[Bug 273885] Accessibility: review use of italicised green monospace in manual pages

https://bugs.freebsd.org/bugzilla/show_bug.cgi?id=273885

--- Comment #6 from G. Branden Robinson <g.branden.robinson@gmail.com> ---
(In reply to Wolfram Schneider from comment #3)

Hi Wolfram!

(I will try harder to get your name correct--people misspell mine all the time,
so I really shouldn't mess up others' names.)

"This is very likely a side effect of the groff 1.23.0 update.

I don't know why, I will check.

...

I think problem is in the new variable doc-page-topic-font

/usr/local/share/groff/1.23.0/tmac/mdoc/doc-nroff
.ds doc-page-topic-font \f[I]

if you change that to

.ds doc-page-topic-font \f[]

the title will be displayed without italic fonts

...

commit eeb7e34a074014631c5feab8121928a9b2ddc7a2
Author: G. Branden Robinson <g.branden.robinson@gmail.com>
Date:   Thu Nov 3 07:16:41 2022 -0500"

That is indeed the commit that changes the page topic to use the same face as
the _mdoc_ `Xr` macro, which (as of _groff_ 1.23.0) also uses italics by
defaults.

However, as you've found, this setting is also customizable, and there's
nothing wrong with changing it.

I would not, however, make the exact change you proposed.

.ds doc-page-topic-font \f[]

This doesn't make a "null font change": it changes the font to the _previously
selected_ font.  Sometimes this will have no adverse consequences, but I
wouldn't bet on it never doing so, and it's the sort of thing that can be hard
to track down later.

If you want the page topic to render in roman, I would say so explicitly.

.ds doc-page-topic-font \f[R]

In _groff_ 1.24.0 I hope to get the `MF` string from _groff man_ ported over to
our _mdoc_ implementation to improve the package-neutral configurability of man
page appearance.  (The reasons this wasn't already done have to do with PDF
support for hyperlinks, whether internal or of the "man:ls(1)" kind; it's
easier for me to develop features for _man_(7), get the bugs shaken out, then
port them over to _mdoc_.)

If you want to eliminate the appearance of italic text in _mdoc_ documents as a
low-vision accommodation measure (or for any other reason), you might also want
to look at some other string definitions.  In _groff_ 1.22.4 (and "nroff
mode"), the `Ad`, `Ar`, `Em`, `Fa`, `Ft`, `Pa`, `Sx`, and `Va` also used
italics, as did the fixed string `Na` (which writes "NaN").  This list is
mostly the same in _groff_ 1.23.0, with the removal of `Sx` and addition of
`Xr`.

Regarding text appearing in green, that is not anything _groff_ does by
default; _groff_ itself does not colorize man pages.  (It's overwhelmingly
popular among Arch Linux users.)  Based on experience with other man-to-HTML
converters, I surmise that what's happening is that a tool is telling _groff_
to format a man page for a terminal and then interpreting the output to infer
typeface changes.  A CSS style may then be getting applied to the inferred
faces.

Regarding the accessibility issues of italic text, I think it's important to
keep the domain of application in mind.  As pointed out in the top link
matching your "startpage" query,

https://ux.stackexchange.com/questions/62742/are-italics-on-the-web-bad-for-accessibility

...it seems that some people are interpreting a blanket prohibition against
italics for Web content by (arguably) overreading a W3C recommendation. 
Whether the problems that degrade the readability of italics apply to the
FreeBSD web site is something that the FreeBSD project should decide for
itself.

I will add that in _groff_ 1.23.0 italics are not used by default when
rendering to terminals.  It can be enabled, however.  _grotty_, _groff_'s
output driver for terminals, has long supported the production of ISO
6429/ECMA-48 SGR escape sequences for italics, but the switch to enable these
has not been easy to access.  It is now.

https://git.savannah.gnu.org/cgit/groff.git/tree/NEWS?h=1.23.0#n86

Still, as I said, italics in terminal output are _off_ by default.  This might
change in _groff_ 1.24.0, as Lennart Jablonka has proposed patches to make
_grotty_ use _terminfo_ to determine the terminal's capabilities instead of
firing blindly as it has done to date.

https://lists.gnu.org/archive/html/groff/2023-09/msg00027.html

Traditionally, "nroff devices" use underscores in place of italics, because the
typewriter-based paper terminals that _roff_ and _nroff_ targeted in the early
1970s did not support oblique typefaces.  Apparently (per the above Stack
Exchange thread), at one point the British Dyslexia Association discouraged
thae underscoring practice as well...but the link is now dead.  Whether this
suggests that the corresponding guidance has been withdrawn, I cannot say.

Finally, I would emphasize that _groff_, like the _troff_ from Bell Labs that
inspired it, is a typesetting system.  At the aforementioned StackExchange
thread, much of the quoted discussion expressing concern with the accessibility
of italic text to those with low vision centered on issues of poor font quality
or low-resolution glyph rendering.  _groff_ is indeed designed to format text
even in such limited environments, but it also produces PDF, PostScript, PCL 5,
and TeX DVI, where glyph detail can be of professional quality.  I think that
if italic text were _inherently_ frustrating to low-vision accessibility, we'd
have learned this fact hundreds of years ago, nearer to the time when italic,
slanted, and oblique typefaces were first designed and set in lead, instead of
stumbling on the fact suddenly in the wake of Tim Berners-Lee's most famous
achievement.

Let me know how I can be of assistance.

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