4 ms·
Something we've been trying to figure out is how to get screen readers to play nice with a terminal emulator. We're building one as a webapp and had a pretty go
by komali2 7y ago
Something we've been trying to figure out is how to get screen readers to play nice with a terminal emulator. We're building one as a webapp and had a pretty good solution in an old version of jQuery terminal, but the new one splits each character into its own span... So we're trying out xterm which builds out a whole aria tree, but simple concepts escape me like... How can a screen reader "scroll back and forth" between terminal output, without just redoing a terminal command and listening to the whole output all over again?
- mwcampbell 7y agoIf you have a Windows machine handy, I suggest you grab the NVDA screen reader (https://www.nvaccess.org/ https://www.nvaccess.org/) and try it out with the Windows console to get a feel for what a good screen reader plus terminal experience is like. I understand that the Orca screen reader for GNOME also has good terminal support, and I think JAWS for Windows does as well, but I'm more familiar with how it works with NVDA. Here's how you move around the terminal with NVDA. For all of these commands, you need a keyboard with a numeric keypad, and NumLock should be off. I believe there are alternatives for laptops without a keypad, but I'm only familiar with the desktop layout. To read the current line, press numpad 8. To move to the previous line, press numpad 7. Next line is numpad 9. The same pattern applies for words (numpad 4-6) and characters (numpad 1-3). Incidentally, on Mac, VoiceOver's terminal support is crappy enough that my friend Tyler Spivey wrote his own screen reader for the terminal environment, called tdsr [1]. [1]: https://github.com/tspivey/tdsr https://github.com/tspivey/tdsr
- dredmorbius 7y agohttp://emacspeak.sourceforge.net http://emacspeak.sourceforge.net