[Clients] Gemini and accessibility regarding preformatted code blocks

Latest version of Elaho (1.3, in App Store now) handles preformatted
text better and wraps it with accessibility metadata, using the alt
text if present as title. I tested it with VoiceOver and it seems to
do the right thing. Sometimes it seems to also read the contents of
preformatted text if it looks like words, but not always. In any case,
please let me know if this works better.

On Thu, Feb 25, 2021 at 10:21 PM Devin Prater <r.d.t.prater at gmail.com> wrote:
>
> On Feb 25, 2021, at 2:38 PM, Sol?ne Rapenne <solene at perso.pw> wrote:
>
>
> Is the reader reading line by line? So depending on the alternative text 
the user could decide
> to explore the content or skip it?
>
> The screen readers read line by line, basically. But browsers would have 
to put the code blocks in a container that can be skipped, like a frame so 
that screen readers can know that this is something that can be skipped. 
That?s for browsers that use some kind of web engine to show the content. 
For text browsers, this can?t really be controlled, some screen readers 
can?t easily skip it. That?s why I think these browsers should ?fold? in 
Emacs terminology, or hide the blocks on request. Okay, I?ll give more concrete examples.
>
> On iOS, the VoiceOver screen reader shows everything in its own element. 
The Elaho browser, then, could get away with simply putting the 
preformatted blocks without Alt-text, or Alt-text that isn?t a language 
ID, in its own element so that can be skipped by moving to the next 
element (item) with VoiceOver. This is the same with Android with the 
TalkBack screen reader, and on the Mac, using VoiceOver.
> => https://developer.apple.com/documentation/uikit/accessibility_for_ios_
and_tvos/supporting_voiceover_in_your_app VoiceOver (Apple developer)
> => https://developer.android.com/guide/topics/ui/accessibility TalkBack 
(Android developer)
>
>
> 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.
> => https://github.com/nvaccess/nvda NVDA screen reader for Windows (Github)
> => https://gitlab.gnome.org/GNOME/orca Orca screen reader (Gitlab)
>
> Console screen readers are the most dumb of them all. They read directly 
from top left of the screen to bottom right, whereas GUI screen readers 
start at keyboard focus, or at top left of a document or web page that 
doesn?t put keyboard focus anywhere else. Console screen readers do have 
keys to read by line, word or character, but not much else. It all is 
dependent on the program being read.
> => http://www.linux-speakup.org Speak screen reader
> => https://github.com/chrys87/fenrir Fenrir screen reader
> => https://brltty.app BRLTTY braille display driver
>
> Hope that helps a little more.

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