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Comment by modernerd | Hacker News Reader

Has TUI accessibility improved at all?

Textualize (Python), Charm (Go) and tui-rs/Cursive (Rust) make building TUI apps appealing, but I'm put off by the idea of making apps like this if they have no screenreader support.

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I think we will need new standards here, because terminal emulators currently don't have any semantic information about what TUI programs are rendering. Browsers have the benefit of HTML to know this is a button, and that is a paragraph. A terminal is an unstructured grid of characters. The best we can hope for is for terminal emulators to use heuristics or AI to make sense of what TUI programs are rendering.

Textual has a browser-like DOM internally, which means that it has the same kind of structured information that a screen-reader would need. But there isn't a screen-reader API for the terminal to expose that.

On the roadmap is a browser target for Textual (same API, just rendering in the browser). Once that's available Textual can make use of browser technology for accessibility.

The browser target sounds neat. Do you plan on running the python in web assembly, or would it be a client/server design?

Client / server initially. The app "runs" remotely with a JS front-end.

I'm intrigued what the planned architecture is for the web front end. I'm guessing WebSocket back to a persistent process on the backend/server?

So all operations happening via the websocket connection. Only the GUI in the browser? I bit like Phoenix LiveView.

This would be a really interesting toolkit for building real-time UIs for remote processes.

That's pretty much on the nose!

Ah, so that also explains the significant use of asyncio for all UI operations.

Are you also considering a "WebView" front end, a little like Electron?

We were! I figured if we don't do it somebody else will. But there is already a project to bundle a Textual app with a working browser. So you can distribute Textual apps as a binary.

I once asked the dev relations person of a TUI framework company if their stuff worked on a real physical terminal, and they didn't even know what I meant by that. Back to the nursing home for me!

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