There is a persistent misconception among sighted developers: if an application runs in a terminal, it is inherently accessible. The logic assumes that because there are no graphics, no complex DOM, and no WebGL canvases, the content is just raw ASCII text that a screen reader can easily parse.
The reality is different. Most modern Text User Interfaces (TUIs) are often more hostile to accessibility than poorly coded graphical interfaces. The very tools designed to improve the Developer Experience (DX) in the terminal—frameworks like Ink (JS/React), Bubble Tea (Go), or tcell—are actively destroying the experience for blind users.
↫ Casey Reeves
The core reason should be obvious: the command-line interface, at its core, is just a stream of data with the newest data at the bottom, linearly going back in time as you go up. Any screen reader can deal with this fairly easily, and while I personally have no need for such a tool, I’ve heard from those that do that kernel-level screen readers are quite good at what they do. TUIs, or text-based user interfaces, made with modern frameworks are actually very different: they’re “2D grid[s] of pixels, where every character cell is a pixel. [They] abandons the temporal flow for a spatial layout.”
It should become immediately obvious that screen readers won’t really know what to do with this, and Reeves gives countless examples, but the short version is this: the cursor jumps all over the place with every screen update, which makes screen readers go nuts. Various older TUIs, made in a time well before these modern TUI frameworks came about, were designed in a much more terminal-friendly way, or give you options to hide the cursor to solve the problem that way. Irssi, for example, uses VT100 scrolling regions instead of redrawing the whole screen every time something changes.
I had never really stopped to think about TUIs and screen readers, as is common among us sighted people. The problems Reeves describes seem to stem not so much from TUIs being inherently inaccessible, but from modern frameworks not actually making use of the terminal’s core feature set. I really hope this Reeves’ article shines a light on this problem, and that the people developing these modern TUIs start taking accessibility more seriously.
Yes, this should be obvious.
“Graphical” UIs, especially properly designed ones come with pretty neat nested structures with metadata built in.
“Here is a window. At the bottom, there is a bar with two buttons. The button on the left says Okay and has WM_OK action. The one on the right says Cancel and WM_CANCEL action. The title of the …”
And so on. This is perfectly readable by the screen reader, AI assistant, or whatever your computerized agent is.
The text UI? Requires full on visual understanding. High level machine learning and prone to errors.
Ironic…
is this a rebuttal to this? https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48000028
I agree, text base is silly these days!