request you top post please

[Technomage_Hawke]

this I can deal with... <smile>

On Aug 13, 2010, at 12:42 PM, Joseph Sinclair wrote:

> Ed,
>  Not everyone agrees with the bottom-post-for-technical approach, it's a personal preference more than anything.

sometimes that personal preference can cause unintended problems.

> Technomage_Hawke is using reading tools that don't skip effectively (no visual interface).
> It's not a lack of GUI, it's a lack of any capability to see the text, and he's absolutely correct that viewing bottom-post in a screen reader or braille reader is excruciating, at best.
> 
excruciating? thats putting it mildly! I am just learning braille and reading this right now without speech is like trying to read a billboard 300 feet long and 125 feet high while you are standing right below it. very slow indeed.

btw, I have a set mode where I can read a single sentence at a time and respond to it on the next line (one of the few things VoiceOver did right).

> I've generally found the following compromise to work reasonably well:
> 
> 1) top post if it makes sense to do so, if people want the history they can keep reading.
and it makes life easier for the visually impaired user <smile>.

> 2) post interlocutory if you're responding point-by-point to something; bracket your comments with --- so the visually impaired can tell more easily when the author changes.
like I am doing here. harder, but doable.

> 3) Bottom post if it's preferred on a list or if someone requests it, but remove as much of the thread history as you can so screen readers and braille devices don't have to re-read the entire conversation with every email.
The operative word here is TRIM. the last 2 weeks I have missed out on conversations because getting to the bottom was so frustrating that i gave up and deleted the mails.

> 4) Use a thread-aware email client to make it easier to accept that others should make their own choices in this regard.
> 
mail.app is "thread aware" after a fashion, unfortunately, it has no feature to "hide" quoted material. I have submitted a feature request with apple.

now this was a little harder for me, I had to read through everything first to determine breaks and then reread each point I wanted to respond to. takes about 5 minutes (been upping the speech speed so its starting to take less time).