Mitchell Hashimoto has a great response on lobste.rs https://lobste.rs/s/ifbdw1/text_mode_lie_why_modern_tuis_are...

> It isn't fair to blame TUIs.

> The real problem is that pretty much the whole stack has a terrible AX story.

> First, most GPU-rendered terminal emulators don't engage in system-provided accessibility APIs AT ALL. Because text is GPU-rendered, AX tooling can't "read" it, it just shows up as an image. This applies to Kitty, Alacritty, WezTerm. My own terminal Ghostty is AX-readable (on macOS), and so are others like iTerm2 and Terminal.app (which admittedly do it better than me, we have gaps to fill).

> Second, there are no terminal sequences or initiatives at all for TUIs to communicate AX information to the emulator, so the emulator itself can't do much more than display a blob of text to AX tooling. We need the equivalent of ARIA-style annotations but for terminal cells, runs, and regions. No such initiative exists. Even if TUIs do great things with the cursor, this is going to bite a lot of use cases.

> As an example of combining the above, I've been working on something with Ghostty where we integrate semantic prompt (OSC133) and AX APIs so that we can present each shell prompt, input, and command as structurally significant to AX tooling (rather than simply a text box where the cursor is somewhere else). This shows the importance of the relationship between terminal specs (OSC133), TUIs (which must emit OSC133), and terminal emulators (which must both understand OSC133 AND communicate it to AX APIs).

> The whole stack is rotten. And no one is earnestly trying to fix it (including me, I have limited time and I do my best but this is a WHOLE TOPIC that requires a huge amount of time and politicking the ecosystem and I don't have it, sorry).

Bonus: a simultaneously awesome and horrible reality is that AI is really helping to improve AX here. A lot of AI tooling uses/abuses AX APIs to make things happen. How is OpenAI reading your list of windows, typing into them, etc? Accessibility frameworks! So a lot more apps are taking AX integration a lot more seriously since its table stacks for AI using it... Sad it requires that but the glass half full is more software is doing that.