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James Tomasino tomasino at lavabit.com
Fri Sep 11 21:33:21 BST 2020
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On 9/11/20 8:22 PM, Nathan Galt wrote:
Oh, huh. My assumption would be that screenreaders wouldn’t read anything in preformatted-text blocks if there were any alt text available.
(Yes, my assumption is that 99.9999% of the time, the page will download faster than a screenreader can speak.)
Back in HTML land, if an image has no alt attribute at all, the usual screenreader behavior is to read the filename out loud. Because this is time-wasting noise 99.999% of the time, web authors are repeatedly urged to add `alt=“”` (empty alt attributes) to images that blind people don’t need to care about (purely presentational ones, for example).
At any rate, if I were blind, I’d want a “skip past the preformatted block I’m in” if my client were set to read out preformatted-text blocks. I have no idea how hard this would be to program in a GUI-based Gemini client, though, for any OS.
I've invited the Rhapsode maintainer to join us on the mailing list so we can get the perspective of a dev of an actual accessible gemini client. I hope that will help guide our assumptions in this area better. My own expectations of how a screen reader would work differ a bit from what you're saying, but rather than muddy the waters more I'll wait and hope Adrian jumps in here.