Partially blind guy here with an #a11y PSA:

I'm seing a trend away from "Text Size" sliders or old fashioned font dialogs and towards a few set choices "Default", "Large","Larger", etc.

This is a HUGE step backwards. Your 'larger' is *never* large enough for my crazy busted eyeballs when I'm using my 34" monitor.

If you must do this, please be sure to add "Largest" and even "ZOMG ARE YOU SERIOUS LARGE" options. Some of us REALLY need them, even if it seems insane to you.

@feoh

Yeah I just set my Emacs minibuffer font to be like 140 point. I realized I couldn't see it and was just doing things by memory, even if things get cut off now I'll see something. It looks even more ridiculous in person because my monitor is huge.

@smyth It's like as graphical interfaces become more entrenched and 'mature' they move further and further away from actually being able to accommodate people with non normative interface needs.

It's frustrating. I'd say I'd just go back to 100% text mode all the time, but the web and everything else is so inherently image oriented these days that could get pretty rough pretty quick.

@feoh @smyth

One of the things I really like about running my own web services is that I get to control the damn CSS.

So I guarantee high contrast, decent colors, no minuscule type, and white space where I want it instead of where a "UX designer" who has never taken an accessibility class has decided it should be.

Oh, and one of the things I like about running XFCE on X11 is that writing a window manager theme is easy. So the focus window has a big cyan border, and unfocus windows have narrow but distinct black.white.black borders and high contrast titlebars. Because it should be bloody obvious which window has focus, and easy to find the new window that you want next.

@dashdsrdash @smyth
<kidding>
Oh, so theming your desktop is GOOD, but theming your editor is BAD?

A strange breed, these old school sysadmins are :)
</kidding>

I'm rather enjoying a similar level of customization capability in KDE, but mostly I don't need to write my own theme per-se, as I can tweak existing ones with a fair bit of precision, and KDE is super strict about things like text size being adjustable all the way down.

Because this conversation has delightfully meandered all over the map, I was originally posting about my frustration on installing the Office365 Outlook client, because I'm struggling a bit to find the right notification mechanism for meetings.

I fell back to the web version, but that has problems too.

Note that the problem here is calendaring, which can't be readily solved with 'read yer mail with mutt, brush your teeth, etc." :)

@feoh @smyth

I didn't say that theming your editor was bad. I said that, for me, becoming used to excess editor configs is a problem because I am frequently on some new machine where I do not have the time to set up a new config, nor is it appropriate -- so I would get more annoyed at not having my tools than learning to live with what I've got.

I suppose I could always cut-n-paste to my local, edit, then cut-n-paste back, but... no.

Calendaring: gaaah.

@dashdsrdash @smyth For sure that's a challenge, I have things along those lines optimized about as much as they can be for durable systems I spend any time on. My $HOME is a got repo which has proven to be a life changer - patterned after this article: https://www.atlassian.com/git/tutorials/dotfiles

But I get it. If you're working on say, production environments where dragging your dot files around isn't an option, or dispoable EC2 instances and the like, that's just not gonna fly.

For me there's very little cognitive load imposed because my heavily ornamented editor is Neovim, so dropping back to stock Vim in those environments is hardly a pennance.

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