[accessibility] Accessibility of CLI

[Jason White]

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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