Posts tagged with "a11y"

I've released Rogallo v0.3.0, which mostly concentrates on adding command line support and sorting support for browsing files in the local filesystem. There are also a couple of cosmetic configuration options thrown in.

Configurable cosmetics¶

Starting with the cosmetic configuration options: I got to feeling that the URI-containing tooltips that show on mouse-hover over a link might be a bit much for some people, so I've added show_link_tooltips to the configuration file¹. Set it to false to make the tooltips go away.

Similar to this I've also added disable_animations. Out of the box Textual loves its animations. This is arguably most noticeable if you have a long body of text in a scrolling widget (such as the document viewer in Rogallo), as you use PgUp, PgDn, Home, End, etc., it'll scroll in a fancy animated way. It looks cool for a moment but I can imagine plenty of people getting sick of it, or feeling sick because of it (I sense this is an a11y issue too). With this in mind if disable_animations is set to true they'll all be turned off.

Command line options¶

Rogallo now also has a number of command line options that can come in useful. In part borrowing from a number of my other TUI applications, and also adding some specific to Rogallo itself. They can be easily found with the --help switch:

usage: rogallo [-h] [-v] [-t THEME] {directories,dirs,d,license,licence,bindings,themes,open} ...

A terminal-based client for the Gemini Protocol.

positional arguments:
  {directories,dirs,d,license,licence,bindings,themes,open}
                        Available commands
    directories (dirs, d)
                        Show the directories created and used by Rogallo
    license (licence)   Show license information
    bindings            List commands that can have their bindings changed
    themes              List the available themes that can be used with --theme
    open                Open a location

options:
  -h, --help            show this help message and exit
  -v, --version         Show version information
  -t, --theme THEME     Set the theme for the application (see `themes` command for available themes)

v0.3.0

directories¶

Because I feel it's important that people know where applications drop things in your filesystem, there is the directories command, which shows you which directories are used by Rogallo.

$ rogallo directories
/Users/davep/.config/rogallo
/Users/davep/.local/share/rogallo

licence¶

On the off chance you really need to know the licence of Rogallo (it's GPL3+), you can ask to see the key details:

$ rogallo licence
Rogallo - A client for the Gemini protocol for the terminal.
Copyright (C) 2026 Dave Pearson

This program is free software: you can redistribute it and/or modify it
under the terms of the GNU General Public License as published by the Free
Software Foundation, either version 3 of the License, or (at your option)
any later version.

This program is distributed in the hope that it will be useful, but WITHOUT
ANY WARRANTY; without even the implied warranty of MERCHANTABILITY or
FITNESS FOR A PARTICULAR PURPOSE. See the GNU General Public License for
more details.

You should have received a copy of the GNU General Public License along with
this program. If not, see <https://www.gnu.org/licenses/>.

bindings¶

If you wish to know what commands are available for binding, and what the default bindings are, you can use this command:

$ rogallo bindings
Backward - Move backward through history
    Default: ctrl+left_square_bracket
ChangeCommandLineLocation - Swap the position of the command line between top and bottom
    Default: ctrl+up, ctrl+down
ChangeTheme - Change the application's theme
    Default: f9
Forward - Move forward through history
    Default: ctrl+right_square_bracket
Help - Show help for and information about the application
    Default: f1, ?
JumpToCommandLine - Jump to the command line
    Default: /, ctrl+1
JumpToDocument - Jump to the document
    Default: ctrl+slash, ctrl+g, ctrl+2
Quit - Quit the application
    Default: f10, ctrl+q
ToggleHistory - Toggle the display of the history viewer
    Default: f2, ctrl+3

The how of changing bindings still needs to be documented, but it's the same as with most of my other TUI applications, so if you look at how it's done in OldNews, for example, you should get the idea.

themes¶

This lists the available themes that can be used with the --theme switch.

$ rogallo themes
atom-one-dark
atom-one-light
catppuccin-frappe
catppuccin-latte
catppuccin-macchiato
catppuccin-mocha
dracula
flexoki
gruvbox
monokai
nord
rose-pine
rose-pine-dawn
rose-pine-moon
solarized-dark
solarized-light
textual-dark
textual-light
tokyo-night

open¶

This command can be used to open a location from the command line. You can pass it either a URI for a Gemini capsule, or the path to a file in the local filesystem.

Viewing local files¶

Talking of viewing files in the local filesystem... that's now supported too. This is something I wanted to build in from the start, as I feel it could be handy to anyone writing gemtext files prior to deployment. I sense there might be a couple of edge cases relating to this that I might still need to iron out, but mostly it seems to be working well.

At some point I'll probably also pull in textual-fspicker so that the user can browse for files to view, making it just a little easier to open a file in some cases.

Not requiring the gemini:// scheme prefix¶

So far, to connect to a Gemini capsule, it's been necessary to provide the full URI. That's kind of annoying. It had been deliberately left like this until I sorted the work to allow specifying local files, as I wasn't quite sure how it would all interact. Now that I've got that in place I could address this too. So whereas before you had to type gemini://davep.gemcities.com/ to get to my test capsule, now it's enough to enter davep.gemcities.com.

There is some guesswork going on in the background, with the resolution rules looking something like this:

• Have I been given a URI that is obviously a Gemini URI?
• If not, if it has no scheme, and it matches the name of a file in the filesystem, let's assume the user meant that.
• If it's not a file in the filesystem, and it doesn't have a scheme, let's slap gemini:// on the front and see how we get on with that.
• None of the above applied, yet it has a scheme: throw it at the operating system's URI resolution system.

In casual testing so far this is working out well.

More to come¶

I'm still having a blast working on this, and there's still a lot more to do. The TODO list is staying pretty constant in size at the moment because, as I knock an item off, I seem to keep finding new things I want to add or improve. I see this as a good thing.

I have a very busy AFK life for the next week or so, so I don't imagine too many updates during that period. Once things have settled again I want to try and tackle the two big issues of user input and client certificates. I'll be happy that Rogallo is getting close to generally usable when I know I can log in and water my plant in Astrobotany.

A quick update to BlogMore, with a small accessibility improvement, and also a whole new set of data for the graph.

The accessibility update follows on from a change published yesterday. In that release I did a little bit of work to disambiguate links to categories and tags that had the same link text; this time I've given the same aria-label treatment to the post dates where they link to the year, month, and day archives. While we're never really going to get ambiguous year links (unless there are also links in the body of a post that are four digit numbers), it's highly likely we're going to get the occasional month and day that are ambiguous.

So now those links make it clear, with aria-label, what's being linked to.

The other main change in v2.31.0 comes from a thought I had last night about the new "related posts" feature I added yesterday. Currently the graph shows the relationships the posts have based around their common categories and tags:

But now I've got this code that can work out how posts might be related based on their text content. What might that look like? It might be cool to be able to switch the graph view between the two sets of data, if the blog owner is building with related posts turned on.

While I'm not sure it really tells me anything, I like that I have yet another method of (re)discovering posts.

BlogMore has been bumped to v2.30.0. This release is pretty heavy on new features, but it does also include one small accessibility tweak too. While looking through some of the neutral feedback from PageSpeed Insights I noticed it mentioned that in some cases I had a category and a tag linked on the same page, where the text of the link was the same. That's pretty common on my blog. For many of the categories (especially things like AI, Coding, Emacs, Python, etc.) I'll also have a corresponding tag. The idea is that categories are essentially sub-blogs within the blog, whereas tags characterise a post.

Given that the same text for different purposes doesn't give much context from an accessibility point of view I've added appropriate aria-label attributes to differentiate these links.

Now for the new features.

The first is another "discover other posts" type feature, that might encourage a reader to venture further into a blog. While BlogMore does support backlinks (as was added back in v2.16.0), I have been thinking that a "related posts" feature would be interesting to add. So now it's added. This is enabled with the with_related configuration option (or the --with-related command line switch) and provides control over how many related posts are shown; the default is three.

Because calculating the best related posts, for every post, will cost in time and memory, some control over how "accurate" the hits are is given. You're also not stuck with "Related Posts" as the title either.

The rest of the new features are more admin-based and are all commands on the BlogMore command line. The first is the drafts command which simply lists the filename of all the posts that are in a draft state.

The second new command is links dump. This is a utility command for dumping a CSV list of all the external links that can be found in your posts, along with the filename of the post the link was found in. This could be useful for all sorts of things; for example writing your own external link statistics tool, or perhaps writing your own external link checker.

Talking of external link checkers: I've also added links check. This is a bit experimental, but is intended to be a simple checker of all the external links, seeing if they're still out there. By default, when run, it'll check every link it finds and, if there's a problem with it, it'll report the issue. There's a --verbose mode as well if you want feedback on all the links that are working.

It seems like every time I think I'm done adding features, something else is either suggested or pops into my head. I feel like I'm near the end of adding stuff now and should be getting back to refining the code.

I'm fairly sure I've said that before.

A quick update to BlogMore that stems from a couple of accessibility concerns raised when using PageSpeed Insights. While the accessibility score on pages generated by BlogMore is pretty excellent (96/100), a couple of things were highlighted that seemed worth tackling in some way.

The first was that the title bar of code blocks is rather low in contrast, especially the name of the language. This was a deliberate choice on my part; when I'd prompted Copilot to do this work some time back I'd expressly asked it to make the text "subtle". While I could have undone that, I do like how it looks and would like to retain it if possible. So, as an experiment, I've used prefers-contrast as a signal that I shouldn't do that. So now there's a bit of extra CSS under prefers-contrast: more which just uses the normal text colour for those headers.

I imagine this won't boost the score on PageSpeed Insights -- presumably it won't simulate that being used -- but I would hope it's an improvement for those who do need the extra contrast.

The other issue that was flagged up was the lack of an underline on the email address link in the comment-via-email invitation box (the optional feature I added back in v2.17.0). That one was an easy fix. There was no reason to avoid an underline on the link, so I added one.