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Tabs are objectively better than spaces - gomakethings.com (gomakethings.com)

submitted 2 years ago by [email protected] to c/[email protected]

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[–] [email protected] 15 points 2 years ago (10 children)

My spontaneous reaction is that making some sort of braille oriented setting for some or hopefully most editors used by people with braille displays (I have no idea if using a "normal" editor even makes sense if you're using a braille display) is the most pragmatic solution to their screens being taking up by spaces.

First of all, convincing everyone to use tabs is a monumental task. Convincing people with braille displays to use more convenient tools on the other hand seems pretty easy, why wouldn't you want to use more convenient tools?

Secondly, there is a large amount of code written with spaces today, so even if people switch with tabs in the future you might still want to be able to read legacy code.

Thirdly, I don't think that the choice of tabs vs. spaces is completely arbitrary because of alignment. Using tabs for indentation and space for alignment leads to a lot more micro management of whitespace compared to just using spaces. I would guess that alignment isn't very braille friendly anyway, but it does make the code more readable for other people. Having a good braille editor affordance might be closer to letting us have our cake and eat it too.

Of course, I don't know what this would look like exactly, and maybe there's some sort of obstacle that I'm overlooking, I do want to be clear that this is just of the top of my head as someone who has never used a braille display.

[–] [email protected] 0 points 2 years ago (9 children)

There’s a difference between doing something that’s “easier” and what’s right.

Whether there is more legacy code with spaces or tabs is irrelevant. Most of the code that will be written hasn’t been written yet.

I disagree with you on “micromanagement” of spaces vs. tabs, that is nonsense. Set up a formatter for commits and set your IDE to display how you want.

The pragmatic view on one or the other is that for a one group of people, using tabs appears to be significantly better, and for everyone else, it barely matters at all, except as personal preference.

That being said, I’m not vision impaired, so I don’t know what the preference would be.

The reason we’re even talking about it is that someone that has studied it from an accessibility perspective has asserted that tabs would be preferred.

[–] [email protected] 6 points 2 years ago (8 children)

There’s a difference between doing something that’s “easier” and what’s right.

The way I see it, there are two competing strategies for improving the experience for braille screen users: making tabs more widely used and improving braille oriented editors. Without knowing for sure, my guess is that improving editors is a better strategy and this is in part because it is easier.

As a matter of principle it might be "more right" for people without visual disabilities to adjust themselves to people with visual disabilities than vice versa, but I also think that it's important to care about what is actually likely to improve braille screen users experience and not default to the more principled goal without any consideration for how realistic it is.

(Of course, I might be overestimating how easy it is to get better braille oriented editors, but since you referred to this as the "easy" solution it doesn't sound like you're disputing this specifically.)

[–] [email protected] 3 points 2 years ago (1 children)

Of course, I might be overestimating how easy it is to get better braille oriented editors

A braille display traditionally is a personal, almost handfitted (estimated by price) device controlled by its screen reader software. Not the editor. This has some unfortunate implications:

There is no (standardized) API to control your braille device directly. You could hand your screenreader filtered data, but that would be read as well. At best, you might be able to script your screen reader software to a varying degree of success. However:
- Every aspect about this is extremely abysmal in every possible way, so it will likely require you to fork over some biiiiig amount of cash to one of the vendors to provide a brittle plugin. In particular if we are talking about JAWS. Think of extremely unstandardized COBOL dev with less stability and more price gauging involved.
- As far as free readers are involved, only the proprietary and licensing aspect go away. Still, developing extensions is terrible in many ways. For example, for ORCA, I was able to find out that you can extend it somehow. Alledgedly. NVDA on the other hand has better documentation. That is to say, it has documentation. Now, you might recall that NVDA is written mostly in Python, and its devs rightly don't even pretend that one could develop stable software in Python, so APIs might change. However, I wasn't able to find a Filter function specific to braille output. That's likely because
From my superficial experience, developers of screen readers think of braille displays mostly as an alternative to speech. It even took them quite a while to be smart about not displaying redundant, long lines of text.

So yes, you might be overestimating how easy that is, compared to telling some diva asswipe chucklefuck to use that formatter or work at McDolans.

[–] [email protected] 3 points 2 years ago (1 children)

Thank you for the insight, didn't expect it to be that dire. Tabs and spaces nonwithstanding, hope that the screen reader/braille display tooling situation improves in the future, sounds like it is sorely needed.

[–] [email protected] 3 points 2 years ago

I sure hope so, but I'm not overly optimistic tbh. The market is basically considered medical, therapeutic devices. It is as you imagine, probably worse. It isn't easy to find prices directly, but the only way this range of vendors continues to exist in this niche market is to sell devices with the complexity of a keyboard for four to five digits. There is no competition worth talking about happening.

So unless very specific regulation takes place, I don't see standardized access to braille displays happening.

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