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<div class="moz-cite-prefix">On 3/2/22 09:19, Jonathan Fine wrote:<br>
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cite="mid:CALD=Yf-OMeYTc7EWjwKYi+ZK0zjmbna+FSe1MEac5rjtxLVTXg@mail.gmail.com">
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<div class="gmail_quote"> 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).
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<div>HTML & PDF: <a
href="https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/3411764.3445544"
target="_blank"
moz-do-not-send="true"
class="moz-txt-link-freetext">https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/3411764.3445544</a></div>
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<p>Thank you for the reference. Some comments:</p>
<p>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).<br>
</p>
<p>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.</p>
<p>I find a braille display to be very effective for reading tabular
material generated by shell commands.<br>
</p>
<p>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.<br>
</p>
<p>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.<br>
</p>
<p>In other respects, I think the authors make valid observations,
but their work has notable limitations as described above.<br>
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