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[Clients] Gemini and accessibility regarding preformatted code blocks

Bradley D. Thornton Bradley at NorthTech.US

Thu Feb 25 21:36:32 GMT 2021

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On 2/25/2021 11:42 AM, Devin Prater wrote:

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) and Org-mode fans. No tags to worry about, either!

Hi Devin,

There's /e/, which you can look up here:https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki//e/_(operating_system)

It's basically a fork of LineageOS. And it is the most horrendous thingto try to type into a search bar that I think I have ever experienced.

I guess I was half asleep though, when someone asked me how to pronounceit. Being a Ham Radio operator, and not very alert, I justtransliterated it and told my friend, "Oh, it's pronounced Marky Mark."

But then we get to preformatted blocks, and the dreaded Ascii graphics. This is what I’ve always disliked about all plain text mediums. MUD’s use Ascii maps and compass and all that. Gopher uses Ascii graphics. And now Gemini too. Sure, it’s wrapped up in a pretty block, but as I’ll discuss in a moment, that isn’t necessarily helpful.

The Author of Ariane, an Android Gemini app available from F-Droid, washimself lamenting ASCII art images in Gemini recently from his Fediverseaccount.

I solicited a response from him but to date have heard absolutelynothing from him. But here's what I did in the meantime.


contentcontentcontent```

Now, that's a stopgap, and at this time a kludge, but anyone who usesVger on a regular basis will quickly come to realize that I put thosestrings there, and hopefully that can help? maybe there's a way to setthe reader to ignore between those backticks when the so-called ALT tagsays that the server is about to spam you with an unintelligiblecharacter barrage?

Well, I had been meaning to bring it up to the list here, but wanted tohear back first from someone who, as a developer, expressed a realinterest in proposing a convention, some sort of handler, perhaps, toaccommodate the non-sighted readership.

I guess the dev was just lamenting the irritation and so without hisparticipation I suppose now is as good a time as any to bring that up.

Basically, an identifier in the so-called ALT tag portion that anyreader can key off of to skip the block in between? It seems like a verysimple and elegant solution to me that some clients could incorporate bymere convention.

ASCII-art might be too narrow of a definition too. Perhaps something like:

contentcontent```

so that anything with a string such as 'skip-block:' would cause thereader to just ignore that like it was a comment?

Okay, I keep saying I'm goin' down for a nap. Now I really am lolz.

-- Bradley D. ThorntonManager Network Serviceshttp://NorthTech.USTEL: +1.310.421.8268