> it seems improbable to get a11y into an expansive CLI application
Why?
I used to use make menuconfig back in 2000--why should it not work now?
3d game? This I'll grant you. Some experiences are just not replicatable for the blind, though if you're interested in this at all check out the weird and wonderful world of audiogames and 3d audio with HRTF.
An editor? Even a visual editor? Is not one of these experiences. I used to use Visual Basic 6 just fine, dragging and dropping controls out of the toolbox, lining things up, and editing the code behind the widgets all the way back in 2002.
I see that this project apparently took 8 years by 150 people, according to the OP. With this much human effort behind it, it's remarkable that no one once said, hey, I wonder if anybody with a visual disability might want to use the app that this will be a part of?
I don't really understand your question. Mark what up, a command line interface? They don't really have markup.
If I'm trying to read a lot of data in a CLI, the output of top, for instance, I need to read by line with the screen reader fixed to a given column offset but it works fine even if it's a little awkward.
I guess I meant that in the case of HTML you usually mark things up with aria tags and what have you. Not that there was anything like that in CLI land.
How would you mark it up? If I have multiple panes with different data, and say a graph, how does a screen reader know that? As far as I know that kind of data can't be conveyed yet?
Why? I used to use make menuconfig back in 2000--why should it not work now?
3d game? This I'll grant you. Some experiences are just not replicatable for the blind, though if you're interested in this at all check out the weird and wonderful world of audiogames and 3d audio with HRTF.
An editor? Even a visual editor? Is not one of these experiences. I used to use Visual Basic 6 just fine, dragging and dropping controls out of the toolbox, lining things up, and editing the code behind the widgets all the way back in 2002.
I see that this project apparently took 8 years by 150 people, according to the OP. With this much human effort behind it, it's remarkable that no one once said, hey, I wonder if anybody with a visual disability might want to use the app that this will be a part of?