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

81–90 of 177 posts

Re: gemini:// space

#81

Post by madeofpalk »

simias wrote: post #65
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…

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.

Re: gemini:// space

#82

Post by cabalamat »

Mediterraneo10 wrote: post #79
cabalamat wrote: post #78

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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 problem with this you'll get a million other people saying "Gemini is a really good simple format that the internet needs, but you need t…

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 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.

But add too many features, the project becomes something else, is maybe less useful & doesn't gain traction. A Gemini project that is too bloated and thus gains no traction helps no-one, disabled or otherwise.

Re: gemini:// space

#83

Post by grosswait »

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.

Except it currently is even if it should not be. The number of people that know how to make documents or websites 508 compliant is surprisingly low

Re: gemini:// space

#84

Post by Symbiote »

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…

The lang attribute is also required for embedding Simplified Chinese/Traditional Chinese/Japanese/Korean text in a document containing two or more of those.

There are differences in the display (font) of the same Unicode character.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Han_unification#Examples_of_la...

Re: gemini:// space

#85

Post by Symbiote »

grosswait wrote: post #83
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.

Except it currently is even if it should not be. The number of people that know how to make documents or websites 508 compliant is surprisingly low

Accessibility in the web standards and specifications isn't a niche, even if most implementations don't bother.

Re: gemini:// space

#86

Post by jrochkind1 »

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.

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, right? It is faulty logic to say that because "accessibility" effects everyone, every single accessibility accomodation is also therefore of use to everyone. It's not so.

How much need is there for multi-lingual screen-reading? I have no idea. It's obviously not universal -- I don't need it for instance, although I may need other kinds of accessibility attention -- but there may be lots of need for it! But we can't prove it one way or another just from language games around the general concept of "accessiblity".

Whether developers ought to accomodate even niche accessibility needs is a separate ethical or practical argument.

Re: gemini:// space

#87

Post by bovermyer »

I found this quote on a gemlog by Alex Wennerberg:

> Gemini's obscurity and lack of utility means that there are no analytics, no metrics, no ways to go viral, to monetize people's attention, build a career or even a minimally-functional web platform. No sane business would build on top of Gemini, and that is exactly why it is capable of having the character that it does.

I like this sentiment.

Re: gemini:// space

#89

Post by gerikson »

julius wrote: post #9

I like how it removes noise for the reader. Links cannot simply be put whereever the author pleases. Links have to be put on their own line. (and the browser can neatly indicate to you which links are same-domain, other-domain, other-protocol)

I hate not being able to integrate links in running text - it's been a feature of the web since the start, having to awkwardly add "see this link:" followed by a newline everywhere would drive me mad.

Re: gemini:// space

#90

Post by simias »

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.

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 implemented everywhere.

To be clear I'm not saying that it's a bad idea to implement accessibility features, It's actually quite commendable. I just feel like in practice it's a lot of additional work to get it right and even then it may not do much good at all. Again, while the "lang" attribute is technically supported by HTML, I struggle to find places where it's used in the wild, even in places where it doesn't seem like it would be technically difficult to do it (like dictionaries and language learning websites).

If I was a gemini developer I'd definitely listen when people complain about bad accessibility, but I would also take the time to understand how people deal with things like multilingual content in practice and how to make it easier, because clearly at the moment "lang=" is not it.

Post reply on HN