Re: Emacs is very special regarding UIs

[T.V Raman]

Mario Lang <mlang@blind.guru> writes:

well said.
Returning to chess.el, Mario wrote a Braille interface --
a year ago I added the audio-formatted extension using the same library
from John that Mario used -- and what is nice is that you can use all 3
user-interface modalities, or any one of them and it's entirely
transparent as to what you use.

A lot of baggage gets applied today when folks talk about
"Accessibility", but to me the touch-stone of a truly Accessible system
is one where you dont have to ask what interaction modality  someone
else is using e.g. witness email, where the  persons participating in a
conversation never need ask "Did the person I am talking to use Braille,
speech, or something else", similarly, someone who has a hearing
impairment can send you email without you ever needing to know that he
cant hear you.

--Raman 

> Hi.
>
> To me, there is one thing that Emacs implements that no other program I
> know of manages to do.  I seldomly hear this property mentioned by
> anyone else, so even if it scratches OT-ness, I wanted to get this out
> to people to ponder over, or even be proud of.
>
> Emacs is the only serious program I know which manages to be truely user
> interface independent, in addition to being platform-independent.
> Emacs works with graphical toolkits on all major platforms,
> but also offers a almost-feature-complete text interface.
> With Emacspeak, it even has a (non-mainline) audio interface (speech
> synthesis as a UI).
> And I am not really talking about Emacs as just an editor.
> I am seeing Emacs as a platform to write "apps" in Emacs Lisp.
> These "apps" (we usually call 'em special modes or just interactive 
> functions),
> if constructed according to established Emacs Lisp APIs,
> will be useable across all major platforms *and* user interface modalities!
>
> To give a concrete example to highlight what I mean, consider chess.el.
> John Wiegley originally wrote chess.el with different types of board
> styles.  A graphical board which makes use of bitmaps, and actually two
> text mode board for use with emacs -nw.  He did that because as an Emacs
> Lisp developer, one naturally thinks about how to best support emacs -nw
> more or less automatically.  At the time, I was looking for a text mode
> user interface to play chess against engines and online.  I was able to
> make use of all of johnw's hard work in a way quite different to how I
> suppose he is usually running Emacs.  We didn't need to "port" anything
> over to a text interface.  Everything was already there any basically
> working as expected.  I was able to start contributing right away.  No
> digital divide!
>
> Due to the way how you usually render special modes
> (text properties or overlays for metadata) it is usually pretty simple
> for Raman to come up with a few functions to also provide a very nicely
> tailor made audio interface for modes he stumbles across.
>
> This is something extremely special in the world of accessible software.
> I would be surprised if someone could name another "UI platform" that
> manages to pull this of in a similar way.
> The scriptability of Emacs combined with its insistence on keeping
> some sort of compatibility between graphical and text mode interfaces is
> something no one else does.
>
> As a blind user, I can write a special mode which does something
> specific, say, implement an IRC client.  Almost all my work can
> instantaneously be used by sighted people using their graphical
> toolkit.  True, a face change here and there can improve things, but 95%
> of the code can be reused between totally different user interface
> *modalities*.
>
> This is amazing.  Thanks for being so stubborn during the period of
> transition to graphical toolkits and insist on keeping a compatible text
> mode interface.  This has led to a truely unique outcome.
>
> I feel like me being a non-native speaker of English is a bit of a
> hinderence to explaining how very special that "feature" of Emacs is.
> To most of you, I guess it will not feel so important, since you likely
> dont know how it feels to constantly fight UI problems.  Having
> discovered Emacs, and settled on learning how to extend it, was one of
> the most important things in my computer life.

-- 
?7?4 Id: kg:/m/0285kf1  ?0?8