[Clients] Gemini and accessibility regarding preformatted code blocks

[Kujiu]

Hello,

I share my experience here as I'm legally blind and I
use screen reader.

ASCII Art can be tricky but there are two ways for blind
people (and I use the both). The first one is text to
speech and it's really confusing. The second is
refreshable braille devices. But I need to interpret
the character with its visual form to understand. And
this device can display only one row, it's few.

The best will be like HTML navigation, interpreting
the structure of the document. With Orca on a web
browser, I can use following keys :

- p to go to the next paragraph ;
- 1 to go to the next heading of level 1 ;
- 2 (to 6) to go to the next heading of level 2 (to 6) ;
- h to go to the next heading, with any level ;
- l to go to the next link ;
- ...

All this behavior is defined using the accessibility
bus (at-spi on Linux). Only Gemini clients can implement
it. But, I don't think a dedicated client is a good
idea. Dedicated software is rarely maintained correctly,
and developers of other clients don't know all the
problems of accessibility. This can create a gap about
comprehension of needs. In other way, be visually
impaired can be no vision or a little vision. So, see
the ASCII Art can be a good thing even if a screen
reader is needed (that's my case).

I hope an alternative text for next version of
specification.

Have a good day !

Le 21.02.25, Oliver Simmons a ?crit :
>    On Thu, 25 Feb 2021, 21:21 Devin Prater, <[1]r.d.t.prater at gmail.com>
>    wrote:
> 
>      Windows and Linux graphical screen readers, however, read web pages like
>      a document. So, there isn?t an easy way to skip past plain text, like
>      Ascii art and such. Even if the blocks are marked up in the GemText, it
>      is up to clients to show them. So, if a client just dumps the GemText
>      into paragraphs, and puts the Ascii art in with it, then it is hard to
>      skip. One can quickly arrow line by line until understandable words are
>      spoken, but this is slow and frustrating. Windows and Linux GUI screen
>      readers do have commands to ?skip to end of container,? which are used
>      to skip block quotes, frames, things like that. But the browser has to
>      display them to the screen reader as such, the screen reader doesn?t
>      just guess this.
> 
>    I'm not sure how the world of screen-readers/similar works, but:
>    Since Gemini is very simple (unlike the web), creation of a dedicated
>    client is a possibility.
>    For preformatted text, it could read out the alt-text and then query you
>    if you want it's contents read out to you.
>    I have no idea how creation of such a client would be, but I imagine it
>    would be easier than makes it them for most other things.
> 
> References
> 
>    Visible links
>    1. mailto:r.d.t.prater at gmail.com

-- 
Kujiu
https://www.kujiu.org
gemini://kujiu.org
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