A proposed scheme for parsing preformatted alt text

[James Tomasino]

On 9/11/20 8:22 PM, Nathan Galt wrote:
> Oh, huh. My assumption would be that screenreaders wouldn’t read anything in preformatted-text blocks if there were any alt text available.
> 
> (Yes, my assumption is that 99.9999% of the time, the page will download faster than a screenreader can speak.)
> 
> Back in HTML land, if an image has no alt attribute at all, the usual screenreader behavior is to read the filename out loud. Because this is time-wasting noise 99.999% of the time, web authors are repeatedly urged to add `alt=“”` (empty alt attributes) to images that blind people don’t need to care about (purely presentational ones, for example).
> 
> At any rate, if I were blind, I’d want a “skip past the preformatted block I’m in” if my client were set to read out preformatted-text blocks. I have no idea how hard this would be to program in a GUI-based Gemini client, though, for any OS.

I've invited the Rhapsode maintainer to join us on the mailing list so we can get the perspective of a dev of an actual accessible gemini client. I hope that will help guide our assumptions in this area better. My own expectations of how a screen reader would work differ a bit from what you're saying, but rather than muddy the waters more I'll wait and hope Adrian jumps in here.