We need to talk about preformatted text blocks
When I first discovered Gemini 2 years ago, the video I watched said that preformatted blocks were often used for ASCII art, which is why one can give them alt text, so that screen readers don't parse them as text. But preformatted blocks are just as often used for actual text, whether code or to align sections of text like tables and so on.
So we have situations where one would want preformatted text to be presented to a screen reader as an image, and times when it should be presented as plain text. Not being a developer myself, I can't say where along the line, with the underlying gemtext or with how the gemtext is rendered by the client, this differentiation would need to be made. Alternatively, one could default to presenting all preformatted text as just text, as slogging through dozens of lines of gibberish before getting to actual content is something we're already used to.
However, I am only situationally reliant on screen readers, and can consume visual content as often as not. Someone who doesn't have that option would have a better perspective.
Jan 09 · 4 months ago · 👍 smallpatatas, jimmy-leafhorde
5 Comments ↓
Theoretically you could add the alt text to the preformatted line. It could have a version suitable for the reader -- or some abbreviated readable text such as
With some browsers you should mouse-hover over the table or click on it to see the alt text...
I hope screen readers are smart enough to detect ASCII Esc characters and not read the text literally.
🐡 Breebee [...] · Jan 09 at 20:59:
i also only situationally seen a screen reader but damn those preformatted blocks just read in full. even if there is alt text it's not like any client work with the screen readers to make sure they only read it. so usually i'll hear both the alt text and the "line slash 12 underscores line underscore 10 shashes underscore" with no real way of skipping it.
🐡 Breebee [...] · Jan 09 at 21:00:
@stack unfortunately they are not (at least Orca isn't)
📻 Anchorite [OP] · Jan 09 at 21:12:
@stack
I hope screen readers are smart enough to detect ASCII Esc characters and not read the text literally.
Given Gemini's niche status there's little chance screen reader developers will accommodate it. In terminal clients everything is seen as unstructured text, fine for smaller pages but long ones such as the feed on the homepage here would be very tedious to navigate. But that's the case with all terminal apps (try navigating a man page for example).
GUI clients are were the concern lies. Again, I'm not a developer so I don't know how to fix this, only that something needs fixing. A proxy client such as the one I linked to in an earlier post
renders gemtext as HTML because they're in a web browser. I think that would be a good starting point for GUI clients, rendering the gemtext as though it were HTML. Screen readers are very familiar with that format.