Note by @fastfinge

🇨🇦Samuel Proulx🇨🇦 @fastfinge@interfree.ca

Sometimes there's no excuse for blind people spelling. "What's the NVDA addon for raping with shortcuts?" they ask plaintively. First off, it needs another p. And then we can worry about the missing w. But honestly, maybe you should just stick to dictation.

Jamie Teh @jcsteh@aus.social

@fastfinge I feel like some of it is just pure laziness and lack of willingness to invest in learning, likely related to the general sense of entitlement demonstrated by certain blind folks.

🇨🇦Samuel Proulx🇨🇦 @fastfinge@interfree.ca

@jcsteh And some of it is probably due to secondary mental illnesses, that get completely ignored because everyone was focused exclusively on their blindness growing up. But I suspect the vast majority of it comes from the dreadful state of disability education. Far too many blind people (and too many sighted people for that matter) have no idea how to actually learn anything. But it's far worse if you're blind, stuck into a special education classroom with everyone else, have no teacher who knows Braille, and are pretty much just left to sit by yourself in the corner; the staff are just happy you're not causing them anymore problems and will just leave you to your own devices. This is, in general, not a criticism of the usually under-funded, under-resourced, and under-trained teachers and staff. But in a class of 40 third graders, the blind student isn't going to get much attention. Or you could go to an underfunded blind school, where they teach you in grade nine what sighted students get in grade four. Sorry, you touched a bit of a nerve. Obviously blind folks have some responsibility for our own destiny. But by the time you're old enough to realize you should be responsible, it could well be too late for you.

Jamie Teh @jcsteh@aus.social

@fastfinge Yeah, that's fair.

Jamie Teh @jcsteh@aus.social

@fastfinge I am of the unpopular opinion that you don't necessarily need braille as a blind person to become fully literate. It is possible to learn how to spell even when using speech with a screen reader if you are encouraged (or required, or incentivised, whatever) to do so. It's certainly a hell of a lot easier/more intuitive if you can use braille, though.

🇨🇦Samuel Proulx🇨🇦 @fastfinge@interfree.ca

@jcsteh I used to agree with you a lot stronger until I went into journalism at university. They had a required "spelling and punctuation" exam that every other student past on the first try. It took me three. Without reading Braille, you just don't notice things like God needs a capital g, LORD is in all caps in some cases (and YHWH always is), titles that go after a name (esq, phd, OBE, etc) are capitalized differently from titles that go before the name (mr. mrs. and so on), not to mention all of the non-obvious homophones; everyone gets there/they're/their, but what about pail vs. pale? When should you write the number 5, and when should you spell it out? When should a word be a compound, and when should it be hyphenated? How and when should words be split across lines? What types of subheads can go in the middle of a page, and what should always go at the top of the next page? When is it okay to skip an accented letter at the end of a word, and when is it not? What is the difference between dashes, Hyphens, and em-dashes, and when should each be used? When does punctuation go inside the quotes, and when does it go outside? There are three types of quotation marks; when is it appropriate to use each one? These are things any sighted person picks up naturally, just by reading, well enough to pass this sort of exam. Whereas I mostly used speech for everything but math and science, so I had to study for several months to squeak a pass. Because none of that is stuff you'd think to pause your text to speech reading and check, or even realize was a thing unless someone directly told you.

Jamie Teh @jcsteh@aus.social

@fastfinge Some of those are subjective and depend somewhat on the particular style guide you're using, but your point stands. I am lucky enough to have been taught and read braille from a very early age. I don't use it as much now, but I am still very grateful for it and find it invaluable in certain situations.
Interestingly enough, although my general spelling is pretty good, my spelling of foods and medicines isn't great because I never learned those at school or university. Those are the kinds of things you pick up when you, say, go to a shop or see ads or whatever. Of course, I try to learn the spelling of those things as they come up, but it's not as intuitive as seeing them over and over again in braille.

🇨🇦Samuel Proulx🇨🇦 @fastfinge@interfree.ca

@jcsteh Yes, but most style guides are major enough that they're easy for sighted readers to learn. If you grew up in Canada, almost every newspaper article you read probably follows the Canadian Press Book of Style. Same for US news and AP Style. So for sighted writers, it's just "do the natural thing". For blind folks who don't read Braille daily, it's just a giant pile of a few thousand rules to memorize.

Jamie Teh @jcsteh@aus.social

@fastfinge Yeah, fair. That certainly applied to me somewhat when I did a year of psychological science at university. Learning that stuff was just so tedious, braille or no braille.

Jason J.G. White @jason@jasonjgw.net

@fastfinge @jcsteh I remember that in first-year law school (also my first year as an undergraduate student), I was presented with a style manual that was expected to be followed in writing essays. As I recall, citations and references were the most substantive component of this guidance. The style guide was transcribed into braille for me, which I am sure helped in applying it correctly. Of course, I already had writing and formatting skills firmly in place, reinforced in part by braille reading, which is obviously your point here.

James Scholes @jscholes@dragonscave.space

@fastfinge I think these conversations invariably overstate the degree to which literacy itself just sinks in for many people, let alone a conscious awareness of styling quirks in various forms of media.

I know you don't literally mean that all print readers know what drop caps are or can name it as a technique. But if you got a hundred people in a room to look at a newspaper article without them, I think you'd get a mix of "looks fine," "it's missing something but I don't know what, "it doesn't do that thing, you know, the thing! With the first letter!" and so on.

Plus obviously one guy who'd treat the room to an unsolicited history of the technique, ensuring nobody would remember what a drop cap was afterwards. But that's a different matter. @jcsteh

🇨🇦Samuel Proulx🇨🇦 @fastfinge@interfree.ca

@jscholes @jcsteh Right, but everyone in the room would notice...something...was different about it, even if they couldn't articulate what. The same way even though I can't play a single instrument, I can tell if someone else is playing an instrument poorly. Even if I can't explain what they're doing wrong.

James Scholes @jscholes@dragonscave.space

@fastfinge That's another example of something a notably large segment of the world's population would not or could not do, but maybe you're right. Below a certain point, there's knowledge you can't articulate to a significant degree for it to be useful. @jcsteh

Cleverson @clv1@mementomori.social

@jscholes @fastfinge @jcsteh the perfect solution for spelling, for blind and sighted people, would be for all languages to adopt phonetic spelling.

🇨🇦Samuel Proulx🇨🇦 @fastfinge@interfree.ca

@clv1 @jscholes @jcsteh The perfect solution would be for everyone to just learn a language that already does, like Korean. The world only needs a single language, and then we can get rid of AI translation services, and save the environment! I mean, as long as we’re all dreaming impossible dreams…

Cleverson @clv1@mementomori.social

@fastfinge @jscholes @jcsteh Or Esperanto!

🇨🇦Samuel Proulx🇨🇦 @fastfinge@interfree.ca

@clv1 @jscholes @jcsteh Why? It uses the Latin alphabet, a silly and flawed writing system. If we are forcing everyone to change why keep it? And why keep a language designed by white Europeans to privilege themselves? It’s no easier or neutral to learn than English for Chinese or Japanese speakers. Leave it to die with the other outmoded 19th century ideas that inspired it.

Cleverson @clv1@mementomori.social

@fastfinge @jscholes @jcsteh Maybe all languages could adopt IPA.

🇨🇦Samuel Proulx🇨🇦 @fastfinge@interfree.ca

@clv1 @jscholes @jcsteh Just as soon as someone invents an ipa keyboard that doesn’t require three hands with seven fingers each.

Cleverson @clv1@mementomori.social

@fastfinge @jscholes @jcsteh I recall having read about a kind of keyboard called chord keyboard, which as far as I've understood, is an aproach similar to braille, where you type several keys at once instead of one per character, but for everyone, i.e. sighted persons as well.

patricus @patricus@gts.posix.live

@fastfinge @jscholes @jcsteh @clv1 that won't ever happen because the world needs to fucking unite and that requires a functional brain which the world powers don't have