[Clients] Gemini and accessibility regarding preformatted code blocks

[Bradley D. Thornton]

On 2/25/2021 11:42 AM, Devin Prater wrote:

> 
> 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) and Org-mode fans. No tags to worry about, either!

Hi Devin,

There's /e/, which you can look up here:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki//e/_(operating_system)

It's basically a fork of LineageOS. And it is the most horrendous thing
to try to type into a search bar that I think I have ever experienced.

I guess I was half asleep though, when someone asked me how to pronounce
it. Being a Ham Radio operator, and not very alert, I just
transliterated it and told my friend, "Oh, it's pronounced Marky Mark."


> 
> But then we get to preformatted blocks, and the dreaded Ascii graphics. This is what I?ve always disliked about all plain text mediums. MUD?s use Ascii maps and compass and all that. Gopher uses Ascii graphics. And now Gemini too. Sure, it?s wrapped up in a pretty block, but as I?ll discuss in a moment, that isn?t necessarily helpful.
> 

The Author of Ariane, an Android Gemini app available from F-Droid, was
himself lamenting ASCII art images in Gemini recently from his Fediverse
account.

I solicited a response from him but to date have heard absolutely
nothing from him. But here's what I did in the meantime.

```ASCII-art blah blah blah

content
content
content
```

Now, that's a stopgap, and at this time a kludge, but anyone who uses
Vger on a regular basis will quickly come to realize that I put those
strings there, and hopefully that can help? maybe there's a way to set
the reader to ignore between those backticks when the so-called ALT tag
says that the server is about to spam you with an unintelligible
character barrage?

Well, I had been meaning to bring it up to the list here, but wanted to
hear back first from someone who, as a developer, expressed a real
interest in proposing a convention, some sort of handler, perhaps, to
accommodate the non-sighted readership.

I guess the dev was just lamenting the irritation and so without his
participation I suppose now is as good a time as any to bring that up.

Basically, an identifier in the so-called ALT tag portion that any
reader can key off of to skip the block in between? It seems like a very
simple and elegant solution to me that some clients could incorporate by
mere convention.

ASCII-art might be too narrow of a definition too. Perhaps something like:

```skip-block: Any random description to follow blah blah

content
content
```

so that anything with a string such as 'skip-block:' would cause the
reader to just ignore that like it was a comment?

Okay, I keep saying I'm goin' down for a nap. Now I really am lolz.


-- 
Bradley D. Thornton
Manager Network Services
http://NorthTech.US
TEL: +1.310.421.8268