getting nerds to give a shit about people who aren't neurotypical & able-bodied middle+ class white tech boys is the hardest problem in computer science
@Canageek
just because you're on the autism spectrum doesn't mean the stuff you're making is automatically accessibile to all non-neurotypical people. see: Linux being completely fucking inaccessible to people with adhd
@quine Not sure what you mean by that? I have ADHD and find Linux great...
@Canageek
because Linux people are obsessed with long difficult to understand man pages and directing people to really big long wiki articles and expecting users to read a lot
@quine That isn't usually a problem with ADHD? At least not mentioned in any of them help groups I've been in.
@quine I mean, trouble skipping over lines on tests was one of them, which could apply? I might have my notes here somewhere..
@quine The only one I can see that would hurt that is Selective focus? But if you used multiple, shorter instructions you'd harm people with issues Shifting focus
@quine (Been trying to manage my ADHD better so I can graduate grad school faster, so going to a lot of groups. Reading over these notes, man page length feels like lose-lose. Too short and you'll screw over people who's ADHD gives them trouble with task switching, as every time they have to open a new one to get the detail that isn't in the main one, they will have trouble. But all in one page, and you get trouble with people with Selective issues.)
@quine Actually, there is a good chance that is why...
@quine tech is probably the most friendly field for people with disabilities though?
eh..
@rice
extremely extremely extremely untrue as someone with ADHD (which can be a disability sometimes) as well as not super great motor control & rsi problems (not really at disability level but still makes using certain software hard), plus knowing people who have disabilities who have found tech extremely fucking inaccessible
@quine what would make it better for you? I'm interested
@rice
people being actually fucking helpful and not shouting rtfm at you or banning you from a support channel for asking a question, people not assuming that a user is able to sit there and read a long user manual and retain information from it in their brain, people not writing "self documenting" code that is impossible to wrap your brain around if you have a bad memory, people not writing complicated documentation that involves a knowledge of category theory to understand stuff
@quine getting them to give a shit about minorities is NP-hard
@quine It's not even NP-hard, it's EXPTIME-hard D:
@Felthry
O(n!^n!)
@quine
I've been thinking about this lately, and how odd that is. Seems to me that if you tell a programmer e.g. "some people can't hear" the response should be "an edge case! Let's refactor everything to support that!"
And similarly, "you've only hired men" should get "this is a bug in our system and I will not sleep until we have rewritten our entire interview process and company culture such that it is fixed."
But those don't seem to be the popular reactions.
this toot is getting a lot of attention again. huh.
@quine weird eh
@quine Which is of given a huge percentage of them are on the spectrum