💾 Archived View for perso.pw › solene › 2021-02-23-welcome.gmi captured on 2021-12-05 at 23:47:19. Gemini links have been rewritten to link to archived content
⬅️ Previous capture (2021-12-03)
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Today I realized the potential of Gemini for blind or disabled people, the line oriented format is perfect for screen reader (text to speech) or braille display. Unfortunately, there are two major obstacles for users: available clients doesn't provide accessibility features and the pre-formatted text blocks are abused of Ascii Arts that will be tried to be read by accessibility features.
With some works, clients could implements accessibility features (like integration with Orca screen reader) and provide a way to hide by default the content of pre-formatted texts blocks and display its Alternate text instead. Like for images that are not displayed in-lines, this would be a great step for accessibility to hide verbatim blocks and show them upon user action.
These verbatim texts can also contain an alternate text which would be used when the content is hidden, this would allow users (disabled or not) to choose if they want to see it. If you are blind and your screen reader say "Verbatim text named Ascii art", you will certainly want to skip it!
I created a new hosting on my server using Nextcloud and running Vger on another port, fun fact is that while the main hosting is using relayd + vger, this one is using nginx + vger and I edit everything through Nextcloud. I am also typing this text within Nextcloud because I believe this could be the easiest way for beginners to invest the Gemini space, even if Nextcloud is a huge software it does the job and is open source. There are no connections between Vger and Nextcloud as its files are stored flat on the filesystem.
The nginx stream module was a quick way to make a TLS handler for Vger (because it doesn't manage connections at all) and I will have to write a bit of documentation about it because this module isn't known enough.
While working on the host I found a bug in Vger (it has so few!) in the chroot code, unfortunately the test code requires to be root so I disabled it and it was never tested since the huge changes in its code. It is now fixed and ready to chroot again :) The code was simply not finding files so there were no security issues.
I installed the android next cloud client and I can edit or publish texts from here. This is awesome!!
10/10 for ease of use I'd say :) the same could be achieved with any synchronisation tool but Nextcloud integrates it very well. It is quite convenient because it's possible to write offline and publish when internet is reachable.
I may switch to a self signed certificate for my Gemini servers, it comply better with the TOFU (trust on first use) paradigm.
Still curfew, boring.