weeb
Joined 7 years ago
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May 31
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Comment · 6 months ago
Ah yes, this task fails hard at the xkcd.com/627/ tactic of "Find a menu item or button that looks related to what you want to do..."
What do I want to do? "turn off my computer" What button do I press? "start"
Comment · 9 months ago
Interesting how different people's brains work. I personally cannot mentally parse a month-based calendar - the distribution of weeks and weekends is far too variable. I print one of these in A3 every year [0] - easy to see at a glance how many weekends are booked up, any gaps where you need to plan something to look forward to, how many weeks of work you can slot in before a particular commitment, etc. Interesting I've never found the same concept anywhere else.
[0] https://www.calendarpedia.co.uk/download/calendar-2025-portr...
Comment · 11 months ago
Calendarpedia offers loads of options which are great for printing. I always print an A3 "rolling" format for the current year, which I haven't seen anywhere else - lets you see all your weeks and weekends at a glance.
Comment · 11 months ago
You can do "see only current branch" with the little filter icon when you hover next to a branch. Although I do find myself getting lost amongst branches more easily compared to Sourcetree, I think there's some difference in how filters are combined that isn't ideal (but I can't remember specifics)
Comment · 1 year ago
There are commonly used terms for different types of empathy[1] which makes these conversations a lot easier. People often generalise, or misinterpret a lower level of one type of empathy for another - for example, some autistic individuals have lower cognitive empathy but heightened levels of affective empathy. The definition in this blogpost focuses entirely on cognitive empathy, but I bet the people telling them to be "more empathetic" were talking more about compassionate empathy.
[1] https://embrace-autism.com/the-different-types-of-empathy/
Comment · 1 year ago
does anyone know of recent TTS options that let you specify IPA rather than written words? Azure lets you do this, but something local (and better than existing OS voices) would be great for my project.
Comment · 1 year ago
Nice to see people getting interested in eye gaze. There are two things that you might like to look at that can help the UX.
1 - Calibration. Looking at static dots is BORING. The best idea I've seen is Tobii's gaming calibration where you look at dots to make them wobble and pop. This makes the whole process feel like a game, even when you've done it a hundred times before. I would love to see more ideas in this space to give a much more natural-feeling calibration process - even better if you can improve the calibration over time with a feedback loop, when users interact with an element.
2 - Gaze feedback. You are absolutely right that seeing a small, inaccurate and jumpy dot does more harm than good. Again, Tobii have led the way with their 'ghost overlay' for streamers.
For an example, see the following video. After calibration the ghost overlay is used to give approximate feedback. This is enough that some naive users are able to make small adjustments to a constant calibration error, or at least give feedback that the gaze is wrong, not that the UI is not responding.
Comment · 1 year ago
Thanks, that's it. I really like 'gradually walk the UI tree', though I'm struggling a bit with the thing I want being obscured by the label (and me not remembering what was there). An offset would be nice, though I'm sure it's not easy to define a heuristic that works in all places.
The first thing I tried was in my browser, I asked for all the buttons and it labelled the 'x' to close each tab, but where the labels were laid out it just looked like an inviting right-aligned label on the clickable tabs themselves. Lost a few tabs before I realised, because you also don't see any feedback on the click since any UI feedback is hidden by the label. Hmm. Food for thought.
Comment · 1 year ago
Yes! transforming the top level frame sounds like the way to go.
I ran jwno with example-config and pressed RAlt and RAlt+K a few times, each time trying one of the onscreen shortcut keys (b, c, d, etc). Log at the bottom of this comment. At the end of the process I was left in a state where pressing Space triggered a context menu in my title bar, and I couldn't type space in the app (e.g. in Notepad or Terminal) which I think is due to one of the Alts ending up being held down? It persisted after leaving Jwno
Comment · 1 year ago
This looks to have great potential for accessibility! I work with individuals who use eye gaze input, where a significant part of the screen is taken up by an on-screen keyboard (including various shortcut/macro keys as well as for typing). Having tiling options that fit within a smaller part of the screen (e.g. still allow side by side or top/bottom split, but in a smaller total region) would be great. Particularly as Windows 11 has broken vertical docking of appbars.
The UI hints also look promising, but I can't get them working. Using example-config.janet I tried pressing RAlt or RAlt+K and I get the UI hint shortcuts list coming up, but none of them seem to do anything, except in Notepad where I sometimes get the standard UI hints (that always come up here with a long press of left alt)
Fwiw, as a newbie I found it a bit intimidating/off-putting that it doesn't work out the box without choosing a config file. That's quite a lot of extra cognitive effort and link-clicking before you can try it out. And I'm left quite unsure what I'm missing out on. Am I able to access the different documented features with the config file I have? It's not clear.
Comment · 1 year ago
I maintain an open-source interface that lets kids with physical disabilities play Minecraft using eye control[1]. When I started working on it, I was already familiar with what Minecraft offers as 'virtual lego' in creative mode, and the challenges of survival mode, but the biggest surprise for me was how much value kids get from just having a world that they are free to do whatever they want in. Just wandering round and punching some sheep or digging a hole, completely free of any adult-directed 'goals', is such a freedom for them. Try explaining that to the parents, though!
[1] https://www.specialeffect.org.uk/how-we-can-help/eyemine
Comment · 3 years ago
Do you have any recommendations for getting over the friction of starting? Like, suggestions of what to write about if you're unsure what's worth putting to paper. I'm sure I'd have plenty to write once I got started, but an empty notebook is intimidating!
Comment · 3 years ago
Agree on this. Also a bug report - I was getting bored of a story level and tried to find a shortcut to skip it or speed it up or something. Pressed a key (not sure which - was thinking about Esc/Tab/Enter type navigation at the time) and apparently copied a Reddit command, ending up stuck in the state shown in this screenshot. Can't get out to continue the level, the [X] button doesn't seem to do anything. I deleted the modal from the DOM and could not press either button on the dialog below.
I was actually thinking through accessibility considerations while playing as I want to recommend to a friend who would be using alternate input methods. Not being able to skip / speed up cut scenes is a pain. Even just being able to click through the dialog (without the slow travel in between) would be an improvement.
[edit: typo]