Re: The endless thread without benefit - Re: re. RMS

[Jean Louis]

* Adonay Felipe Nogueira via libreplanet-discuss
<libreplanet-discuss@libreplanet.org> [2021-04-09 16:36]>

> I know that it also depends on the font size, since for example,
> visually impaired people (e.g.: with monocular vision) have to
> either use a text-to-speech software or rely on a setting to enlarge
> only the text font size for the entire system, which also changes
> how much width an email client has to decide if it will use an
> horizontal scroll bar or do a soft line wrap. Avoiding such arts not
> only helps visually impaired but also leaves more space to convey
> other messages.

Reason why somebody cannot see proper order of letters is that they
view email as HTML which uses fonts that are not of equal width, that
is why it comes out misaligned.

I do believe helping visually impaired or hearing impaired or
otherwise impaired users should be assisted by computer software. We
do not have much of it available really.

> This is why I particularly don't find text art useful in text-based
> communications, specialy when there is a chance that a blind person
> is viewing it (since they have hard time understanding “:)” and
> “:relaxed:” since these aren't localized to their language, but “☺”
> is).

Maybe there is no standard language for all the world.

And if that person can hear, it is easy to ask a friend.

There was a man who was alwayas in wheelchair, he had no problem
associating with anybody and directing teenagers to lift him, move him
up the stairs and similar. 

I also believe that blind literate persons may be way more attentive
and prone to understand than a non-blind one that consciously or
unconsciously pretend to be apt to understand.

Experience from a project to help people communicate better and safer
by using free software applications tells me that majority of people
who can read, who did face the project, cannot read. This relates to
one particular group of 1000+ people in East Africa. They can read in
the sense that they can understand letters and read some words, and
understand many words, but understanding it really is hard for
majority, though they may be English speakers in physical real
life. Majority of those English speakers never read a book like Tom
Sawyer, or any other popular English book, unspoken of reading popular
books, or comics, books almost do not exist and there is no habit in
society and families to read books. This makes one large number of
people impaired to read though they do speak the language and
occasionally write it in the SMS.

That is why each reader application shall have direct access to local
dictionary, from each single word wherever possible, each editor
should have possibility to access dictionary from each word. GNU Emacs
has recently inclued M-x dictionary command that helps users to find
definitions for words, and there are many other packages.



Jean

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