Accessibility considerations for error reporting

[brendanzab]

Our error reporting should be accessible to people with low, to non-sighted users, and also those who are colour blind.

I think at the moment we support colour blind users reasonably well - ie. colour enhnces the experience, but is not required. It would be interesting to know how non-sighted people fare, and how our error reporting works with terminals with large text sizes.

Wondering if we should do some design documentation surrounding this? Is there any existing resources out there with regards to accessibility for error reporting?

[brendanzab]

Steps we currently take on accessibility:

• Colour is not required to understand the diagnostics
• Colours can be customised
• Characters can be customised (for less fancy fonts)
• A short mode can be used to get the main messages without the source snippet

[brendanzab]

I'm thinking we might also need a machine-readable diagnostic format as well (perhaps JSON), separate to the the LSP support. This could enable people using screen readers to create their own tooling for languages using codespan. This is what rustc does.

[brendanzab]

Some really cool suggestions regarding this were posted here: zkat/miette#28 (comment)

[brendanzab]

Also a handy thread on twitter: https://twitter.com/marcysutton/status/1109200218275246080