@doppelgreener A couple months ago I helped a VI client evaluate some tablet software, and the app neglected to tell the swipe interface that a popup window should make it impossible to select the items hidden by the window.

And the app sometimes used popups and coverups three layers deep.

The swipe interface effectively considered all the items on the screen to be on the same layer, which made it nigh impossible to find anything or tell the relationship between things.

Goodness, that's terrible.

And it's a point of sale app that advertises as VI accessible.

Turns out, when POS apps say they're VI accessible, at best they mean accessible for the customer. We've yet to find one that's accessible for the employee.

wait what?

as in, for work purposes

What!! That doesn't mean VI accessible at all!

?

Someone else is using the software! It's the person being VI accessible!

Like, when your swipe interface can't handle popups, and employees have to enter their login info in a popup, you're done.

I,..... what?

I have no words right now

Yes, that's disastrous.

Actually those people are liable to be sued based on false advertising.

The whole thing is awful and we've yet to find a CS rep who's actually worked with VI people before.

Accessibility lawsuits are a very real thing and a large part of the reason anyone's concerned with accessibility at all.

E.g. during the Sydney Olympics in 2000, there was a man unable to purchase tickets to the event because the ticket purchasing site was not accessible at all. He sued based on discrimination law and won.

For the most recent company, we did a video call with a rep so I could see what he's talking about and describe it to my client. The rep proceeded to motormouth through a standard powerpoint presentation and couldn't understand that I needed him to stop so I could describe the slides to the client.

POS accessibility just barely hit the legal table a few years ago, and it's all very nascent.

I guess so. Most of the time if you have someone at the point of sale, you've necessarily employed someone with vision for that purpose.

It'd be easier if we didn't have to do everything long-distance; so far only one service has been able to give us a "free trial" type deal so we could try it ourselves.

My client is starting a business where he hopes to hire VI people for all his employee positions.

Awesome.

all? very ambitious there

He might need to outsource the graphic design elements.

There's a number of VI students on Guam who've been told they have very limited career options, and he wants to prove to them that's wrong.

@doppelgreener [wave] That'd be me.

cool

@BESW yeah I was going to mention, if he works with you,.... XD

@BESW \o/

He doesn't need a full-staff GD.

That means they still technically could fill all their employee positions with VI people!

Unfortunately even the governmental departments and services that are supposed to be helping him with this don't think he can do it.

So I've been working with him to jump all the extra hurdles they're throwing up.

Hmm.

@BESW we actually do have a problem with that here yeah

I have a story to share regarding someone's surgery & rehabilitation.

Maybe we should NAB this?

Sure.

← 41 messages moved from RPG General Chat

This story was shared with me from a trustworthy individual who has no tendency or reason to embellish, so I'm trusting the account is pretty accurate.

A mother's kid is injured in an accident. He requires spinal cord surgery, will afterwards need rehabilitation to give him back movement in his legs. The surgeon she's speaking to about the procedure says it's very unlikely he'll be able to walk again -- most people who have this procedure never do. As you can probably guess, this story is about how he's going to be walking again.

Yey!

The mother recognises there's a possibility for him walking again and wants that possibility. She asks the surgeon if he's open to the idea her son could walk again. He says yes, that could actually happen. She asks him if he's on board with her in doing their best to help him actually walk again, and he says yeah, that'd be awesome.

So she asks to speak to the rest of the surgery team -- all the assistants, nurses, and so on, that will be there in the operating room or otherwise assisting with the procedure. She asks each one whether they're open to the idea her son will walk again, and whether they're on board with helping make that happen. Some of them say they don't think it'll happen. She asks them to be pulled off the team and replaced with someone else. They are, and she does the same with the replacements.

This continues until they have a team purely of people open to the idea he'll walk again, and invested in the idea of actually helping that happen.

The surgery goes well, and she does the same thing with the team who'll be involved in her son's rehabilitation.

... and that goes well too. The chances of him walking again are pretty damn small, but he manages and reaches that milestone. The guy telling me this story says he saw the kid walking just fine on his own without assistance.

That came to mind re: government representatives not on board with the idea and continuously throwing up obstacles.

Yup.

There's an idea in Baha'i administration that if a decision has been made that you disagree with, the best way to show it's wrong is to support it so that when it fails nobody can blame dissenters or artificial obstacles.

I don't think that is universally applicable

(This is, of course, in the context of a decision-making process which places great value on reaching consensus in the first place. So disagreeing with a decision that's being made anyway is rare.)

fair enough there

It's in place to discourage factionism and sabotaging a workable plan to promote one's own interests.

that is also fair, but that still, on paper at least, sounds like it doesn't condone actually not agreeing with something

Again, it's within very specific boundaries and contexts.

yeah

Like, the idea that Baha'i administrative bodies only have authority in quorum and a body's individual members have no personal authority by virtue of being part of that body.

I AM FULLY PREPARED TO RANT ABOUT PLAYSTYLES UNTIL THE NAB CLOSES!

Essentially, what doppel said would imply that questions that say "I only want answers based on the actual rules" get to keep the tag, but it's being removed from any question that isn't fundamentally about rules-as-written.

@Miniman what makes a question fundamentally about RAW? sort of meta-questions about the playstyle itself?

@Shalvenay I'm not sure how the judgement is made, but it looks like questions asking about some quirk of the rules or weird interaction get to keep it.

Then again, looking through the latest questions in the tag it seems like things have backed off a bit.

@Miniman so basically, questions where RAW vs RAI is seen as actually mattering, no?

"RAI" is its own thing

indeed

and generally requires some sort of word-of-god as evidence

well, RAW vs any other interpretation approach

what interpretation approaches are there anyhow?

off the top of my head, RAW, RAI, rulings-not-rules, rule-of-cool, social contract, and gm-fiat

RAW is a tool designed to meet a particular need.

the tag or the approach?

The approach.

I get RAW (normative text > all), RAI (designer word of intent > all) and social contract (explicit table decision/implicit table consensus > all), but rule-of-cool is nebulous to me (I have way different concepts of "cool" than most folks, I suspect) and I'm not sure what the difference between gm-fiat and rulings-not-rules is

Its purpose is to treat the rules as a independent of both author and reader, to be examined and extrapolated from, in order to (and this is the important part) create a common shared baseline for discussion between people in different groups so that they can all talk about the same thing regardless of how unique their personal experience might be.

rule of cool is nebulous to everyone

and rulings-not-rules is supposed to have internal consistency (so every subsequent ruling matches the first)

@Miniman The RAW tag isn't for "i want rules answers" though afaik, it's I want really super literal rules - so there's a category for which "rules" applies but "exactly as written" does not

RAW is controversial primarily because (a) it's impossible to treat a text as divorced from its reader's context, and (b) it's often treated as prescriptive of how a game ought to be played.

@BESW you're not wrong, but I find there's more to it than that

(this s exactly what I was threatening to rant about before everyone arrived)

(In many cases, RAW supporters have fallen prey to the affective fallacy: the illusion that a neutral statement is superior to an emotional or personal one.)

As one recent super lovely Game Dev.SE post described it, "When you get into an argument and one of you decides to sue the others, the contract will be interpreted as written, not as what you thought it meant." Our RAW tag historically has been about legalistically interpreting the rules that way; non-"RAW" rules advice meanwhile gets to be bendy & go "we know what they meant, so I'll advise you on that instead."

If the only way to "win" is to persuade the MC that he should favor you, that turns the game into a psychopathy contest. I deeply dislike that.

And, for context, I am actually very good at psychopathy contests

@fectin Been there, done that, ripped the T-shirt from the comatose bodies of my victims.

Exactly.

@fectin RAI is two things (at least): rules as intended, and rules as interpreted. And usually they're both the second one regardless of what someone's saying (because we're interpreting what we think they intended), unless we have the writer's own words on hand to demonstrate it's the first one.

a) you are correct. b) the recent trend here has been to demand author quotes to back up RAI

@fectin alrighty

@BESW If the resolution is instead by faithful interpretation of some abstract system, then that's preferable. Even if the result is sometimes silly, that's far better than player charisma contests, especially for longer term than a one-shot.

@Shalvenay (from my observation; ymmv)

yeah -- internal consistency is hard

Personally, I think if a game requires its participants to rely on a text for legalesque arbitration or the social dynamic will collapse into manipulation and coercion, there's a very. big. problem. which no game system or play style can address.

@Shalvenay GM fiat is an action. Rulings-not-rules is an attitude that leans toward GM fiats and house rules over checking & staying faithful to source material. Rule of cool says "you're trying to use Grapple to pin the dragon's wings to its back; I don't think the rules let you do that but it's awesome so I'm totally going to let you do that anyway." (the rules might actually let you do that, I'm just making that up for an example.)

@BESW you're not wrong. But I think it's more of a question of ultimate recourse than of day-to-day process

RAW, in those cases, is an attempt to fix a social problem with a games solution.

Rule of cool is not a playstyle but a guideline some individuals might be happy with: when it's really cool, let it happen, regardless of what the rules assert. It's mostly just used retroactively to describe a decision that's already been made, to summarise their attitude to wanting super cool fun things in their game and not wanting to let the rules stop them; it's not some hard-and-fast rule people stick with.

@doppelgreener yeah -- I think I'm with you now

@BESW arguably. But it's a successful one. RAW does not really support questions about whether a PC elf is elfy enough, or whether they would elf in that way. Most other approaches do. So, by changing the default expectation, you actually can change the social dynamic.

@BESW from that perspective -- you're probably right -- there are other uses for RAW level arbitration though (a DM or even a player trying to grok what a weird corner of the rules does at a base textual level and simply failing a la [language-lawyer] questions on SO (let me put it this way -- it's hard to layer higher level interpretation or alterations over a text that you don't understand)...

On a strongly-related tangent, I find Sanderson's laws very accurately describe the upsides of a strict RAW approach

or trying to construct pieces that need some degree of portability between tables/DMs/campaigns within a single system's framework, and thus can't rely on things beyond the written text (like writing a piece of cross-platform code))

all right, butting out now :)