Accessibility of command line interfaces

Abstract

Command-line interfaces (CLIs) remain a popular tool among developers and system administrators. Since CLIs are text-based interfaces, they are sometimes considered accessible alternatives to predominantly visual developer tools like IDEs. However, there is no systematic evaluation of the accessibility of CLIs in the literature. In this paper, we describe two studies with 12 developers on their experience of using CLIs with screen readers. Our fndings show that CLIs have their own set of accessibility issues -the most important being CLIs are unstructured text interfaces. Based on our results, we provide a set of recommendations for improving the accessibility of command-line interfaces.