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

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.

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.

> 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.

Isn't it possible to expose this content via a publicly accessible API that screen readers could simply hook into? BTW, thank you so very much for Rich and Textual. Wonderful tools. Love 'em.

De nada!

> Isn't it possible to expose this content via a publicly accessible API that screen readers could simply hook into?

Definitely possible from a technical standpoint, but I don't know of anyone who has done that. Maybe one day, Textual could provide that solution.