PBI - shell access via HTML?

[Linux for blind general discussion]

most modern linux commands that are run from a shell (whether nushell or
bash or whatever) are already fairly powerful, and are easily adaptable
to creating tabular output, especially when more complex pipelines to do
that are encapsulated in a script.

probably more to the point, accessing any shell via http usually requires
a separate webserver process (shellinabox or gateone), is ajax-dependent
(ajaxterm), is a java client (mindterm), or some combination; the latter two
may render html that's weird enough to be unrecognizable by screen readers,
and the first requires a dedicated server. and all of these, along
with the general concepts of what are called "reverse shells", often
come with difficult and subtle security exposures.

since nushell is just a shell like any other, if your screen-reader setup
can parse the output of any other shell (like bash), it can similarly
parse the output of nushell, i would think. and using the relatively
well-secured ssh setup, could be just as effective.

On Sun, Oct 31, 2021 at 09:03:03AM -0700, Linux for blind general discussion wrote:
> I have a Partly Baked Idea (PBI) regarding shell access via HTML.  In reading about nushell (https://www.nushell.sh), I was intrigued by the fact that many of its commands (e.g., cal, ls) output data in tabular form.  This allows other commands to process the data, making certain sorts of pipelines more effective.
> 
> My PBI is that, if nushell were accessed via HTML, a screen reader could let a blind user navigate the rows and columns of any tabular output.  I'd like to get some early feedback on this idea.  Does anyone think it might be useful?  What issues would need to be resolved?  (Inquiring gnomes need to mine...)
> 
> - Rich Morin