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by WhyNotHugo 183 days ago
TUI tools are generally as accessible as the terminal on which they run.

GUI apps are much trickier. They require that the developer implement integration with accessibility frameworks (which vary depending on X11/Wayland) or use a toolkit which does this.
2 comments
hombre_fatal 183 days ago
GUI kits like AppKit or GTK have built-in accessibility features like standard components (input fields, dropdown boxes) and view hierarchy that interact with accessibility tools for free. It's the main upside of a GUI.

TUIs are tricky.

I think TUI accessibility generally involves rereading the screen on changes (going by macOS VoiceOver). It can optimize this if you use the terminal cursor (move it with ansi sequences) or use simple line-based output, but pretty much zero TUIs do this. You'd have to put a lot of thought into making your TUI screenreader friendly compared to a GUI.

The thing going for you when you build a TUI is that people are used to bad accessibility so they don't expect you to solve the ecosystem. Kind of like how international keyboards don't work in terminal apps because terminal emulator doesn't send raw key scans.

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jcgl 183 days ago
How are TUI tools just as accessible as the terminal? Take a visually-simple program like neomutt or vim. How does a vision-impaired user understand the TUI's layout? E.g. splits and statusbar in vim, or the q:Quit d:Del... labels at the top of neomutt. It seems to me like the TUI, because it only provides the abstraction of raw glyphs, any accessibility is built on hopes and dreams. More complicated TUIs like htop or glances seem like they would be utterly hopeless.

When it comes to GUIs, you have a higher level of abstraction than grid-of-glyphs. By using a GUI toolkit with these abstractions, you can get accessibility (relatively) for free.

Open to having my mind changed though.

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