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[Clients] Gemini and accessibility regarding preformatted code blocks

John Cowan cowan at ccil.org

Thu Feb 25 20:14:43 GMT 2021

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On Thu, Feb 25, 2021 at 2:42 PM Devin Prater <r.d.t.prater at gmail.com> wrote:

I am a blind person who is interested in all kinds of different ways of
working with text and writing.

Thank you very much for participating: accessibility is always bestdiscussed when a person who needs it is actually in the room. ("If youwant to know how much antisemitism there is in your country, don't askyourself: ask a Jew.")

My previous employer sold its software to a lot of government sites. WaleiSabry, the New York City Digital Accessibility Coordinator, came into ouroffice for half a day and talked about how we should and shouldn't dothings. He also demonstrated his screen reader JAWS for us (none of uscould understand a single word it said). It was hugely useful and gave usprogrammers accessibility tasks for the next month.

So, I started looking at the spec for GemText. Links one on each line, I
could do that. No italics or bold, but people are used to seeing *this*
anyways, or even /this/ for better ergonomics (for me anyways)

Is that because "slash" has one syllable and "asterisk" has three? Justguessing here, but please tell us what works/doesn't work for you, or pointto a suitable "accessibility 101" site.

So, this is where client creators come in. Gemini clients should have a
way to hide preformatted blocks, or fold them, or if they are a GUI client,
like GemiNaut, which shows the Gemini text in n HTML-like area, map the
blocks to a frame, so that screen readers can skip them.

I think that most preformatted blocks are meant to be readable. How aboutan option to hide preformatted blocks if and only if they have alt text?That, plus social pressure to actually *provide* alt text, even if it'sjust "ascii art" or "ascii art kittens", should do it.

John Cowan http://vrici.lojban.org/~cowan cowan at ccil.orgI am he that buries his friends alive and drowns them and draws themalive again from the water. I came from the end of a bag, but no bagwent over me. I am the friend of bears and the guest of eagles. I amRingwinner and Luckwearer; and I am Barrel-rider. --Bilbo to Smaug-------------- next part --------------An HTML attachment was scrubbed...URL: <https://lists.orbitalfox.eu/archives/gemini/attachments/20210225/6a2ed826/attachment-0001.htm>