Skip to content

Improve tor log dialog

As mentioned in #41383, the Tor log is shown in a textarea element. This makes it fairly annoying to navigate with a screen reader.

Moreover, it does not allow any line wrapping, which means most likely the user will need to horizontal scroll to read the full log.

Screenshot showing the tor log dialog with the log in a textarea

I can improve the screen reader situation by changing the underlying semantics to be a table, but I could also change the visuals while I'm here:

  1. We can split the log into the timestamp, type and message into separate columns. This would help with screen readers since the leading timestamp is very noisy and long to wait for, so it would be easier to skip. It might help with visual reading as well.
  2. Allow for line wrapping of the message to avoid horizontal scrollbars.
  3. Increase the gap between lines.
  4. We could change the font to something other than monospace, if desired.

Here's just a rough grid showing what was described above, but still using the monospace:

Screenshot showing the tor log dialog with a table with three columns showing the log timestamps, type and message.

/cc @felicia @donuts what do you think?

To upload designs, you'll need to enable LFS and have an admin enable hashed storage. More information