accessibility of the reproducible builds page

[Sebastian Humenda]

Hi

HW42 schrieb am 13.11.2016, 20:52 +0000:
>Sebastian Humenda:
>> I'd like to report and discuss with you an issue that I'm having with the
>> reproducible builds page, linked from the QA page of a package of mine.
>> My package, freedict, is affected by "unstable" builds. I suppose that's because
>> the build time stamp is inserted into some of the distributed files.
>> Therefore I have tried  to take a look at the diff output, but found this view
>> to be very inaccessible on the web site. I am using a screen reader (BRLTTY or
>> gnome-orca) to read either the console or the GUI, respectively.
>[...]
>> However, the text file contains tables made of Unicode symbols and hence I
>> cannot navigate them properly. The screen reader is reading every character on
>> the line, from left to right, ignoring the columns in the plain text format.
>> This usually works fine for plain texts or code, but in these plain-text-tables,
>> I am unable to read the information properly. It basically gets read to me
>> without structure.
>[...]
>> 3.  The diff (or build) output contains  these characters mentioned above. It
>>     would be great, if somebody could explain the sense to me. As far as I
>>     understand the output, it is some slightly polished diff output. If so,
>>     would it be possible to provide a plain diff output as well?
>
>The text (and the html) output is generated by 'diffoscope'.
>
>citing https://diffoscope.org/:
[...]
>In the text output it uses "unified" diff output to compare the text
>representation of different parts of the file. Those diffs are indented
>to reflect the nested structure of the files in question. To make the
>structure visually more easily recognizable additional to the
>indentation there a lines drawn with those unicode chars.
>
>As a temporary work-around you can try to remove the unicode stuff and
>replace them with simple spaces with a command like:
>
>  sed -e ':a;s/^\(\s*\)[╵│├─┄]/\1 /;t a' -i freedict_2016.10.22-1.diffoscope.txt
I didn't know that these characters were indentation. It looks much better with
spaces. Thanks!

>How do you deal with other text content where the indentation matters
>like for example python source code?
Indentation is not an issue. I use a braille display and hence see indentation
just fine. However, for the output of diffoscope, I get "random" characters on
my display (imagine that all the lines would start with question marks). That
simply is not helpful.

Cheers
Sebastian
-- 
Web: http://www.crustulus.de (English|Deutsch)  | Blog: http://www.crustulus.de/blog
FreeDict: Free multilingual dictionaries - http://www.freedict.org
Freies Latein-Deutsch-Wörterbuch: http://www.crustulus.de/freedict.de.html