Cognitive aspects of navigation in gemini space

[Luke Emmet]

>> 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
Personally I find Ascii art or Figlet type fonts unattractive, but each 
to their own. Some clients for Gemini will be
using non-fixed-width rendering fonts. But I suppose it they are wrapped in
preformat blocks it is OK.

> 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
>
>
<snip>
> 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...

Colour escape codes seem like a Unix/terminal hack to me, they would 
look strange in a non CLI?
They aren't very accessible (e.g. screen readers for the blind) and if 
there are security
  issues I think that has to be a serious consideration

Best wishes

   - Luke