6 ms·
Wow, it's interesting how many people seem to have their own takeaways from this, many of which seem to have missed the original point of the post (I wonder how
by dhosek 6y ago
Wow, it's interesting how many people seem to have their own takeaways from this, many of which seem to have missed the original point of the post (I wonder how many actually read the post). The author of the post on gnu.org is blind (and the "Raman" he referred to is T. V. Raman, a blind mathematician who I met ages ago when he gave a presentation at the Portland TeX Users Group meeting about adapting TeX for presenting mathematics to blind readers. Raman, in fact, wrote a reply to the message where he wrote:
>A lot of baggage gets applied today when folks talk about
"Accessibility", but to me the touch-stone of a truly Accessible system
is one where you dont have to ask what interaction modality someone
else is using e.g. witness email, where the persons participating in a
conversation never need ask "Did the person I am talking to use Braille,
speech, or something else", similarly, someone who has a hearing
impairment can send you email without you ever needing to know that he
cant hear you.
I feel like too many developers treat accessibility as an afterthought rather than a central concern.
- sn41 6y agoIt is an interesting historical note that T. V. Raman won the ACM best doctoral dissertation award as a blind scholar [1]. I take an active interest in accessibility partly because my wrists hurt. Technologies initially meant to help blind people have turned out to be useful for people with other conditions as well. [1] https://awards.acm.org/award_winners/raman_4110221 https://awards.acm.org/award_winners/raman_4110221
- mercer 6y agoin my late teens and early twenties my wrists started hurting so bad that I could barely use a computer. While over time things improved to the point where I only have pain after doing pixel-style photoshop work with a mouse, it made me painfully aware of easy it is to take things for granted and not consider accessibility.
- paulryanrogers 6y agoNIH and others have recommendations that may help. I would also suggest seeing a specialist ASAP. A career may last a few decades but your body is for life.
- pmoriarty 6y ago"I take an active interest in accessibility partly because my wrists hurt." If we live long enough, each of us will almost certainly have accessibility issues. So improving accessibility helps our future selves.
- PaulDavisThe1st 6y agoLast year I was 55 and backpacking with my brother (35). I was reading a 1st gen Kindle and having problems without my reading glasses. He kindly pointed out to me that you could change the font size, an idea that absurdly had not occured to me. I still don't know what was more remarkable: that it didn't occur to me, or the way it saved 16 nights of reading for me. It felt a little embarrassing to have to take advantage of this feature initially, but it wasn't hard to embrace and feel deeply grateful for.
- linkdd 6y agoThanks to Chrome which saves the zoom settings per domain, I have "configured" every site I read to be at the same size (125% for most of them, 110% for some, 200% for monsters who put a very small font). I do this mainly because switching from font size to font size actually tires my eyes (they always need to refocus) on the long term.
- dhosek 6y agoThis change seems to have made its way upstream into Webkit (or perhaps went downstream to Chrome? Who knows, probably the former though). It's really nice to have the zoom setting preserved on visits rather than on tabs. I'm also fond of the two finger double tap on the trackpad to zoom into a narrow column of text on a website (I assume Chrome also supports this) which is my primary mode of reading a lot of websites.
- jannes 6y agoThe zoom level can be read by the website and used for fingerprinting, so some browsers see it as a privacy issue to preserve it across visits. Firefox supports both, but the default is to preserve it, I think.
- munificent 6y ago> Technologies initially meant to help blind people have turned out to be useful for people with other conditions as well. The generalization of this observation is called the curb-cut effect: https://burness.com/blog/the-curb-cut-effect-how-a-fix-for-one-group-benefits-us-all https://burness.com/blog/the-curb-cut-effect-how-a-fix-for-o...
- jberryman 6y agoAre there any particular technologies that have helped you with your wrist issues?
- sn41 6y agoI use dictation on my MacBook Pro liberally. One thing I wish is that my Emacs interacts with the Voice Control features - Voice control does not recognize the Emacs on my Mac at all. Also, Karabiner-Elements helps me to remap some of my awkward key combinations. For example, I avoid doing any typing with my pinky - so shift has been remapped to spacebar long press, and control has been remapped to caps lock. These are standard settings that I think many people use. I also try to use text-to-speech and voice control to avoid pressing the ridiculous arrow keys on the MacBook Pro. On other machines, I have an easier time, since I have bought a mechanical keyboard which supports softer keypresses. When I finally come around to it, I will try to purchase a joystick/accessibility (vertical) mouse. I just don't want to clutter my small desk too much.
- anitil 6y agoNot OP, but I periodically swap my mouse hand, and that seems to be enough change to ward off my long-standing wrist issues. That and a proper mechanical keyboard with decent travel in the key stroke are necessary for me to do this long term.
- sn41 6y agoYes, I do this as well. The improvement is significant, and the relief, noticeable.
- dang 6y agoCoincidentally, there is a current thread about blind mathematicians: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24429493 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24429493