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' will be displayed on stderr while gcloud is performing tasks.
  • Percentage progress bars: Progress will be displayed as a percentage, outputted to stderr.
  • Boxed tables drawn with ASCII characters: Boxed tables are the default output of many list commands. Instead of being drawn with Unicode, they will be rendered using ascii characters. 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-wide 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.

Filing feedback

To file a bug, provide feedback, or send suggestions, use gcloud feedback to help improve the gcloud command-line tool experience. This command will open the public issue tracker in a browser window.

You can also directly log issues using issue tracker. Be sure to toggle the 'Type' field to reflect the nature of the issue you're filing (Bug, Feature Request, etc.) to help make responses more efficient.