Re: Accessible terminal output

[Christian Schoepplein <chris@schoeppi.net>]

Hi Nils,

On Sun, Jan 28, 2024 at 11:54:24AM +0100, Niels Thykier wrote:
>In my case, my tool is not interactive. It generates text output and either
>emits all of it on standard out or pipes it to a pager. It is closer to a
>tool like ls than mutt in spirit. As far as I know, my tool cannot control
>the caret of the output in any meaningful way in this case.

Piping output into a pager is very uncomfortable for screen reader users 
IMHO. To navigate such content you either have to use the keys of a 
connected braille device or use the screen reader commands to go through the 
output. Both variants are much less good then piping the content into a 
programm where the user can navigate the output just with the normal arrow 
keys, like navigating through a file in an editor, or piping the content 
into a textbased browser like w3m where the content also can be navigated by 
using the arrow keys. At least I do avoid using pagers because I can not use 
the arrow keys to read the whole content.

So, instead doing a

ls -1 /dev/ | less

I prefere much more this, because in vim I easiely can navigate through the 
text just using the normal keyboard:

ls -1 /dev | vim -

Or also this:

ls -1 /dev | w3m

The same is with the output to the normal screen, not into a pager. Also 
this content has to be navigated using the screen reader functions which IMO 
is always much mor les comftable then using just the normal keyboard 
navigation.

But thats all my personal taste. I am much faster using the normal keyboard 
functions then navigating around with the screen reader or a braille 
device. Im sure other blind people work completely different...

Ciao,

  Schoepp