[accessibility] Accessibility of CLI
Jason White
jason at jasonjgw.net
Sat Feb 5 17:56:07 CET 2022
On 3/2/22 09:19, Jonathan Fine wrote:
> next week the TeX Hour will be a case study of a paper on
> "Accessibility of Command Line Interfaces" by Sampath, Merrick and
> Macvean (all at Google, Seattle).
>
> HTML & PDF: https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/3411764.3445544
Thank you for the reference. Some comments:
It appears from the paper that all of the participants were primarily
Windows users. I wonder whether this influenced the findings. For
example, the use of scroll-back buffers with a screen reader works
straightforwardly under Linux in a GNOME or MATE terminal session. Under
Mac OS, the screen reader can review the entire buffer - not just what
is on screen. I think any future research along these lines should
attempt to recruit participants from the Linux and Mac OS communities
(e.g., Linux Speakup, Orca and BRLTTY mailing lists, among others).
Emacspeak has features for reading and navigating tabular material
extracted from shell sessions. I am not aware of any other tool that has
similar functionality; but it does exist, and worked when I last tried
it. As I recall, Emacspeak can also navigate within manual pages by
heading. Many Linux manuals are provided as GNU Info documents, which
are navigable, or have HTML versions in /usr/doc or online.
I find a braille display to be very effective for reading tabular
material generated by shell commands.
Another useful strategy for finding information within the output of a
command (apart from Grep, of course) is to use the search feature of a
pager - for example, the "/" command in GNU Less, which is the default
pager in Linux.
For TeX output and log files specifically, useful strategies include
working backward from the end of the log, and using an editor that can
move the cursor to the position in the source file corresponding to the
error reported in the log.
In other respects, I think the authors make valid observations, but
their work has notable limitations as described above.
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