4 ms·

1. With due respect to various useful elements of design in Microsoft's work - this booklet reads like "We design for black people! We design for LGBT people! W

1. With due respect to various useful elements of design in Microsoft's work - this booklet reads like "We design for black people! We design for LGBT people! We design for disabled people! Look at us, we're so morally and politically superior!" 2. Microsoft makes software which costs a lot of money (for most people in the world); often a lot of money. One of the main problems people with disabilities have is low income and lots of expenses. 3. Microsoft makes software which hogs resources and thus runs poorly, or not at all, on older or simpler, low-power devices. This also not very accessible. So it might have a perfect UI experience - on the computer people don't have. Admittedly, though, this is not as bad of a problem in the past few years. 4. I wonder how actually accessible MS apps and Windows actually are. Considering how they've botched a lot of their designs in recent years even for normies (Metro; Ribbons).

acdha 6y ago
It's disturbing that you find trying to be inclusive offensive because you perceive them as political opponents. I mean, who cares what people's political leanings are if they are making things better for people who haven't been well-served historically? Similarly, while Microsoft software isn't free nothing in computing is and it seems like an odd angle to criticize an effort to help make their products better based on decisions made by other people in different parts of a huge company, or to criticize them for things in the past which they've since corrected.
- einpoklum 6y ago
  > nothing in computing is free... Luckily, that is not the case: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Free_software https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Free_software I suggest you take a bit of time to read some Free Software philosophy. Consider starting with "Why software should be free", by Richard Stallman: https://www.gnu.org/philosophy/shouldbefree.html https://www.gnu.org/philosophy/shouldbefree.html
  - acdha 6y ago
    Haha, that lazy troll takes me right back to Slashdot before the turn of the century. On the off chance that you actually believe what you're doing is useful, here's why this form of advocacy has singularly failed to attract converts (speaking as someone who's been using and contributing to open source software since the early 1990s): open source software is only free if your time and expertise are free. That free software has to run on non-free hardware (even if the oft-heralded RISC-V revolution happens, someone has to manufacture the device) and most people do not have the skills or time to assemble the hardware or maintain an OS. That means that we're all making tradeoffs of what things we buy and what we do ourselves, and for the vast majority of computer users, even open source developers, that involves outsourcing that work to a handful of companies (or, maybe, a hardware company and Debian). Most computer users consider that a good deal: they spend time on things they like and pay a rather small amount of money relative to the utility they get from a transformative device like a general purpose computer. This means that for most people the decisions which matter the most are made by Microsoft, Apple, or Google — and that anyone who cares should applaud them improving accessibility because it will affect daily life for billions of people. This is especially true for accessibility, where people develop deep habits around things like screen readers and quality matters a great deal. I happen to work with a number of visually impaired users and have not heard good things about the Linux screen readers compared to their Windows or iOS counterparts, and that means that in the context of this thread it's really not useful to snark about the moral superiority of free software.
    - sls 6y ago
      I rarely bother to address this argument: > open source software is only free if your time and expertise are free but since you seem to actually be trying to discuss this in a thoughtful way, please note that we're not given a choice between free software that takes time and expertise to use and maintain vs closed software that takes no time or expertise to maintain. To mimic your original phrase, Windows 10 Pro is only $199 if your time and expertise is free. Going further, in my experience it's often been the case that the free software takes less time and less expertise to use and maintain. Also, it's worth mentioning that you are conflating two different things, open source software and free software, a distinction that often doesn't matter but is central when the point at hand is the ethics of free-as-in-freedom software vs non-free software, a distinction the term open source was deliberately created to elide. You are also conflating free-as-in-freedom with free-as-in-beer by opposing the "software is only freedom-free" with "your time and expertise are free-as-in-beer free". Finally it's not clear to me why you went on to address the pragmatics of non-free hardware or the fact that human effort is necessary to build computers, maintain distros, write kernels etc. Is there a claim that it's unethical to try to run free software on the hardware that you have, or that free(dom) software must always be provide without cost on hardware that is both free(dom) and without cost? If not, then computer users can still spend a small amount of money, relative to utility, to buy a computer that runs free(dom) software. I'm not disputing your claims that accessibility software on Windows or iOS is better than that on Linux, because I don't know the space. It's an unrelated argument, afaict. To illustrate this, simply imagine that some government or corporation had decided to make high-quality accessibility software available under a free license. (I am reminded of Intel's work supporting Dr. Hawking.) You wouldn't conclude from this that all your previous thoughts about free and open source software vs closed/commerical software were wrong, I assume.

acdha 6y ago

It's disturbing that you find trying to be inclusive offensive because you perceive them as political opponents. I mean, who cares what people's political leanings are if they are making things better for people who haven't been well-served historically? Similarly, while Microsoft software isn't free nothing in computing is and it seems like an odd angle to criticize an effort to help make their products better based on decisions made by other people in different parts of a huge company, or to criticize them for things in the past which they've since corrected.

einpoklum 6y ago
> nothing in computing is free... Luckily, that is not the case: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Free_software https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Free_software I suggest you take a bit of time to read some Free Software philosophy. Consider starting with "Why software should be free", by Richard Stallman: https://www.gnu.org/philosophy/shouldbefree.html https://www.gnu.org/philosophy/shouldbefree.html
- acdha 6y ago
  Haha, that lazy troll takes me right back to Slashdot before the turn of the century. On the off chance that you actually believe what you're doing is useful, here's why this form of advocacy has singularly failed to attract converts (speaking as someone who's been using and contributing to open source software since the early 1990s): open source software is only free if your time and expertise are free. That free software has to run on non-free hardware (even if the oft-heralded RISC-V revolution happens, someone has to manufacture the device) and most people do not have the skills or time to assemble the hardware or maintain an OS. That means that we're all making tradeoffs of what things we buy and what we do ourselves, and for the vast majority of computer users, even open source developers, that involves outsourcing that work to a handful of companies (or, maybe, a hardware company and Debian). Most computer users consider that a good deal: they spend time on things they like and pay a rather small amount of money relative to the utility they get from a transformative device like a general purpose computer. This means that for most people the decisions which matter the most are made by Microsoft, Apple, or Google — and that anyone who cares should applaud them improving accessibility because it will affect daily life for billions of people. This is especially true for accessibility, where people develop deep habits around things like screen readers and quality matters a great deal. I happen to work with a number of visually impaired users and have not heard good things about the Linux screen readers compared to their Windows or iOS counterparts, and that means that in the context of this thread it's really not useful to snark about the moral superiority of free software.
  - sls 6y ago
    I rarely bother to address this argument: > open source software is only free if your time and expertise are free but since you seem to actually be trying to discuss this in a thoughtful way, please note that we're not given a choice between free software that takes time and expertise to use and maintain vs closed software that takes no time or expertise to maintain. To mimic your original phrase, Windows 10 Pro is only $199 if your time and expertise is free. Going further, in my experience it's often been the case that the free software takes less time and less expertise to use and maintain. Also, it's worth mentioning that you are conflating two different things, open source software and free software, a distinction that often doesn't matter but is central when the point at hand is the ethics of free-as-in-freedom software vs non-free software, a distinction the term open source was deliberately created to elide. You are also conflating free-as-in-freedom with free-as-in-beer by opposing the "software is only freedom-free" with "your time and expertise are free-as-in-beer free". Finally it's not clear to me why you went on to address the pragmatics of non-free hardware or the fact that human effort is necessary to build computers, maintain distros, write kernels etc. Is there a claim that it's unethical to try to run free software on the hardware that you have, or that free(dom) software must always be provide without cost on hardware that is both free(dom) and without cost? If not, then computer users can still spend a small amount of money, relative to utility, to buy a computer that runs free(dom) software. I'm not disputing your claims that accessibility software on Windows or iOS is better than that on Linux, because I don't know the space. It's an unrelated argument, afaict. To illustrate this, simply imagine that some government or corporation had decided to make high-quality accessibility software available under a free license. (I am reminded of Intel's work supporting Dr. Hawking.) You wouldn't conclude from this that all your previous thoughts about free and open source software vs closed/commerical software were wrong, I assume.