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Comment by 9dev | Hacker News Reader

Using Braille characters as a 2D textual rendering output is a neat idea. Might come in handy for charting on the command line.

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You may be interested in btop: https://github.com/aristocratos/btop

Here's some terminal charting libraries that use Braille runes:

* https://github.com/mum4k/termdash?tab=readme-ov-file#the-lin...

* https://docs.rs/ratatui/latest/ratatui/widgets/struct.Chart....

* https://github.com/NimbleMarkets/ntcharts/blob/main/examples...

You may be interested in the venerable visidata: https://www.visidata.org/docs/graphics/

I actually saw this done in a cryptocurrency price chart IRC bot. It works surprisingly well.

Please don't, commandline is like the one frontier where I don't have to yell at devs for doing that kind of thing and locking people out by accident too often. It'd be rather ironic to have braille of all things become an accessibility barrier :) Disclaimer: fully blind developer and accessibility expert.

As developer of one such libraries (ntcharts), and having some accessibility experience, I've thought about that irony too.

On a practical level, is it simply any terminal visualization that can destroy a terminal app experience, or only Braille rune rendering? We could include some guidelines in our project for how to include such charts while ensuring accessibility.

Besides via some configuration, I'm not sure how to programmatically recognize that terminal charts would be poorly experienced by a user.

EDIT: made a ticket for this https://github.com/NimbleMarkets/ntcharts/issues/2

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