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ASCII Art Banners Poll

2021-04-19


I'll try to keep this kinda brief because I'm not a big fan of talking about gemini on gemini.


The other day I held a poll on Mastodon:

> @moddedBear@fosstodon.org:

> #gemini users: What do you think of ASCII art banners? Boosts appreciated.


32 people participated giving the following results:

Like: 69%

Dislike: 13%

Don't care/show results: 19%


The reason for the poll is that I was considering removing the ascii art banner I've got on my capsule, or at least limiting it to the home page only. I think most of us have heard the arguments against them: it hurts accessibility, it's not friendly for screen readers, it goes against the spirit of gemini, etc.


There are plenty of reasons to like them though. As a capsule owner, they're fun to make and give you a way to give your capsule character beyond just the words you write down. As a reader, they're a way to visually set different capsules apart.


I don't pretend to be an expert in accessibility, but I don't think ascii art banners are a big concern so long as they're not used in place of actual headers. But then that leads to another problem. If you should be including a header anyway then that defeats some of the purpose of an ascii art banner -- you're taking up several lines on the page for information that's duplicated in the header.


That was basically where I was at when I created the poll. My main fear was that my banner was taking up too much space without being useful -- and my banner is among the smaller ones I've seen on gemini. But if the results are reflective of the wider gemini community (they might not be!) then it looks like people who dislike banners are firmly in the minority and most people actually appreciate them.


- moddedBear


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