Comment by 🐡 Breebee
Re: "We need to talk about preformatted text blocks"
@stack unfortunately they are not (at least Orca isn't)
Jan 09 · 4 months ago
1 Later Comment
📻 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.
Original Post
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...