[Clients] Gemini and accessibility regarding preformatted code blocks

[John Cowan]

On Thu, Feb 25, 2021 at 2:42 PM Devin Prater <r.d.t.prater at gmail.com> wrote:


> I am a blind person who is interested in all kinds of different ways of
> working with text and writing.


Thank you very much for participating: accessibility is always best
discussed when a person who needs it is actually in the room.  ("If you
want to know how much antisemitism there is in your country, don't ask
yourself: ask a Jew.")

My previous employer sold its software to a lot of government sites.  Walei
Sabry, the New York City Digital Accessibility Coordinator, came into our
office for half a day and talked about how we should and shouldn't do
things.  He also demonstrated his screen reader JAWS for us (none of us
could understand a single word it said).  It was hugely useful and gave us
programmers accessibility tasks for the next month.

> So, I started looking at the spec for GemText. Links one on each line, I
> could do that. No italics or bold, but people are used to seeing *this*
> anyways, or even /this/ for better ergonomics (for me anyways)
>

Is that because "slash" has one syllable and "asterisk" has three?  Just
guessing here, but please tell us what works/doesn't work for you, or point
to a suitable "accessibility 101" site.

> So, this is where client creators come in. Gemini clients should have a
> way to hide preformatted blocks, or fold them, or if they are a GUI client,
> like GemiNaut, which shows the Gemini text in n HTML-like area, map the
> blocks to a frame, so that screen readers can skip them.
>

I think that most preformatted blocks are meant to be readable.  How about
an option to hide preformatted blocks if and only if they have alt text?
That, plus social pressure to actually *provide* alt text, even if it's
just "ascii art" or "ascii art kittens", should do it.



John Cowan          http://vrici.lojban.org/~cowan        cowan at ccil.org
I am he that buries his friends alive and drowns them and draws them
alive again from the water. I came from the end of a bag, but no bag
went over me.  I am the friend of bears and the guest of eagles. I am
Ringwinner and Luckwearer; and I am Barrel-rider.  --Bilbo to Smaug
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: <https://mailing-list-archive.gemi.dev/www/attachments/20210225/6a2ed826/attachment-0001.htm>