@matt How do you imagine the keyboard navigation patterns for this?

Mac is easy, because you can both use the VO cursor and have the rest of the keyboard interact with the application, but Windows? constantly having to switch between browse mode and focus mode doesn't seem too appealing for terminals, and you can't do table navigation with just NVDA's review cursor.

Mac would have an entirely different problem, that of Voice Over not having a functional speech queue, which would require you to do your own speech for announcing new content instead of relying on the screen reader.

Then you have the problem of how to handle e.g. cursor tracking, in most cases you want the terminal to force your review cursor to the bottom every time new output appears, except when you actually don't. Can you even do that with UIA?

@matt Then there's the whole cursor tracking problem, how do you detect cursor movement for aesthetic / UI reasons versus when the user actually wanted to move the cursor, particularly in programs like VIm (which let you move the cursor with arbitrary keys) and when there's unpredictable network latency, and how do you communicate that properly to the screen reader.

As far as I understand, NVDA still relies on the "when an arrow key is pressed, wait n milliseconds and read whatever the cursor is on" logic, even on the web, which breaks when there's Javascript involved sometimes.

@matt I was personally thinking more along the lines of extra "ARIA-like" escape codes that composed well with how terminals actually work, where some of them would apply to the characters being drawn (like color codes do now) and some of them would control general TTY behavior.

In the latter category, you could have codes for "set cursor movement to cosmetic" and "set cursor movement to user-initiated", which could be emitted before any actual cursor-movement codes.