Hey everybody.
I'm looking for accessible terminal clients, or since they seem to be kind of rare, ssh clients. In particular, something that will let me work within things like editors, if there are any. I'll need to be able to write text in a terminal, and I'll need to be able to move between lines and the like.
It's possible I could write in something else and paste it into the terminal/ssh app, if there's an easy way to do that and a decent free editor. I will be using a Bluetooth keyboard for all of this. But if I'm going to do something like that, a way to select and copy text from the terminal/ssh window would be awesome.
Comments
Try ish
I've tried a few shell apps on iOS but was never satisfied with any of them. Quite odd, really, that no one has found a way to make a text-based shell accessible to the blind.
The last one I tried was ish. You might want to look at the latest version to see if they've made any accessibility improvements. Let us know what you discover.
There aren't really a lot of…
There aren't really a lot of options I've found that seem to play well with text editors, sadly. For simple command line work, either a-shell or iSH seem to work pretty well for me.
If you want to edit text on remote servers in iOS, though, finding apps that can save text through SSH/SFTP works better. Things like Secure Shellfish which gives you a terminal but also gives you a file provider which means you can read and write files by SSH. A lot of the files replacement apps can do this too, the one I use is File Browser pro or File Browser Go.
And finally, some text editors do this, Textastic is the one I use.
Oh, BTW, Secure Shellfish speaks terminal stuff, but I tend to not use it as my primary because looking at the terminal output doesn't always play nice with Voiceover. I do use it for a couple of things, though.
Thanks, I'll check those out.
The problem is that the thing I want to login to is a BBS. If I use ssh, I can write posts and then send them to an editor, I assume Nano or whatever it's got running. In that situation, I'd be doing ssh to the server it's running on, and running a client on that server, which is why I'd be using whatever editor it has.
It does have an option to upload posts, hence the idea of writing something in another editor app, selecting it all, and pasting it into the terminal window. That would be annoying, but possibly workable, assuming whatever client actually reads the terminal output.
MudRammer actually reads it, but you have to hit enter after every command. It claims it has some sort of special telnet mode where you don't have to do that, but I didn't see anything about that when I was adding the BBS server. Maybe I'll try to do some more digging in the options or something.
A terminal app would be ideal because then I wouldn't have to mess with ssh and ask them for an account on the server and all. I'd still have to write in something else and paste, but since it doesn't have a built in editor, which means you can't get back to lines once they're written, I'd have to do that anyway. It's just that if you run the client on their server, you can edit the post afterwards in an editor running on the server.
What's the process for asking for a refund from Apple if an app isn't accessible? I'd have to ask what it was again, but somebody is using a terminal app that you have to pay for, it's like $15 or something, so last time I was looking into this, *very briefly), I didn't worry about it.
I don't think it had a demo version or anything though. Now I'm trying to push the phone more seriously to see what all I can do with it, so I'm trying to really dig into things I'd normally do on my PC. I check into this place pretty regularly, so having a way to do that would be nice.
I would love to have an ssh…
I would love to have an ssh client that would have BSI, just... Work. I never found one and I would love to find one that would honestly, play nice. It's why I don't do server stuff when I'm out on the go, even though that's what I would love to do. ish don't let you input using BSI even though you can switch to it. Which, is utterly stupid! I don't wanna have to get a keyboard for one, thing only. There are times when I would just like to have my phone and my phone only and not have any other thing and I shouldn't have to have other things, just to make things work for my liking.
The Trick
In ish, give focus to (touch) any keyboard key. Now switch to BSI, and it works. It's wondrous.
There's also Panic's Prompt 3, of course. Now with support for Eternal Terminal and mosh, in the event you don't have a VPN session to your server's network to avoid issues caused by NATs on the path.
Do you ahve to touch on the keyboard ot type?
Because I was just coming here to ask how you even type in it. Using a Bluetooth keyboard I get nothing. So I have to touch on the phone's keyboard, and then the Bluetooth will work?
Will try this. Thanks.
Will try this. Thanks.
Just Focus
No, you don't have to type. The point is, typing won't work unless you focus the keyboard. So do that, and now you should be able to use BSI or type on a BT keyboard. IWFM.
What about Termious?
Hi,
Has anyone tried Termious?
I have not tried it for myself, due to the steep subscription price, but someone told me that voiceover would not read the output.
I’m curious to know why this is and see if anyone else has tried it. If so, what was your experience?
Voiceover and output
I don't know specifically whether Voiceover reads the output in Termious, but I will say that, unless the Dev has gone out of their way to *make* Voiceover read the output, terminal apps generally don't, so by default in an app like this, you might be able to navigate the output but it won't be spoken automatically when you hit enter etc.
I'm not really sure why, but I think generally VO isn't really designed to automatically speak the output in apps like this. An interesting side effect in the ones that do, for example, is that output is often spoken whether the app is the focus app or not, so if you start a download or a copy or something in the terminal app and switch somewhere else, it'll still speak the progress from the terminal app. Generally the only way around this is to turn off speech.
Re: Voiceover and output
It's a problem, both for shell apps and every IRC app I've tried. And it's kind of strange, because VoiceOver works great for text messaging, and even FB Messenger used to work well for group chats until an update broke it. And those types of apps are displaying exactly the same kind of content: You type something, and someone or something types back. So VoiceOver isn't inherently unable to work with this type of content.
App Developer Must Support
Ultimately VoiceOver has no way of knowing that a widget or section of the screen is a continuously updating view unless the developer tells it. You can argue, and I would, that such widgets should be built-in, but they're not and so the dev has to specifically output the changes through VoiceOver. Spatterlight and Frotz are Interactive Fiction (IF) multi-interpreters for Mac and iOS, respectively, that do.