Screen reader mode

[epage]

This is dependent on cargo/rustc wanting it

Users of applications that use miette can get a screen reader mode for diagnostics using NO_GRAPHICS=1. (source)

oops!
    Diagnostic severity: error
Begin snippet for bad_file.rs starting at line 1, column 1

snippet line 1: source
snippet line 2:   text
    label at line 2, columns 3 to 6: this bit here
snippet line 3:     here
diagnostic help: try doing it better next time?
diagnostic code: oops::my::bad

The idea of making output compatible with screen readers seems beneficial

We likely wouldn't bake NO_GRAPHICS directly into annotate-snippets like miette does but instead have the API for it with that being controlled by

• --error-format flag in rustc
• term.<something> in cargo (which maybe could also read NO_GRAPHICS)

[epage]

From https://hachyderm.io/@zkat@toot.cat/115585347513424989

I honestly haven’t had a lot of user feedback about it that I can point to. People seem happy that it exists at all which is a really low bar. Mostly I just designed based on what would be a predictable structure that people could picture in their heads and reference back (hence the tabs), without needing to know about any special symbols. Literally just reading it would give them the info they needed.

i know there’s at least some users out there because I’ve gotten PRs to improve minor details but it seems to mostly just do the job for those folks.

as with my earlier conversation with jsbarretto, a lot of the work also comes down to the end program generating reasonable diagnostics that don’t rely on super complex nesting etc, preferring multiple diagnostics for that instead

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Pretty much every screen reader issue for rust-lang/rust was about rustdoc.

I also search zulip and all I got was #general > Accessibility working group @ 💬

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Related content

• address accessibility story zkat/miette#28
• Accessibility considerations for error reporting brendanzab/codespan#30