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A proposed scheme for parsing preformatted alt text

Nathan Galt mailinglists at ngalt.com

Thu Sep 10 09:13:01 BST 2020

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On Sep 9, 2020, at 4:28 PM, easeout at tilde.team wrote:

On Wed, Sep 09, 2020 at 10:41:12PM +0100, Luke Emmet wrote:

[snip]

Any text following the leading "```" of a preformat toggle line which toggles preformatted mode on MAY be interpreted by the client as "alt text" pertaining to the preformatted text lines which follow the toggle line. Use of alt text is at the client's discretion, and simple clients may ignore it. Alt text is recommended for ASCII art or similar non-textual content which, for example, cannot be meaningfully understood when rendered through a screen reader or usefully indexed by a search engine.

So on one hand, alt text is not to be included in the rendered output of

the preformat block, but alt text is recommended as alternative output

for the preformat block, when the usual rendered output is not useful to

the user.

I think that means clients should probably hide alt text normally, but

to make use of it, might have a way to reveal it. Tooltips […]

I strongly recommend against this. The W3C has been trying to get HTML authors and browser makers to _only_ display, in tooltips, text in `title` attributes.

Previously, HTML authors would write `alt` attribute values intending them to be read by sighted HTML readers who can already see the image. If we encourage Gemini-browser authors to put Gemini Alt Text in some kind of tooltip visible to people who can already see the ASCII art or code or whatever, then all but the most accessibility-conscious authors will stuff easter-egg-type text in Gemini Alt Text, similar to the `title` attribute contents on each XKCD comic strip.

(You might be thinking “well, what about that Markdown meme where people write ‘```javascript’ to start off a JavaScript code block, with the idea that a syntax highlighter will read it and colorize the output?” I’d say that yes, that sort of thing _might_ be an imposition to blind users, but that sort of text is mercifully short and gives them a better idea of when they might want to hit a “skip just past the end of the preformatted-text block” keystroke combination and get on with the rest of the page.)