Re: OT: Help! (MP3 questions) pt 2 of 2

James Jolley <jrjolley@xxxxxx> wrote:

real-address-in-sig@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx (Rowland McDonnell)

Do I want to know what interactive fiction is?
Text adventures.

So why not say so? Text adventures aren't any sort of fiction in my
experience - they're irritating battles against the user input parser.
Many works of Interactive Fiction are hardly adventures in the literal
sense. Many now are more story-driven.

Hmm... I can't see how that would work. I've never met an interface to
that sort of thing which wasn't irritatingly impossible to get on with.
The idea of trying to work through a story that way - well, what story
would /I/ experience? One of profound annoyance and pointlessness, at a
guess.
Talk about closed minded,

Eh? Hardly! Or at least, that's no evidence of closed mindedness.

It's just the thoughts of someone who's had some experience of tech
similar to that which you're talking about, /and/ the hype surrounding
that tech. When I hear similar hype about similar tech, I naturally
/suspect/ that the results will be similar to that which I have already
experienced.

And then I wrote this:

"But enough speculation: go on, I'm talking crap about this stuff 'cos
I've never looked at the modern varieties. Could you give me a link so
I can take a look at something in that line?"

which seems to me to be a clear indication that I'm interested in
finding out more, and that I'm keen on having my expectations
confounded.

It's a shame that you chose to snip the above without comment. I really
am interested in learning more, but it seems you wanted to pretend that
I wasn't.

[snip]

All I can hear at `speed 100' is noise.

[snip]

Will there? Short of reading Braille and walking with a white stick
(etc), and that only because blind people get more practice, I can't
think of anything that losing your eyes would make you *better* at in
general.
Perhaps surviving? Many sighted people rely on there external view of
the world.

<puzzled> Most of the data I receive about the external world is
visual, as is the case with anyone who's got working eyes that are open.
Duh!

And this following point that you made is qualitatively different in
what way, exactly?

"Many sighted people rely on there external view of the world."

I could have responded to that point with `Dur!' just as well, could I
not? But I chose what I thought was a more interesting response.

That's the point of eyes and the human visual system. However, if you
don't use a bunch of other senses, you can't operate well. For example,
you'd better have a working sense of balance, functioning ears are dead
useful to keep yourself alive walking around cities in particular
(traffic!), and so on.
Obviously?

When analysing a situation, it is important to note all the obvious
things as well as all the non-obvious things. You made a `bleedin'
obvious' observation of that sort (sighted people rely on their eyes),
which I took not as an annoyance but as a prompt to dive into that point
a little deeper.

For some reason, you seem to me to have been annoyed at my entirely
constructive and non-irritable response to you making a point which
would have prompted many to respond with `Duh!'.

Many sighted people don't seem to understand where they are
when the lights are out for instance.

Yes, of course, that's because eyes are so damned good at keeping you
oriented, and because artificial lighting is pretty much ubiquitous for
any modern city dweller.

So of course blind people are mostly better at getting around when the
lights are out - but some sighted people have learnt to do better than
blind when it's dark-but-not-like-in-a-cave 'cos they can use all the
tricks that blind person can use, plus their eyes (give a human eye a
packet of 10 photons and it can detect it, apparently - a packet that
big is just above the noise threshold of the human photon detection
system, apparently. See in the dark animals can only do better by using
reflective retinas and IR detectors in the retina and so on.)

Point it, it's not an ability granted a person on losing their sight:
it's a skill that is learnable by anyone, and being blind only makes the
need to develop that skill a pressing one. It does not give you any
ability - just a need.
I'd say whatever, but this entire response seems to be very much in this line.

I'm not sure I follow you here.

[snip]

I also think that blind people develope a better sense of memory for
procedures, hense all you're comments regarding VO not working. I can
tell you it does work.

<puzzled> I can't see any connection at all between `sense memory for
procedures' and my experience of Voice Over.

I mean that blind people tend to have to learn more things to do the
same job. Take something like using a DVD player. Blind users have to
learn that 3 down is special features, etc, etc. Sighted users don't
have to learn that kind of thing at all.

Righto - now I understand what you mean by `sense memory for
procedures'.

It seems to me that modern technology should find a way to give blind
people some of the `look/see' identification ability that sighted people
have, if only as prompts to make learning what's where.

I'd like to see more talking gadgets. Texas Instruments made the
educational toy `Speak and spell' back in the 1980s. Tech like that is
dirt cheap these days.

I can envisage a practical scheme whereby gadgets have identification of
parts built into them, using some sort of passive wireless remote
signalling system (a standard would have to be defined), with a gadget
available for purchase which would be able to read such tags and speak
words based on the data in the tag.

It's technically feasible - but economically unrealistic at the moment,
I fear; then again, what's disability access legislation for, eh?
Society can afford the cost of developing the sort of kit I'm thinking
of... Still, I've long felt that disabled people in general are very
poorly served by modern high tech innovations.

But you're wrong that sighted people do not have to learn things like
that - how could one operate the controls of a typical road-going motor
vehicle or touch type without muscle memory guiding hands and feet and
fingers? My left thumb `knows' where to move to sound the horn or start
and stop the indicators (left and right) or move the headlight from
dipped to main beam - three differently operating controls in different
places, all activated by the one clumsy digit in a heavy glove, and the
thumb finds its way on command while my eyes stay looking at the road.

That example is trivial. How about touch-typing? <shrug> Any idea how
quickly my fingers can perform the key-dance cmd-s cmd-t (save and then
LaTeX in TeXShop and other apps)? Pretty damned quickly is the answer -
all down to muscle memory. Of course I do not have to learn things like
that, it's easier for me to do the learning, and I don't have to learn
all the controls I wish to use - but us sighted types do use that sort
of memory to operate the knobs.

I tried it. The
behaviour I saw was confusing and inconsistent.
Funny, considering it's had many hours of testing and feedback from
blind users, there are things it's not great at but even so.

Every time I tried it and then turned it off, MacSoup was basically
buggered - the space bar was mapped to `activate random control X'.

Quit+relaunch sorted it out every time, mind you.

Inconsistant? I'd think not.

What I saw - saw! - most certainly was inconsistent. I'd understand it
if the black border were displayed around the window that was the
current active one, or the current active window element, but that is
not what I saw. Note the word: saw. With my eyes... On MacOS X
10.4.11, mostly using an application that I gather is not fully Cocoa
(MacSoup).

A blind person would not see anything, so would not be in a position to
detect the inconsistencies I saw.

Either way, until you have to use this
stuff yourself, or at least have some sort of open mind, we're wasting
each other's time.

I think it'd help if we stopped hurling derogatory allegations around
the place.

Since I had read no instructions on how to use Voice Over, I had no idea
how to operate it beyond `cmd-5' and `shift'.

I can also tell you that I know the keyboard
commands as you should expect.

<puzzled> Of course you do. I learn keyboard commands when I have to.
When I do not, I rely on on-the-fly visual prompts, which I can see on
menus and things with my eyes. It's a little slower than remembering
things, but more convenient to get started than having to learn all the
damned key combos.
To get started. That's the key.

I used to use Emacs for all text editing. I've forgotten most of the
key combos by now, but I did once learn all the usual keyboard
navigation commands and it was terrifically efficient to use once I'd
done so.

But! It was easy to learn because I worked through the Emacs tutorial
and kept the Emacs reference card by my side. The former is something
that is applicable to blind people (in principle). The reference card?
- that's a harder thing to implement for the blind.

The puzzle is how to achieve something of the convenience of `scanning a
full document in a glance and then eyeballing the precise bit you want'
that us sighted types have with the constraints that apply to the blind.

I'm sure something could be devised and bloody well ought to be. We
have laws about accessibility for the disabled - maybe someone ought to
start coming the heavy on this sort of thing, 'cos you can't leave it up
to the marketplace.

As someone who has to navigate the
screen left to right usually, I have no choice but to learn that the
4th button does this or that Command Shift M hides the subscription
list in NNW as an example.

Yes, of course. I feel that the technology should give you more help to
do so. It wouldn't be hugely hard to implement. Argh! - these days, so
much /could/ be done by way of high tech to - erm - liberate blind
people a little from the constraints that they (you!) have to struggle
against.

Don't take this the wrong way, it seems like
you are attempting to criticise me on some level,

<puzzled> How do you mean?

I don't fully agree with all your points. Is it wrong to mention such
things in a discussion?

perhaps i'm
missreading but this thread has degenerated into a rowland has some
issue with the fact that the blind can do specific things and has no
regard. Not sure if this is the case, hoping not.

I think you've not merely grabbed the wrong end of the stick, but you've
found a stick that's not mine at all.

I know that there are a *few* blind people who have got good at
navigating by sonar, which skill can be taught. But the skill can be
taught to sighted people too. There's nothing I can think of that blind
people are inherently quicker and better at than sighted people due to
their disability.
I don't think it's disability itself that makes blind people slightly
more aware of things. It's the fact that we have no choice.

That's how it seems to me. For example, when I learnt Braille as a
child, of course I knew the only reason for using Braille is to read
with your fingertips - but that was so *SLOW* and I had no patience at
all. I learnt to read Braille by eye very readily (you need get the
lighting right or it's not quite so easy), so I read a few things for
practice and thought `Well, ink on paper is easier, at least I've got
some evidence that these dotty bits of card really are covered in
writing and it's not a hoax, can I be bothered to learn Braille
properly? Nah.

Obviously,

It wasn't obvious to me when I started to to try to learn Braille
properly (touch reading). It's an awful lot harder than one might thing
until the attempt is made.

but to be fair, I only use braille these days for labels,
never read literature in that format these days.

Hmm - righto. Is that because speech synthesis is so much more
convenient to use, or because Braille literature is so expensive, hard
to come by, or similar? Or a bit of both? Or something else entirely?

If I were blind, I would not have made that decision, would I?
You'd have had it made for you by necessity.

One always has the option of not learning and remaining illiterate.
Admittedly, I'd go even madder if I did that.

[snip]

Any time he's ill-informed that I've noticed, it's because he's said so
and has asked an expert to explain things. I've not noticed that he
presents himself as an expert as such - mostly he comes across to me as
someone who knows a bit and wants to find out more, even when he's
haranguing people.
Perhaps, to me, he comes over an arrogant tosser but there we are. He
might be nicy nicy, but he's clueless on so many levels.

Do you have any examples of Peter White's cluelessness?
Generally, he's just clueless. He has no understanding of technology,

But he uses technology effectively all the time, and has often explained
exactly how he himself exploits technology to make his life easier.

has no interest in anyone but his own selfimportance.

It's a different bloke you've been hearing, I'm sure of it. Someone's
taken on Peter White's identity and is broadcasting on a hidden
transmitter...

Anyway, this
isn't a let's worship peter white group, snipping the irrelevant stuff

<raised eyebrows> I can't see any sign that anyone's worshipping Peter
White. I do see signs of someone slagging him off relentlessly in a
fashion that I find bizarre, because none of the criticisms of him that
I've read here match the Peter White *I* hear on the radio.

It's like you're talking about a completely different bloke.

Rowland.

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