4 ms·

On what basis do we believe GUIs are more accessible? Merely because that’s the default that’s been demonstrated to us? Thinking broadly about accessibility (so

On what basis do we believe GUIs are more accessible? Merely because that’s the default that’s been demonstrated to us? Thinking broadly about accessibility (so including those with sight issues and mechanical impediments like, for example, Hawking had) I’m not sure we’ve got any solid reason to believe a GUI is inherently more accessible. I’m also not sure that a less social but more democratic system beats a less democratic but more social one, given that we can train people to script CLIs, giving them the socially sourced empowering the piece is speaking to, but we can’t train people to automate and scale up their GUI work in the same manner.

temporarely 2y ago
In my view CLI is "inherently" more abstract and requires a relatively deeper understanding of the system that is being interacted with. I honestly find it strange one needs to elaborate on this manifest fact: see all the unwashed happily tapping away on their smart phones. Also we're not discussing "systems" rather interfaces. The system is invariant. Take OS X. I know few normies who even know what "terminal" is or what it means and on the other extreme, most of my fellow techies mainly interact with it via a terminal. It's the same system. Training also indicates specialization. Arguably any endeavor requiring specialization is already anti-social, if we consider society in its widest sense.
- yawpitch 2y ago
  Give me five minutes and I can get most of the unwashed to see that a Terminal window is not much different than a Finder window, for the tasks most of the unwashed are doing (browsing, finding, opening, maybe deleting, maybe moving). Sure, it’ll take me longer to get them up to speed on all the extra facilities the Terminal provides, but the mental model required for a Finder window and that required for a Terminal cwd aren’t a heck of a lot different, except that the latter can optionally do things outside its context. Also training doesn’t have to be specialization… just like we do basic arithmetic and literacy and (mostly useless and often curated by people with agendas) history we could do basic directory navigation and associated operations, side by side, just to get everyone on the same page, going forward. Now suddenly everyone has access to the social value of sharing their interactions with machines. Arguably this is what little value LLMs might actually provide, assuming we ever get to the point we can talk one into reliably performing some interaction with the OS for us, then capture that as an output we can share as well.
eternityforest 2y ago
Nearly all existing CLIs are much harder to use than GUIs, regardless of what technical possibilities exist. They will delete your stuff instead of trash it. You can run commands on the wrong folder or even the wrong machine easily, since you're not directly clicking on objects. The context of where you are and what you're doing has to be all in your head. Even with autocomplete there's a lot of typing involved. If you're not a touch typist, it's a real slog to type that much literally all day, and can even make your eyes and neck tired from glancing back and forth to the keyboard so many times. If you customize any of this behavior, it doesn't look any different, you can't tell at a glance what's in bashrc. It's great for scripting, if you do anything that needs to be scripted and also doesn't already exist as a prepackaged workflow in a gui, but there's a lot of stuff where it's rather difficult. GUIs also could be perfectly well scriptable, we could have some futuristic UI where everything was an auto generated UI around drag and drop script blocks or something.
- yawpitch 2y ago
  Knowing where you are in the file browser window is still in your head, it’s just because you’ve clicked from the desktop to the folder to the sub-folder that you’re aware of the current context… sure, it might be configured to display the cwd in a status line or title bar or what have you, but so does a well configured CLI. And sure, a CLI app can just delete stuff without interaction, but so could a GUI, it’s just that one’s be kept default unsafe and the other default safe because of the expected average user… if everyone was always going to be introduced to CLI/TUI first then those default safety features would be there too. What the GUI can never do well is work with things outside the CWD, and while GUIs could be scriptable, they almost never are. I wish they were, I would love to see GUIs be as inherently capable of the social effects the post is speaking to as CLIs, with a shareable artifact of your interaction, but there seem to be incentives that keep that from happening. Honestly I don’t see there’s any reason we don’t introduce both modes to every user. Where they want to be able to do repeatable and shareable they should have that option, and where they want to click around they should have that… but until GUI frameworks are scriptable by default, with some embedded scripting language (don’t care which) that’s ubiquitously present in every window even if the writer of the app knows nothing about it, then we should be empowering users by showing them the things CLIs are inherently better at. My guess is the work necessary to make CLIs more ergonomic is smaller than the work needed to make GUIs more scriptable, but I could be wrong.

temporarely 2y ago

In my view CLI is "inherently" more abstract and requires a relatively deeper understanding of the system that is being interacted with. I honestly find it strange one needs to elaborate on this manifest fact: see all the unwashed happily tapping away on their smart phones. Also we're not discussing "systems" rather interfaces. The system is invariant. Take OS X. I know few normies who even know what "terminal" is or what it means and on the other extreme, most of my fellow techies mainly interact with it via a terminal. It's the same system. Training also indicates specialization. Arguably any endeavor requiring specialization is already anti-social, if we consider society in its widest sense.

yawpitch 2y ago
Give me five minutes and I can get most of the unwashed to see that a Terminal window is not much different than a Finder window, for the tasks most of the unwashed are doing (browsing, finding, opening, maybe deleting, maybe moving). Sure, it’ll take me longer to get them up to speed on all the extra facilities the Terminal provides, but the mental model required for a Finder window and that required for a Terminal cwd aren’t a heck of a lot different, except that the latter can optionally do things outside its context. Also training doesn’t have to be specialization… just like we do basic arithmetic and literacy and (mostly useless and often curated by people with agendas) history we could do basic directory navigation and associated operations, side by side, just to get everyone on the same page, going forward. Now suddenly everyone has access to the social value of sharing their interactions with machines. Arguably this is what little value LLMs might actually provide, assuming we ever get to the point we can talk one into reliably performing some interaction with the OS for us, then capture that as an output we can share as well.

eternityforest 2y ago

Nearly all existing CLIs are much harder to use than GUIs, regardless of what technical possibilities exist. They will delete your stuff instead of trash it. You can run commands on the wrong folder or even the wrong machine easily, since you're not directly clicking on objects. The context of where you are and what you're doing has to be all in your head. Even with autocomplete there's a lot of typing involved. If you're not a touch typist, it's a real slog to type that much literally all day, and can even make your eyes and neck tired from glancing back and forth to the keyboard so many times. If you customize any of this behavior, it doesn't look any different, you can't tell at a glance what's in bashrc. It's great for scripting, if you do anything that needs to be scripted and also doesn't already exist as a prepackaged workflow in a gui, but there's a lot of stuff where it's rather difficult. GUIs also could be perfectly well scriptable, we could have some futuristic UI where everything was an auto generated UI around drag and drop script blocks or something.

yawpitch 2y ago
Knowing where you are in the file browser window is still in your head, it’s just because you’ve clicked from the desktop to the folder to the sub-folder that you’re aware of the current context… sure, it might be configured to display the cwd in a status line or title bar or what have you, but so does a well configured CLI. And sure, a CLI app can just delete stuff without interaction, but so could a GUI, it’s just that one’s be kept default unsafe and the other default safe because of the expected average user… if everyone was always going to be introduced to CLI/TUI first then those default safety features would be there too. What the GUI can never do well is work with things outside the CWD, and while GUIs could be scriptable, they almost never are. I wish they were, I would love to see GUIs be as inherently capable of the social effects the post is speaking to as CLIs, with a shareable artifact of your interaction, but there seem to be incentives that keep that from happening. Honestly I don’t see there’s any reason we don’t introduce both modes to every user. Where they want to be able to do repeatable and shareable they should have that option, and where they want to click around they should have that… but until GUI frameworks are scriptable by default, with some embedded scripting language (don’t care which) that’s ubiquitously present in every window even if the writer of the app knows nothing about it, then we should be empowering users by showing them the things CLIs are inherently better at. My guess is the work necessary to make CLIs more ergonomic is smaller than the work needed to make GUIs more scriptable, but I could be wrong.