bug#49050: 26.1; The INSANITY of setting a default font size in EMACS and saving it for future instances.

[Jeff B]

My response is down below at the end.

> > > > Such changes in the defaults will need to be requested by much more
> > > > than a single individual, for them to be considered seriously.
> > Why me?  I have enough on my plate already, and starting a discussion
> > needs neither my consent nor my help.
> On 6/17/21 10:13 AM, Christopher Dimech wrote:
>
> So me starting a discussion does not require your consent nor your help.
> I shall take you up on that and start discussing.
>
> The suggestion was mainly driven by the previous comment that my requests are 
> not
> considered seriously.  This is not always a healthy solution to inactivity.
>
> > The decision to add an "Accessibility" toggle, which is off by
> > default, is a much easier one, and given that someone writes the code,
> > should be a no-brainer to install.  No discussion is needed for that.
> Let's do the no-brainer and see how that goes.  An accessibility option is good,
> but need an easy way to enable it after installing emacs.  I suggest an
> "Initial Option" such as "emacs -A", together with an elisp command
> "(accessibility 1)".
>
> Jeff, what do you think about this?  Would it be a good 70th birthday present?
>
> Felicitations
> Christopher

Since you ask I will answer.

• I would NOT use an Initial Option such as "emacs -A" because that
   means that you would have had to read the man page to know that
   -the A option is there.  The Emacs 26.1 man page is already 473
   lines long.  If someone is having a hard time seeing to begin with
   then expecting them to read their way through all that to look for
   something they don't know is there is not exactly
   accessibility-friendly.

• Instead I would add an accessibility item either as an item to the
   Options menu or, better still, add it as a separate item to the menu
   bar.  That would make it easy to stumble upon.  :-)

• Which brings me to another point.  I accept that I probably have
   some weirdness in my environment which causes Save Options to
   fail, so solving that problem is probably on me.  BUT since saving
   options has never worked for me I am particularly sensitive to the
   issue of saving options.

   As I understand it (because it has never worked for me) to save
   options chosen one not only has to make changes somewhere under
   the Options item but then one has to re-enter the Options menu and
   explicitly save the changes.  If it were up to me I'd reorganize that
   so that each Options menu item had Cancel, Apply and Save buttons
   so that you can save right then and there.

   HOWEVER I recognize that would be a major refactoring of the code
   (I have been a hard-core programmer all of my professional life!)
   which would take a lot of work so it probably won't happen.  BUT, as
   I said, if it were up to me I'd do it.

• Responding to a comment in an earlier eMail, YES, the default font
   size IS TOO SMALL to be accessibility-friendly.  It is far easier for
   a person who has good vision to make the text smaller than it is for
   a vision-impaired person to make the text bigger.

I know all about wanting to cram more lines and columns of code into
a frame.  I used to have 20/20 vision and made the characters as small
as possible so I could have more lines of code visible on my screen at
any one time.  Then I got older and, as happens to many people, I lost
my ability to focus rather suddenly at about 45 years of age. Assuming
that you do make it to "older", then you may also discover, personally,
how important accessibility features really are.  So I urge you to get
them in place BEFORE you need them, and in the meantime making it
easier for all of the people who already have sight impairment.

Thank you,
Jeff Barry
Old Fart and Curmudgeon-In-Training


PS: Fix the EMACS documentation problem with jargon too!