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gemini:// space

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Re: gemini:// space

#111

Post by danShumway »

cabalamat wrote: post #82
Mediterraneo10 wrote: post #79

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Gemini is to a large degree a reaction to the commercialization of the web, all that huge load of Javascript etc. arose through the ad economy. Accessibility isn't that, accessibility is something that people trying to do business would prefer to avoid. But letting the disabled be first-class citizens in an online community alongside the rest of the population is a matter of justice. Adding accessibility features isn…

> Adding accessibility features isn’t making a standard "bloated", it is simply doing the right thing. Yes, and the other million people are going to say their proposed features are "simply doing the right thing". It may be that marking up what language a short except of text is in is a good feature to have (and would be fairly easy to achieve if Gemini used the Markdown format as you could simply us a tag). A counte…

> so a text file format ought not to unless it is aiming at being something more than what text does.

Gemini does aim at being more than text[0]:

> The "first class" application of Gemini is human consumption of predominantly written material - to facilitate something like gopherspace, or like "reasonable webspace" (e.g. something which is comfortably usable in Lynx or Dillo). But, just like HTTP can be, and is, used for much, much more than serving HTML, Gemini should be able to be used for as many other purposes as possible without compromising the simplicity and privacy criteria above. This means taking into account possible applications built around non-text files and non-human clients.

Lots of documents and books contain passages in other languages, it's reasonably common -- I don't get why people are saying this is a niche concern. Books get around that problem because they have controls around presentation, and they're not designed to be consumed visually, not as a semantic, parseable format. But Gemini, at least in theory, is designed to be parseable.

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

Re: gemini:// space

#112

Post by buttercraft »

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.

> Just to be really clear here - accessibility isnt a "niche".

This is uncharitable. They were specifically talking about multilingual accessibility. You responded to something they didn't write.

Re: gemini:// space

#113

Post by GoblinSlayer »

miki123211 wrote: post #109
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 muc…

The specification supports images, any mime types, video, pdf, html and javascript, in theory.

Re: gemini:// space

#114

Post by Jtsummers »

cabalamat wrote: post #82
Mediterraneo10 wrote: post #79

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Gemini is to a large degree a reaction to the commercialization of the web, all that huge load of Javascript etc. arose through the ad economy. Accessibility isn't that, accessibility is something that people trying to do business would prefer to avoid. But letting the disabled be first-class citizens in an online community alongside the rest of the population is a matter of justice. Adding accessibility features isn…

> Adding accessibility features isn’t making a standard "bloated", it is simply doing the right thing. Yes, and the other million people are going to say their proposed features are "simply doing the right thing". It may be that marking up what language a short except of text is in is a good feature to have (and would be fairly easy to achieve if Gemini used the Markdown format as you could simply us a tag). A counte…

> A counterargument would be that traditional text doesn't do this, so a text file format ought not to unless it is aiming at being something more than what text does.

Other text-centric media often emphasize foreign words in some fashion. For instance, in an English language novel foreign language text is often italicized. Same in many articles.

Re: gemini:// space

#115

Post by FrozenVoid »

Gemini appeals to the 'console-only' aesthetic, I won't bet on it replacing the everyday web, but it can be used to construct an alternative 'Internet for the terminal'-type experience: lightweight news, libraries, etc accessed from shell scripts(which is plain text vs web scripts that strip html cruft to get real content). The only thing i dislike is the poor choice of the name, which clashes with millions of sites about horoscopes.

Re: gemini:// space

#116

Post by madeofpalk »

buttercraft wrote: post #112
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.

> Just to be really clear here - accessibility isnt a "niche". This is uncharitable. They were specifically talking about multilingual accessibility. You responded to something they didn't write.

I specifically responded to the "niche within a niche" comment, which I interpreted as referring to multi-lingual documentments as a niche within the niche of "accessibility" in general.

Re: gemini:// space

#117

Post by trap_chateau »

While I think gemini is a cool 'hideout' on the web, it seems a lot of content served over gemini is also served over http. Does anyone know of any message boards like The Midnight Pub[1] that are served over gemini only? After some browsing, I couldn't find any.

[1] https://midnight.pub/

gemini://midnight.pub/

Re: gemini:// space

#118

Post by ilaksh »

If I understand correctly they insist on no re-use of connections. That one makes no sense to me and guarantees any compliant client will be slow. So people will make "fast clients" that just ignore that rule.

Re: gemini:// space

#119

Post by GoblinSlayer »

progval wrote: post #44
amadsen wrote: post #22

Earlier quoted context omitted.

My vision is good and I also don't know if the word you quoted was supposed to be in English, French of Irish? The point being, a screen reader has no more or less information than a human reader. It might be better then to invest effort in improving language inference heuristics, which would help in all applications (pdf documents, text files) than to try to build in support in each underlying protocol.

But the screen reader needs to say the word, and the pronounciation of "coin" isn't the same in every language. I don't know about Irish, but it's radically different between French and English, the only sound in common is the "k". This means that if the screenreader picks the wrong language, then the user has to guess the spelling from the way it's pronounced to understand the text. Though I'll concede that right no…

Not unthinkable that's how a human will read foreign language too.

Re: gemini:// space

#120

Post by madeofpalk »

CoolGuySteve wrote: post #103
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.

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. L…

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

I think it is important to be honest and upfront when we talk about accessability in software because I've seen so many times when developers and product owners dismiss it entirely. I really want to stress the point that thinking about accessebility as a niche is exclusionary and unethical.

I think about my time working at Net a Porter - UK upmarket online fashion retailer - where I brought up some accessability concerns especially around their terrible in-house captcha and it was dismissed as "they arent our target market" which is so blanetly untrue, but all stems from this myth that accessability is only for a small group of users.

> don't lose sight of the much, much smaller group of users who require the feature in order to use the product at all.

The people who need to use captions/subtitles are not a "much smaller group". I think about foreign language media, where i need the subtitles (like when I watched Dark on Netflix), or even primarily English media but has some forign language (I watched Lost recently - there's a fair bit of Korean and Arabic in that). Or even when you're watching TV around someone who's sleeping.

Everyone needs "accessability", and if you don't now, you will eventually.

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