Cognitive aspects of navigation in gemini space

[solderpunk]

On Thu, May 14, 2020 at 07:06:19PM +0200, Brian Evans wrote:
 
> I do think we should be providing alt text to ascii art blocks, maybe like so:

I've kind of wondered about this too.  Specifically, I started wondering
about this after the recent styling changes at typed-hole.org (sorry to
pick on you, Julien!).  The new figlet-generated (I assume?) section
headers look really great, but they're not great for accessibility (a
screen reader won't know how to read them) and they're not great for
searchability (a GUS search for words used in one of them won't turn up
results).

I'm kind of torn here.  A lot of folks are doing very cool things with
ASCII/ANSI art and colour escape codes in Geminispace.  I love the way
it looks, and coming from the Gopher culture myself I totally understand
and appreciate this urge.  I really don't want to publically condemn
these practices and seem like a creativity-destroying jerk who wants
Geminispace to be bland and depersonalised and black and white.

But there *are* a lot of non-trivial problems with this stuff: on top of
accessibility and searchability, Sean has mentioned potential security
problems with handling ANSI escape codes from untrusted sources...

Cheers,
Solderpunk