be viewed in another tool that supports screen reading technologies. You might need to save the data to a file in a format that can be opened in another application.

Out-GridView command on Windows

For small to moderate size output, use the Out-GridView command. The output is rendered using Windows Presentation Foundation (WPF) in tabular form, much like a spreadsheet. The GridView control allows you to sort, filter, and search the data, which reduces the amount of data that needs to be read. The GridView control is also accessible to screen readers. The Narrator tool built into Windows is able to read the GridView details, including column names and row count.

The following example shows how to display a list of services in a GridView control.

Get-Service | Out-GridView

The Out-GridView command is only available in PowerShell on Windows.

Character Separated Value (CSV) format

Spreadsheet applications such as Microsoft Excel support CSV files. The following example shows how to save the output of a command to a CSV file.

Get-Service | Export-Csv -Path .\myFile.csv
Invoke-Item .\myFile.csv

The Invoke-Item command opens the file in the default application for CSV files, which is usually Microsoft Excel.

HyperText Markup Language (HTML) format

HTML files can be viewed by web browsers such as Microsoft Edge. The following example shows how to save the output of a command to an HTML file.

Get-Service | ConvertTo-Html | Out-File .\myFile.html
Invoke-Item .\myFile.html

The Invoke-Item command opens the file in your default web browser.

Reduce the amount of output

One way to improve the accessibility of the output is to reduce the amount of output displayed in the terminal. PowerShell has several commands that can help you filter and select the data you want.

Select and filter data

Rather than returning a large mount of data, use commands such as Select-Object, Sort-Object, and Where-Object to reduce the amount of output. The following example gets the list of services on the computer.

Each of the following commands improves the output in a different way:

  • The -ErrorAction SilentlyContinue parameter suppresses error messages that might be generated if the user doesn't have permission to view some services.
  • The Where-Object command reduces the number of items returned by filtering the list to only show services that are running and have event in the description.
  • The Select-Object command selects only the service name and display name.
  • The Format-List command displays the output in list format, which provides a better narration experience for screen readers.
Get-Service -ErrorAction SilentlyContinue |
    Where-Object {$_.Status -eq 'Running' -and $_.Description -match 'event'} |
    Select-Object Name, DisplayName |
    Format-List

Reformat the output with calculated properties

The default property names of .NET objects output by PowerShell can be verbose and confusing. You can use calculated properties to change the property names and values to something easier to understood when read by a narrator technology.

The following example shows how to get the top five processes by memory usage and display the process name and memory usage in megabytes.

Get-Process |
    Sort-Object WorkingSet -Descending |
    Select-Object -First 5 -Property ProcessName,
        @{n="MemoryMB"; e={'{0:N}' -f ($_.WorkingSet/1Mb)}} |
    Format-List

By default, Get-Process displays the WorkingSet as the number of bytes of memory used. Without formatting, it can be difficult to understand the magnitude of the number. The calculated property converts the number of bytes to megabytes and formats the number with commas and limits the value to two decimal places.

ProcessName : vmmemWSL
MemoryMB    : 1,217.69

ProcessName : Memory Compression
MemoryMB    : 780.45

ProcessName : Code
MemoryMB    : 726.43

ProcessName : OUTLOOK
MemoryMB    : 460.16

ProcessName : msedgewebview2
MemoryMB    : 428.94

Additional reading