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Re: Accessible terminal output



On 1/27/24 22:18, Niels Thykier wrote:
Hi,

(Please CC on replies as I am not subscribed)

I am looking for advice on how to make the terminal more accessible.

The context is that I have a terminal program sub-commands. For some of
them, I currently render an ASCII table sometimes with unstructured
notes following it as legends for users without visual impairments -
usually piped to a pager like less.
   Though this formatting is almost certainly not accessible to screen
readers. I imagine it would be something like "PLUS, 50 times DASH,
PLUS" and so on for the divider lines.

I tried searching for terminal output accessibility and I cannot find
any useful advice among the search results. So I thought I would ask
here if you have any recommendations or guides I can follow.

So far, IRC suggested to provide an alternative formats like CSV or
HTML5, which the user could redirect to a file and then process in a
tool of choice that would be accessible to them. Do you have any other
recommendations for terminal output to support visually impaired? Like
should the tool disable ANSI color and boldface output to avoid creating
confusing output?

Thanks for your support.


Generaly speaking, what is machine readable is screenreader friendly
(JSON/YAML).
To me, it's more importent to have an extensive documentation explaning
what a text file output contains than spending time on getting the
"correct" output.

--
John Doe


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