Command Line Programs for the Blind

Command Line Programs for the Blind(eklhad.net)

67 points by spencerwgreene 4 years ago | 17 comments

skupig 4 years ago |

I really enjoy how this page is perfectly accessible for blind readers but is difficult to read visually because of the lack of formatting. Feels karmically appropriate for all the software I've written without thinking of accessibility.

Fnoord 4 years ago | |

Which formatting is missing? It features proper punctuation and grammar, making it akin to reading an essay with large blocks of text. This is how a book reads as well, or an e-reader, or Usenet or IRC.

What it misses is limit of 80 characters per line which makes it rough to read in terminal as well as portrait mode on smartphone. And it does not adapt to portrait mode on smartphone, indicating the website is not responsive.

Still, it also misses a lot of distracting BS an average website contains.

harryvederci 4 years ago | |

Haha, true. You still have options though, like using firefox reader or copy pasting and doing whatever you like with it.

Maybe the page author could add some links without a description and disable selecting text to give us the "full" experience.

GoblinSlayer 4 years ago | |

You miss the spinners and cookie consent popups? To me it reads better than most internet sites, especially SPA blogs.

flowerbreeze 4 years ago | | |

Same for me. The only thing I miss is having slightly shorter paragraphs in a few places - everything else feels good.

Grimburger 4 years ago | |

Am I missing something here? It's perfectly fine if not perfect for static blog content.

mhitza 4 years ago | | |

You're probably on a phone. On a desktop the content spans all the way across the screen. More paragraphs could be used in order to split up the text as well.

Trouble_007 4 years ago |

A nice clean page! A joy to read!

view-source:http://www.eklhad.net/philosophy.html

mrob 4 years ago | |

Almost, but it's missing paragraph tags for the first paragraph of each section, which makes them run into the following paragraph when viewed with Firefox's Reader View.

kilnr 4 years ago | |

Huh, I'd forgotten unclosed p-tags were a thing.

anthk 4 years ago |

https://edbrowse.org

Not just for the blind. Check the SQL bindings and the scripting support.

Also, it supports enough JS for commenting threads in web pages and most login widgets.

yeetsfromhellL2 4 years ago |

Don't forget nethack! The interface makes it playable with a screen reader.

mrob 4 years ago | |

As far as I know, the most difficult part of playing Roguelikes with a screen reader is interpreting the map. Dungeon Crawl Stone Soup supports setting a fixed random number generator seed, and pre-generating the dungeon using that seed. This means it would be possible to print embossed maps in advance. It would make the game easier by removing the "fog of war" exploration, but it would probably still be difficult enough. Possibly the code could be modified so the monsters and items remain random even when the map is fixed.

What's the current state of the art of embossing printers? Does this sound feasible?

giraffe_lady 4 years ago | | |

I don't know of any roguelikes that implement this but there are MUDs with some degree of baked-in accessibility. The one I used to play was in the LPmud family and had a significant contingent of vision-impaired players.

Those also depend pretty heavily on ascii maps and the solution they implemented was having a "written map" output option. So instead of like |--@-c your "map" would read "the end of your vision is three rooms west, a child is two rooms east" etc.

It gets very verbose when you have a lot of data in both dimensions but is fully legible to screen readers. In the mud-specific case too it can be sent out of bounds through GMCP or similar and handled in client-specific and user-configurable ways. I don't know what a similar UI would be like in a roguelike, but MUDs also move a lot faster than RLs so it may not be a problem that needs to be solved.

yeetsfromhellL2 4 years ago | | |

>What's the current state of the art of embossing printers? Does this sound feasible?

No idea, I've just seen a few posts on slashdot and reddit over the years with blind users having enough fun to make it worthwhile.

Apparently there's been some talk among the nethack devs to make it more accessible, but their dev pace is glacial.

Might be an interesting side project to make a roguelike for blind users.

anthk 4 years ago | |

Not so much (long time slashem player here). IF and MUDs are better.

The Nethack devs could patch the infamous 3.4.3 version in order to be much more accesible for the blind with a similar interface like the one done for Pokémon Crystal.

They could use flite as a library so it could describe items, menus, help files and surroundings.