so... Tried some gemini browsers on linux and no luck. I think that this is a kind of... Me problem if you will but don't know.
None of them seem to be that friendly in turns of accessibility. The terminal ones read a lot of ascii characters with seemingly no way of turning them of and the graphical ones just don't seem to read with screen readers.
Its understandable though because not a lot of users are visually impaired.
so here鈥檚 my question. How hard would it be for someone to create a Gemini web browser? I know a fair bit about programming so if that鈥檚 a criteria I think I have met it
7 months ago 路 馃憤 almaember_ii, bimzhob
I am blind and use elpher under emacs, with emacspeak. The experience cannot be beat IMHO. I think elpher should be in melpa or one of the other emacs package repositories; its git repo is here: <git://thelambdalab.xyz/elpher.git>. I also occasionally use gmnln, a line-mode client that comes with gmni. See here: <https://git.sr.ht/~sircmpwn/gmni>. 路 7 months ago
oh, I see. In any case it doesn't matter as I am trying out amfora again after thoroughly Reading up on how to actually use it 路 7 months ago
In other words, when it comes to design tradeoffs in Lagrange, I've been prioritizing cross-platform functionality. Anything that's specific to one platform needs to have a strong justification for the additional implementation and maintenance costs. 路 7 months ago
The reason is that the entire UI is 100% custom code that is intended to run on any operating system with keyboard, mouse and/or touch as input devices. Support for accessibility APIs would have to be done separately for each platform, which is a lot of work and therefore hasnt't been favorable in a cost/benefit analysis.
In any case, it makes no sense for me (a single dev) to build a new GUI framework that rivals Qt/GTK in being cross-platform and such having highly specialized features like integration with platform-specific accessibility APIs. It would be less work to port Lagrange to, say, GTK4 (which would have other benefits, too). 路 7 months ago
@skyjake do you happen to know the reason why none of the controls in your browser read with a screen reader? 路 7 months ago
This may be recent addition to GTK, but the 4.0 docs do talk about built-in accessibility integrations in the standard controls: https://docs.gtk.org/gtk4/section-accessibility.html
I haven't used GTK that much so no idea how well those work in practice. 路 7 months ago
Here are a few that use GTK, for whatever that's worth:
- https://sr.ht/~julienxx/Castor/
- https://sr.ht/~admicos/moonlander/
- https://github.com/koyuspace/fossil
But I imagine you don't quite get a good screen reader experience just by using GTK, right? 路 7 months ago
How hard would it be for someone to create a Gemini web browser?
I would say that depends entirely on your level of ambition.
The most reasonable approach would be to pick a popular GUI framework (e.g., Qt or GTK) and use its standard UI components. With any luck, these already have decent support for accessibility, and there's most likely a rich text view that supports clickable links so using a full-blown (possibly heavy) web view may not even be necessary.
Sorting out the TLS stuff may be more tricky, if you need to use a lower-level library for it and have no previous experience with SSL. 路 7 months ago
Using HTML as a display technology for Gemtext isnt a bad idea - you have plenty of flexibility in fluid UI design, and many accessibility challenges such as a natural integration with screen readers are already solved for you. This is the approach I use in GemiNaut, although at the moment its Windows only. 路 7 months ago
Which terminal clients have you used that didn't work well with screen readers? Were any of them sort of useable or almost useable? Might be worth submitting an issue to some of them to see how difficult it would be to make modifications to help the accessibility situation. Writing a new one with accessibility in mind is an option too of course :). 路 7 months ago
We actually already have someone who created pretty popular gemini browser here on Station. Don't we, @skyjake 馃榿 路 7 months ago
It's not a very complicated protocol, fortunately. The client part could be implemented in a weekend, I believe, but I have no experience in GUI's or Text-to-speech, so I can't say anything about that, but espeak seems to have a library. 路 7 months ago
This information is a sad peice of news, especially considering how often screen readers are brought up in the mailing list (see for instance the whole fiasco when someone recommended using unicode maths fonts for formatting). And it has got me wondering, what other accessibility issues are there in gemini, and what might a new client do to solve them? Any excuse to learn new things, and not do homework, amirite? 路 7 months ago
haven鈥檛 tried those. I will report back when I do. Never saw them on the list that I was looking at 路 7 months ago
Did you try the line-based clients, AV-98 or Diohsc? I think I have heard that they work well with a screen-reader. 路 7 months ago
Have you tried Rhapsode? From what I know it should support Gemini in addition to web in general. You can find it over at: https://rhapsode.adrian.geek.nz 路 7 months ago