A proposed scheme for parsing preformatted alt text

[Nathan Galt]

> On Sep 10, 2020, at 10:54 AM, James Tomasino <tomasino at lavabit.com> wrote:
> 
> On 9/10/20 5:47 PM, mbays at sdf.org wrote:
>> How about if clients have an easily toggled switch between showing
>> preformatted text and just showing alt text? I guess that would still
>> lead to more easter-egging, but maybe not too much? It seems there's a
>> tradeoff between discouraging inaccessible uses as human-readable text,
>> and discouraging inaccessible uses as machine-readable text...
> 
> I've been thinking about clients toggling the visibility of preformatted text. While it may not provide much value in a desktop client for sighted users, this could be very useful in mobile clients. Preformatted text is one of the troublesome areas that screws up displays on narrow screens. If a mobile client were to serve the alternate text instead then visitors could choose whether they want to expand it to see the preformatted content.
> 
> This sort of flow is exactly what a screen reader would be doing for a blind user. It serves up that alternate text first and the user then can decide whether it is worth the effort to dive into the contents further.
> 
> Maybe it will also help keep alt-text top-of-mind for content authors if they run into it themselves in the proper context.
> 

True, but another (probably better in most cases) way for narrow screens to handle wide preformatted blocks is to have just those blocks be side-scrollable. I’d rather use a client that has the occasional side-scrollable block instead of a client that makes me tap on alt text to display ``` blocks. Oftentimes I can get a better idea of what’s in the block, and whether I want to scroll to the right, just by looking at the left edge.