> We can have an inclusive Internet without this bullshit.
We can but it won't be Gemini. Gemini has fought _tooth and nail_ against accessibility and accessibility metadata. And Geminauts still mostly produce GMI files even though Gemini says nothing about distributing only GMI files. The early Gemini days had optimism about using screen readers to view pages, but that went nowhere. The mailing list has consistently chosen a desire for ascetic, technical minimalism over accessibility. If those are the preferences, then it sounds a lot less like "inclusive Internet without this bullshit" and more like "our cool club where only the plain text kids hang out".
Gemini is really just anti-metadata in general. We don't even get anything resembling a Content-Length header because supporting delimiters can lead to extensibility which can lead to tracking mechanisms like cookies and ETags.
So educate me: since Gemini has limited formatting and is text-only, why can't a screen reader just read you the text? I'm admittedly ignorant here because I don't have vision-related needs, but to me the fact that you can depend on a .GMI document to be text only would make it seem like screen or text reader software could easily handle it.
> So educate me: since Gemini has limited formatting and is text-only, why can't a screen reader just read you the text?
In practice there's a lot of stuff that isn't just plain text. Things like embedded Figlet images for one. And languages for the other; UTF-8 makes it trivial to switch languages, but how do you get the screen reader to change which language it's reading? That's usually the problem. Plain-text fans, like CLI fans, often claim it's easy to wrap things or display things in other formats, but in practice, only other techie workflows actually become well supported. That's also why most Geminauts are techies.
We can but it won't be Gemini. Gemini has fought _tooth and nail_ against accessibility and accessibility metadata. And Geminauts still mostly produce GMI files even though Gemini says nothing about distributing only GMI files. The early Gemini days had optimism about using screen readers to view pages, but that went nowhere. The mailing list has consistently chosen a desire for ascetic, technical minimalism over accessibility. If those are the preferences, then it sounds a lot less like "inclusive Internet without this bullshit" and more like "our cool club where only the plain text kids hang out".