this post was submitted on 05 Sep 2023
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Programming

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[–] [email protected] 38 points 2 years ago (17 children)

Another accessibility reason for tabs: when using a braille display, each space takes up one character cell, so indenting with four spaces eats up four cells. Indenting three times with four spaces each eats up 12 characters already. Tabs only take one character cell each, so three indents = three character cells used.

The fact that there (I assume?) isn't a braille oriented text editor that can handle space-based indentation in a smarter way is a bit depressing. Maybe the solution should be better tools based around accessibility rather than convincing everyone to switch to tabs, which is a project that will just never succeed.

[–] [email protected] 7 points 2 years ago (2 children)

rather than convincing everyone to switch to tabs, which is a project that will just never succeed.

Few years back, Coraline Ada Ehmke went on a one person crusade opening a pull request on every major Github repository to adopt a code of conduct for the project, detailing the complex rules of how the humans in that microcosm of a project should interact with one another. Today, it's the norm.

Arguing that it's invincible to convince people at large to adopt tabs over spaces with good arguments is a ridiculous statement. All you are doing is making up excuses for not having to care.

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

That reminds me of those times when back on reddit some dev showed up to present their new GUI library. Bragging about how they were better than Qt devs etc. (even though they didn't implement the hard parts, like working text fields or tables)

After some time a bunch of people had enough and started bullying those guys into submission about accessibility. After some time, every of those toolkits had support or at least plans for supporting screenreaders. Eventually, AccessKit became a thing.

Good times.

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