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Things I've learned building a modern TUI Framework (2022)

(www.textualize.io)
331 points willm | 1 comments | 11 Aug 24 12:22 UTC | HN request time: 0s | source
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miki123211 ◴[11 Aug 24 16:27 UTC] No.41217308[source]▶
As a screen reader user, reading this post makes me want to scream.

If you care about accessibility even one bit, for the love of god, please, don't use any of the features this post mentions.

Things like animation or unicode diagrams break screen readers in horrible ways.

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willm ◴[11 Aug 24 16:47 UTC] No.41217449[source]▶
I would love to improve support accessibility for TUIs. Textual internally keeps a browser like DOM structure, which means it could in theory offer browser-like support for screen readers while keeping all the features offered to sighted user. But it would require a protocol to allow the app to send structured information so that the screen reader has more to work with than a matrix of characters. AFAIK this doesn't exist.

The most promising way forward for accessibility is the web support for Textual. It would be possible for the app to work with the browser to make highly accessible TUIs.

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1. miki123211 ◴[11 Aug 24 18:53 UTC] No.41218485[source]▶
> AFAIK this doesn't exist

I have complained about this not existing many times and at length, and have actually been thinking about how such a think could work.

It's a great idea, but we'd need support both from screen readers, TUI libraries and some terminal emulators, and I don't know if we could get that to happen.