Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

gemini:// space

spwhitton.name

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

101–110 of 177 posts

Re: gemini:// space

#101

Post by madeofpalk »

simias wrote: post #90
madeofpalk wrote: post #81

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Just to be really clear here - accessibility isnt a "niche". People being able to use software (which presumably is what gemini is about??) is important for everyone, obviously. Imagine saying accessability hardware - like corrective lenses - is niche.

A quick internet search tells me that between 50 and 74% of adults (depending on the source) need some for of vision correction. That's very much not niche. Also it's a pretty bad example because very rarely do you need to worry about "corrective lense accessibility", except maybe for things like VR helmets. A better example would be things like wheelchair accessibility for instance, which is indeed very much not imp…

> A quick internet search tells me that between 50 and 74% of adults (depending on the source) need some for of vision correction. That's very much not niche.

That's my point :)

> Also it's a pretty bad example because very rarely do you need to worry about "corrective lense accessibility", except maybe for things like VR helmets.

Ahh, but what corrective lesnses points to is degregation in eyesight. So ways to make viewing/experiencing content _without_ glasses is definitely a concern to between 50%-70% of adults.

Re: gemini:// space

#102

Post by arbitrage »

jrochkind1 wrote: post #86
madeofpalk wrote: post #81

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Just to be really clear here - accessibility isnt a "niche". People being able to use software (which presumably is what gemini is about??) is important for everyone, obviously. Imagine saying accessability hardware - like corrective lenses - is niche.

By "niche" here, we mean affecting very few people, I think? Then "accessiblity" in general is not niche, it effects everyone or almost everyone. But "accessibilty" is a broad concept, applying to all sorts of different unrelated needs. Vision impairment, cognitive differences, mobility needs, etc. Some of them effect more people than others. Some of them will be "niche", effecting few people. it is just a fact, righ…

you seem to be confusing "any" with "all".

it would be nice to have more accesible interfaces for everyone. helping one person doesn't mean you fail to help everyone, in fact, helping one person in terms of accessibility generally has the effect of helping everyone.

we're asking for some access. not all the access. scoped properly, it doesn't seem to be that insurmountable of a development goal, honestly.

Re: gemini:// space

#103

Post by CoolGuySteve »

madeofpalk wrote: post #81
simias wrote: post #65

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Multilingual accessibility seems to be a niche within a niche. I'm bilingual but I seldom read mixed-language content. And even when I do I wonder how often the author can/bothers to include the markup for it. If I write "ceci n'est pas du français" here for instance it'll remain untagged. I think the only websites where you can reliably expect the text to be tagged correctly are dictionaries and the like, where it c…

Just to be really clear here - accessibility isnt a "niche". People being able to use software (which presumably is what gemini is about??) is important for everyone, obviously. Imagine saying accessability hardware - like corrective lenses - is niche.

I'm not necessarily a fan of your tone, seems pretty shrill.

But at Apple we were well aware that accessibility features like closed captions were often used by people with no disabilities. We would add stuff knowing that all sorts of people would find uses for it.

I can easily imagine a language tag would also be useful for filtering out a German-language gemini for instance.

This was a double edged sword however. Like with closed captions/subtitles, we knew that many people using them that had hearing issues were older and also likely had out of date glasses prescriptions.

But this didn't stop the AppleTV designers from lowering the contrast of the font by displaying it over a transparent background, lowering the font size, using Helvetica instead of an accessible font, and removing the positional text feature that indicated who was speaking. And in typical Apple style, there was no option to make the text more legible.

All of these choices were made to appease people without disability who were using the feature for whatever reason. I didn't like it.

So I guess what I'm saying is, accessibility features are good for all sorts of reasons but don't lose sight of the much, much smaller group of users who require the feature in order to use the product at all.

Re: gemini:// space

#104

Post by jrochkind1 »

arbitrage wrote: post #102
jrochkind1 wrote: post #86

Earlier quoted context omitted.

By "niche" here, we mean affecting very few people, I think? Then "accessiblity" in general is not niche, it effects everyone or almost everyone. But "accessibilty" is a broad concept, applying to all sorts of different unrelated needs. Vision impairment, cognitive differences, mobility needs, etc. Some of them effect more people than others. Some of them will be "niche", effecting few people. it is just a fact, righ…

you seem to be confusing "any" with "all". it would be nice to have more accesible interfaces for everyone. helping one person doesn't mean you fail to help everyone, in fact, helping one person in terms of accessibility generally has the effect of helping everyone. we're asking for some access. not all the access. scoped properly, it doesn't seem to be that insurmountable of a development goal, honestly.

> in fact, helping one person in terms of accessibility generally has the effect of helping everyone.

How does facilitating multilingual screen-reading help someone who is neither multilingual nor uses a screen-reader? How can it possibly help everyone? (like literally 100% of people, you are suggesting?) What am I missing?

Re: gemini:// space

#105

Post by makeworld »

prepperdev wrote: post #3

Gemini is a cool piece of simple tech. I had a genuine pleasure reading the spec: https://gemini.circumlunar.space/docs/specification.html I've entertained an idea to build a set of tools for contemporary development (version control, code review, CI, etc) which would only speak Gemini. That would be both the UI and the API. Blockers came fast: * no way to upload anything that exceeds 1024 bytes, * escaping is subtly…

> triple quotes

Just to clarify, triple quotes work fine in gemtext. It's triple backticks that start and end preformatted sections.

So only a line that exactly starts with triple backticks can't really be shown properly. Everything else can.

Re: gemini:// space

#106

Post by tenebrisalietum »

h_anna_h wrote: post #35
prepperdev wrote: post #27

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is covered by their FAQ: https://gemini.circumlunar.space/docs/faq.html , Section 2.5 "Why not just use a subset of HTTP and HTML?"

I do not buy it. Just use gemini:// rather than https:// to refer to that specific subset of https + html. Maybe also add a header to the server response that says x-gemini: true or whatever. > It's difficult or even impossible to deactivate support for all the unwanted features in mainstream browsers Just do not use mainstream browsers then. Make your own like you do for gemini. They address it a bit later with: > W…

Every Gemini post on HN has an inevitable post like this. Gemini developers want to keep things inside of a box that can't be bulldozed by corporate interests. I love it. I just wish Gemini browsers would optionally inline media and video links, but I'd be surprised if that doesn't happen before too long.

Re: gemini:// space

#107

Post by danShumway »

jrochkind1 wrote: post #86
madeofpalk wrote: post #81

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Just to be really clear here - accessibility isnt a "niche". People being able to use software (which presumably is what gemini is about??) is important for everyone, obviously. Imagine saying accessability hardware - like corrective lenses - is niche.

By "niche" here, we mean affecting very few people, I think? Then "accessiblity" in general is not niche, it effects everyone or almost everyone. But "accessibilty" is a broad concept, applying to all sorts of different unrelated needs. Vision impairment, cognitive differences, mobility needs, etc. Some of them effect more people than others. Some of them will be "niche", effecting few people. it is just a fact, righ…

> By "niche" here, we mean affecting very few people, I think?

A text only web is pretty niche. Can this project really afford to start slicing off additional portions of its userbase? I agree that multilingual blind users are in the minority, but those users are probably the most likely of anyone to be interested in a text-only web.

And even ignoring blind users, it's just... what's the point of any of this if Gemini is not going to be semantic? It's like religiously adhering to the GNU principles of always printing human-readable text on the command line, and then not shipping a shell with a pipe command or any text parsing capabilities. From just about any perspective, whether you're worried about accessibility, or parsing, or search -- it's useful to know what language a document/section is in.

One of the few advantages of having a limited, well-defined, non-extensible spec is that it's easy to work with and write parsers around. And immediately Gemini is just saying, "filtering sections by language? Good text-to-speech support? No need for that."

If nothing else, Gemini is theoretically built specifically for generality[0], and it's already guaranteeing out of the box that it can't be used well with voice assistants. Those things aren't a fad, a general-purpose document format kind of needs to support them. And trying to have a voice assistant that intuits the current language is just a really bad system for everyone.

[0]: https://gemini.circumlunar.space/docs/faq.html

Re: gemini:// space

#108

Post by danShumway »

jrochkind1 wrote: post #104
arbitrage wrote: post #102

Earlier quoted context omitted.

you seem to be confusing "any" with "all". it would be nice to have more accesible interfaces for everyone. helping one person doesn't mean you fail to help everyone, in fact, helping one person in terms of accessibility generally has the effect of helping everyone. we're asking for some access. not all the access. scoped properly, it doesn't seem to be that insurmountable of a development goal, honestly.

> in fact, helping one person in terms of accessibility generally has the effect of helping everyone. How does facilitating multilingual screen-reading help someone who is neither multilingual nor uses a screen-reader? How can it possibly help everyone? (like literally 100% of people, you are suggesting?) What am I missing?

- better client displays (allowing a user client to switch out fonts based on the language, for example)

- better support for users who are not multi-lingual (a client could try to auto-translate sections that are not in the user's native language)

- better search capabilities (find me all documents that contain a French passage)

- better voice-assistant support (if a document is being read out loud for any reason, it would be nice to be able to handle multiple languages well. This also combines with the auto-translate capabilities above.)

Basically, all of the reasons why Gemini includes a "lang" attribute in the first place, except recognizing that parsers and clients want to be able to make use of that on a section-by-section basis rather than purely at the document level.

Sometimes documents are big and expand across multiple languages. It's just a bad abstraction in general to assume that each document would only have one language type[0]. Documents/books in the real world don't work that way, and a document format that can't accurately represent a giant portion of classic literature isn't a very good general-purpose format.

[0]: yes, technically Gemini allows you to specify multiple top-level languages, but that's not useful for anything. If I'm parsing a document, I don't want it to tell me "hey, there's some French in here somewhere, good luck!" Tell me where it is.

Re: gemini:// space

#109

Post by miki123211 »

Mediterraneo10 wrote: post #12

I really like the idea of having a more bare-bones text-only web, but I can't get onboard with Gemini until it offers the same support for screenreaders as HTML. (For example, an equivalent of span lang=XX tags is missing, so if you quote a foreign-language word(s) in your text, you can't let screenreaders know what language to read it in). The visually impaired should not be second-class citizens in any new internet…

As a screen reader user, automatic language switching is the first thing I disable. A lot of HTML templates just include 'lang="en"', and developers rarely notice that, even if their website is in another language.

I find Gemini pretty accessible overall. There are no images, so including alt descriptions isn't even a concern. There's no CSS, so you can't make controls that visually look like check boxes, but are much less accessible. In fact, it's way harder to make an inaccessible Gemini site than to make an inaccessible website. The only gripe I have is the possibility to introduce ASCII diagrams, which usually aren't accessible.

Re: gemini:// space

#110

Post by ignoranceprior »

mysterydip wrote: post #61
jl6 wrote: post #57

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Gemini does support a `lang` parameter to its mime types, which can be used to indicate a document is in a mixture of languages. That could be enough of a hint for a client to tune its pronunciation. I do agree though that this is a far bigger problem space than HTML's `lang` attribute is capable of solving. It's not like knowing the language of the text always tells you the unique pronunciation of a string of charac…

Fair point, for example is it read or read? Maybe a better option would be a phonics tag or attribute followed by phonemes that no matter the language of the following word(s) would be able to be spoken by a reader?

I can't wait until I have to annotate all my documents like:

  He read ...
Post reply on HN