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Comment by miki123211 | Hacker News Reader

The accessibility of that guide with a screen reader is horrible. The text is readable, but that's about it. Why, oh why couldn't people just write good, textual articles like they used to, instead of all this picture based crap? Instagram, Tinder and snapchat are bad anough as they are, but tech was mostly free of this, but then we see stuff like this appearing. I won't really be surprised if I will not be able to read 50, 60% of the content in 10 years if current trends continue.

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Here is the original 100% textual spec. https://www.datprotocol.com/deps/

The post here is an alternate visual version. Best of both worlds!

What would help you screen read a visually oriented guide? Would detailed textual descriptions of the figures help?

Personally I think that the way they're using diagrams to illustrate some of these technical concepts is really helpful. I wonder if the format would translate to spoken text? I.e. in parallel with the figures, having little descriptive "imagination breaks" in the text which would provide opportunity for focusing on some key concept or relationship that might otherwise be illustrated using a visual figure. Maybe even using spatial language?

IMO there should be way more aurally oriented technical materials.

Recently I was listening to math lectures on YouTube while driving and realized that they were much easier to follow than I expected. Still, I'd love it if there was an aurally focused higher math practice. Sometimes I find it easier to focus when I'm listening rather than using my eyes.

In this case, not really descriptions, but equivalents. I don't care that a figure shows two red boxes connected in a particular way, I care that packets flow from node x to y, but not in the other direction (just an example).

How would a screen reader work with the ASCII art of RFCs? https://tools.ietf.org/html/rfc793#section-3.1

Not really that well. I know it's there, I know the rough shape, I know the order of the fields, but I don't know the spacing and alignment. I could count spaces by hand but that would be tedious. That's way, way better than the OP, where images are just indecipherable SVG blobs that the screenreader does not understand at all. The only thing I don't understand here are the numbers above the diagram, I don't know what they're for and it's not obvious for a SR user. I think I could understand it, though, especially that everything seems to be described below, with bit lengths and such. As far as I understand this RFC, you can get by without the diagram. What could help with it, though, would be a screen reader that has excellent braille display support (JAWS) and a good 80-cell braille display. I think that would let me see the spacing and understand it much better, but I don't have such fancy and expensive hardware at hand to test this out.

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