Re: Proposal - Remove requirement that emails be wrapped at 80 characters
On Mon, Mar 17, 2025 at 11:01:27PM -0700, Soren Stoutner wrote:
Hi Soren,
Choosing to respond to this here, rather than on debian-devel.
The info below is from a colleague who is visually impaired. By turns
he uses either a text to speech reader, if appropriate, or sometimes
a screen magnifier. These experiences might be unique to his
circumstances but may be more general for other users using
accessibility peripherals.
>
> Recently there was an email asking if there were any negatives to
> emails that didn’t wrap outgoing text at 80 columns for screen
> readers. So far, nobody has brought up any concrete concerns with
> screen readers. However, if there was a concern in this area, and if
> it caused such problems that it made it impossible for a screen reader
> to parse such an email, then I would consider that to be a significant
> enough of an issue that I would change my position, because if there
> are downsides at that level for even a small number of users then I
> don’t think the change should be made even if it would benefit the
> majority of the other users.
>
TL;DR - If you're not relying on visual formatting and a standard reading
style, then the mailing list Code of Conduct advice on mail formatting may
not work for you - but that doesn't mean that the mailing list formatting
rules aren't very useful for everyone else.
If using a screenreader, there is often a mode to turn off announcements
of format changes or font changes like bold or italics. Because you are
not dependent on visual formatting, it may be straightforward to read
all text in a continual stream and some visually impaired folk read at
very high speed. Format-flowed might work well for this.
(I have also noted some users on the debian-accessibility and debian-user
mailing list who may be visually impaired who tend to write a block of
text with very little differentiation.)
Conversely, for screen magnification at, say 400%, fully justified text
or text filling a monitor space is undesirable and much harder to read.
For this, text that is left justified, ragged right and possibly hand
wrapped at 74 characters is more straightforward to read.
Unlike the mailing list convention of text as any reply being interleaved,
he would prefer a new email with the content and the Outlook style of
top quoting. It's a lot easier to just read the top of the message with
a screen reader than have to dig through a long reply to find context.
With every good wish, as ever,
Andrew Cater
(amacater@debian.org)
> --
> Soren Stoutner
> soren@debian.org
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