CLI Accessibility Tips

This was helpful: Harini Sampath, Alice Merrick, and Andrew Macvean, "Accessibility of Command Line Interfaces," CHI '21: CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems, Yokohama, Japan, May 2021. DOI: https://doi.org/10.1145/3411764.3445544

1. Avoid any scrolling because scrolling is not good.
2. Show Progress
   • Use actual text for progress updates, like 50%, 60%, etc. instead of a Unicode progress bar
   • Say when something was successful! Don't just give the terminal back.
3. Provide a structured man page. They are a pain to use
   • Even if it’s on the web!
   • Maybe a link to a better structured man page at the top could be a low-barrier way to improve the experience?
   • Consider making "-h" open a browser window?
4. Don't rely on tables, like for top
   • Output to CSV instead (keep this in mind for the reporting tool)
5. For long text outputs, provide an option to output to a file.
   • Text editors are easier to use
   • Strutured HTML is even better
   • We should build this in for logging
6. Have clear error messages