💾 Archived View for rawtext.club › ~sloum › geminilist › 002645.gmi captured on 2020-11-07 at 03:02:56. Gemini links have been rewritten to link to archived content
⬅️ Previous capture (2020-09-24)
-=-=-=-=-=-=-
James Tomasino tomasino at lavabit.com
Thu Sep 10 18:54:19 BST 2020
- - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - -
On 9/10/20 5:47 PM, mbays at sdf.org wrote:
How about if clients have an easily toggled switch between showing
preformatted text and just showing alt text? I guess that would still
lead to more easter-egging, but maybe not too much? It seems there's a
tradeoff between discouraging inaccessible uses as human-readable text,
and discouraging inaccessible uses as machine-readable text...
I've been thinking about clients toggling the visibility of preformatted text. While it may not provide much value in a desktop client for sighted users, this could be very useful in mobile clients. Preformatted text is one of the troublesome areas that screws up displays on narrow screens. If a mobile client were to serve the alternate text instead then visitors could choose whether they want to expand it to see the preformatted content.
This sort of flow is exactly what a screen reader would be doing for a blind user. It serves up that alternate text first and the user then can decide whether it is worth the effort to dive into the contents further.
Maybe it will also help keep alt-text top-of-mind for content authors if they run into it themselves in the proper context.