- Completely agree on both counts. We do usability testing, including with keyboard-focused advanced users.
But usability testing with blind users presents some unique challenges. A past org I worked at ran some usability studies with blind users [1] and while I was only tangentially involved in that project it seemed that subject recruitment and observations were much more complex than typical usability studies. I haven't managed to run a usability study with blind participants at my current org though we have discussed ways we could recruit blind users for studies -- our software is complex enough that we'd need someone who is both blind and a prospective user of our software.
[1] https://www.bloomberg.com/ux/2018/08/28/visually-impaired-wo...
- > Why not just optimize for removing the gesture entirely? The microphone has to be better on a full size watch on your wrist vs the tiny ring further away on your finger.
Agreed, let the ring just be a button that can trigger recording on a watch or phone (among other tasks) rather than squeezing in a microphone and audio transmitter.
> I wonder if you could even make it perpetually powered by body heat + buffer battery if it's ONLY job was to emit a couple packets over BLE...
Neat! Or maybe a tiny solar cell? Perhaps the button itself is piezoelectric, like a wearable version of the EnOcean Nodon line of battery-free wireless switches -- a BLE advertising event costs less than 100 microjoules which a button press should be able to provide, though ensuring 100% reliability over BLE with such a tiny energy budget would be hard.
Alternately it could communicate with the watch using IR, but the knuckles might occlude line of sight. The button press could mechanically emit an ultrasonic tone, but that requires an always-on mic in the watch/phone and would be susceptible to shenanigans. Maybe pressing the button causes a specific vibration that a watch accelerometer can reliably recognize?
Now I want someone to find a way to make this work... but long term I expect that the real solution will be making hand gestures work reliably 100% of the time with no ring at all.
- > There are thousands of blind people on the net. Can't you hire one of them to test for you?
Testing is a professional skill -- not all blind people are good at accessibility testing, just as not all sighted people are good at GUI testing.
My team has carved out an accessibility budget so that every couple years we can hire an accessibility consultancy (which employs a couple blind testers) for a few tens of hours of work to review one of our application workflows. Based on the issues they identify we attempt to write tests to prevent those classes of issues across the whole application suite, but our budget means that less than one percent of our UI has ever been functionally tested for accessibility.
It comes down to cost/benefit. Good testers are expensive, good accessibility testers doubly-so. And while I personally think there's a moral imperative and maybe a marketing angle, improving accessibility truthfully doesn't seem to meaningfully improve sales. But if the testing costs came down by a couple orders of magnitude it would be a complete game-changer.
- For many of the families I know it's less about the quality of movies than the cost and effort of going to the movies.
Going to the movies costs an extra hour for the round-trip to the theater, ~$40 for adult tickets, ~$60 for the kids (2h babysitter or movie tickets), ~$20 for concessions. Whereas watching at home on our 75" TV with homemade popcorn costs a tiny fraction of that, even including electricity and popcorn kernels and the amortized cost of the TV.
As nice as it can be to see a good movie in a theater, it's typically not so much better than watching at home that it's worth an extra hour and more than a hundred dollars.
- > I definitely think the average congressperson is more qualified to do that kind of work
My sense is that people who advocate for sortition find it attractive not because they believe that the average citizen is more intelligent or better informed than the average career politician, just less corrupt.
Setting aside whether that's even true, I'm not sure whether it would be better to live in a country run by honest idiots or corrupt experts.
- That was also my interpretation and why I made the point that democratic processes have evolved to account for a changing polity.
The US government could not be managed by Athenian sortition any more than it could be by Athenian direct democracy -- the citizenry is too different, the questions too complex.
However, just as the Romans evolved their original Athenian-style direct democracy into representative democracy as their empire grew and became more heterogeneous, sortition has similarly evolved into deliberative democracy.
- Sure and when the US was founded the majority of residents were similarly not allowed to vote because voting was restricted voting to a minority of property-owning white males over the age of 21. Democracy has evolved from its Athenian origins, presumably sortition would as well.
- For reference, this is referred to as "sortition", and at least the Athenians felt that it was more democratic than elections. The randomization machines they used for picking winners (kleroterion) are quite ingenious.
In modern times, sortition sometimes shows up in some deliberative democracy proposals.
- > LoRa as implemented by the chips used in affordable Meshtastic devices is really more suited to operating many small disjoint mesh networks on separate channels
My impression was that many of the folks who wanted a big shared mesh migrated to MeshCore, which I'm less familiar with. My use case is in fact a small disjoint mesh network, but even that requires proper configuration and can be unreliable due to things like misconfigured nodes (mine or others).
I'd be happy to specify the region and form factor (handheld, fixed router, mobile router, tracker) but it would be nice if the nodes could automatically configure the right role, rebroadcast mode, hop limit, timeouts, etc on their own. I'm not asserting it's possible, just that I don't otherwise see it breaking out of the hobbyist niche.
> A full scan would take hours.
My apologies, I misspoke, I agree that trying every frequency/bandwidth/spread factor/coding rate combination would be impractical, at least for battery-powered nodes. Instead of "scan different channels" I should have said cycling through the half-dozen modem presets for a specific region.
- > but those citations are ultimately irrelevant in the grand scheme of things
It depends on your goal. Is it enough to know that your work is excellent, or do you also want it to be used by others?
I've worked with researchers who had brilliant ideas that never caught on in their field, at least partly because they neglected to develop relationships with colleagues.
(I've similarly worked on products that failed in the market, partly because the teams believed that a focus on technical superiority was sufficient.)
- > This was all common knowledge. It has been for a long time.
Many years ago my advisor passed on an observation (edit: originally from Hamming's 1987 "You and Your Research"): faculty who generally kept their office door closed published more papers each year, while faculty who generally kept their office door open had more successful careers.
Correlation is not causation of course, and sometimes you do just need to get a paper out. But it's worth noting that optimizing for daily productivity has costs.
- Reminds me of a pair of papers from 25 years ago: Olson & Olson's "Distance Matters" [1] and Teasley, Covi, Krishnan, and Olson's "How Does Radical Collocation Help a Team Succeed? [2].
If I recall correctly the benefits of collocated work only apply when you're actually physically proximal to collaborators. There's not much benefit to just "being in an office" if the people you work with aren't there, and even working with people on different floors dramatically reduces the benefit, which is one part of the research a lot of RTO proponents ignore.
A while ago I worked on a handful of research projects in "virtual collocation" or "computer-supported cooperative work" where the holy grail was to come up with something that made remote teams as productive as collocated ones. It's no longer my area of focus so I haven't kept up on the literature -- I'd be interested in any hard evidence that someone has cracked that.
[1](https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1207/S15327051HCI1523_4) [2](https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/358916.359005)
- > better radio silicon that can survey a wide swath of available spectrum (based on country limits) and pick channel(s) appropriate to the use optimized for battery life, distance, and/or bandwidth
That would certainly be helpful, but even with current radios I can imagine a configuration process that sequentially scans different channels to achieve the same result, just a little slower.
- I have a few LoRa radios running Meshtastic and they're fun to play with, but I wouldn't rely on them in a critical situation. It's too easy to accidentally configure a node incorrectly and cause problems for nearby nodes.
Perhaps someday the project will settle on a handful of sensible presets for different use cases. Even better would be if more of the options were managed dynamically by the software itself, things like adjusting timeouts and hops based on current network utilization and previous transmission success rate, or automatically tweaking the role based on the current mesh toplolgy, that sort of thing.
- I'm still not sure how that makes them "maybe even tastier" when you raise them yourself?
> If I didn't eat them they wouldn't exist.
Does that mean that if I bring something into existence that anything I choose do to it is therefore ethical, or is eating special? (To be clear, I think there are a number of solid arguments for eating animals, I just don't think that's one of them.)
- By "tastier" do you mean more physically pleasurable because you could ensure the animal's good health, ethically preferable because you could ensure a (mostly) good life, emotionally enjoyable because you can fondly remember interacting with them, or something else?
- That's certainly the approach our translation team prefers! Assembling a grammatically-correct statement from multiple discrete tokens is hard in languages with grammatical gender, complex pluralization rules, word ordering, etc. And there's not much benefit of doing it halfway right.
- > Providing a real CVE is a contribution, not a burden.
Isn't a real CVE (like any bug report) both a contribution and a burden?
- If you're curious about the rules for various languages, I find https://cldr.unicode.org/index/cldr-spec/plural-rules to be a helpful refence.
Others have drawn the same connection to Dynamicland, but the article briefly mentions "Dynamicland, a project to which Folk owes much of its design and philosophy" and lists Omar Rizwan as one of the Folk Computer founders. Omar was on the Dynamicland staff ~2018-2020, see https://dynamicland.org/2023/People/
(Edit, it also looks like they have some presentations on YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hrXEtG3JILo https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=o3kIzvCYWdE )