Enabling accessibility features

In order to provide a more streamlined screen reader experience, the gcloud command-line tool comes with an accessibility/screen_reader property. When this property is set to true, the following behaviour is enabled:

  • Status trackers instead of unicode spinners: The phrase 'working' is displayed on stderr while gcloud is performing tasks.
  • Percentage progress bars: Progress is displayed as a percentage, outputted to stderr.
  • Flattened tables: Boxed tables are the default output of many list commands. Instead of the queried resources being displayed in tables drawn in Unicode, results are rendered as a flattened list of items. Also, consider using the --format flag to define your own format.

To enable these accessibility features, run:

gcloud config set accessibility/screen_reader true

Additional resources

Alternate documentation experiences

  • To search the gcloud CLI reference docs for a keyword or command, use gcloud help. This runs a search for all commands with help text matching the given argument or arguments.

Refining gcloud CLI output

  • To adjust the verbosity level of a command, you can set the gcloud CLI flag --verbosity with either debug, info, warning, error, critical, or none.
  • For list commands, you can further refine your output by using the --limit flag to set a maximum number of resources to list. You can also use the --page-size flag to define the number of resources per page if the service lists output in pages. To sort, use the --sort-by flag with the relevant field to sort.
  • To disable interactive prompting, use the --quiet flag.
  • To structure and produce more meaningful output, you can use the format, filter and projection flags to fine-tune your output.
    • If you'd like to define just the format of your output, use the --format flag to produce a tabulated or flattened version of your output (for interactive display) or a machine-readable version of the output (json, csv, yaml, value).
    • To format a list of keys that select resource data values, use projections.
    • To further refine your output to a criteria you'd like to define, use the --filter flag.