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Lynx, Links, w3m: all capable user-agents.

I have at various times found myself unable to use a GUI, and these browsers saved my butt finding information to restore my system.

This is why I test all functionality in all three of them and ensure that they are just as able to use the site (or better) as Chrome Canary.



Oh, hello there again! It's always good to see people testing their site on non-mainstream user-agents.

Some other terminal user-agents to try:

rdrview, go-readability: these are CLI utilities that use Mozilla's Readability algorithm to send HTML of just the article to stdout. Pipe that into w3m/lynx/links to read articles in the terminal. Testing in these ensures that your website will work in Firefox's Reader Mode. I also like to diff my website's HTML against the HTML output of these tools, just to see how much extraneous HTML I have.

Mozilla's Readability is written in JS; these tools are written in C and Go, respectively. With the exception of a few whitespace characters, their output of both seems to be identical.

=> https://github.com/eafer/rdrview rdrview

=> https://github.com/go-shiori/go-readability go-readability

Edbrowse is a line-mode browser that supports JavaScript via Duktape. Originally written for blind users, it's great for sighted users as well.

=> https://edbrowse.org/ edbrowse

If you want to go the extra mile and ensure that your website works with the most basic HTML parsers, try sending it through an HTML-to-Markdown converter that doesn't include inline html in the Markdown output. I test with pandoc's strict markdown output and make sure the resulting markdown is readable:

  pandoc -f html -t markdown_strict https://example.com
None of this is a replacement for real a11y testing; most a11y technology leverages mainstream browsers (Chromium, FF, Safari, et cetera).




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