A Writer's Notebook, Day Seven-Hundred-And-Ninety-Six

When I was around nine or ten years old, my father brought home an IBM XT that was being discarded from his office.  This was the first real computer I had extended access to, at least in a way that went beyond gaming.  It was the first machine I used for writing and other productive activities, and also provided me many hours of entertainment through games and other experiences.

That machine was quite primitive in comparison to even the computers I had when I was just a few years older, but I still find myself longing for certain aspects of the experience I had using that machine and some of the others that followed.  FI found those machines incredibly useful for me, as a tool that I could use without feeling handicapped.  As I have expressed before, I have a great many difficulties with certain kinds of tasks, and the computers I had in my youth were designed in ways that made it easy for me to interact with them without difficulty.

I believed, at the time, that the computer would always serve me in that way, and, while I am reliant on computers in many ways, even now, it is also true that the design 9f computer interactions has changed in a way that makes them quite difficult for me to use without real difficulty.  I can even pinpoint exactly when this change occurred, or perhaps that is overstating it, I recall when it became impossible to avoid, and that was in 1995.

For those who recall computing in that era, it is likely you can guess the shift I am discussing, as it was in that year that Microsoft launched the first version of Windows that ran as the primary OS on your computer.  Until that time, the computer would boot into a DOS prompt, a command line.  Windows 95 made the Graphical User Interface an essential aspect of the PC.

Now, most people find using a GUI is positive, as it turns the monitor into a metaphor for physical space, but, consider that my difficulties are with my ability to interact with physical space.  I have difficulties with graphomotor skills, spacial reasoning, and visual pattern recognition.  Using a mouse is intensely frustrating for me, as it requires recognizing movement in one location. As connected to subtle movements that are not physically linked.  It is often impossible for me to control the cursor, and it can take me ten or fifteen minutes to do simple tasks because of this.  Beyond that, I am not able to retain the visual menus, and often cannot even recognize the icons on the screen to recall their function.  When I was on those old machines, I had no mouse, and everything was typed in.  While others may find that difficult, for me, it was simple.  I knew how to get wherever I wanted with one line of code, and if I was not certain about the name or location of a program or file, I knew how to find that out with the same ease.  These days, to do those things requires moving through a physical labyrinth on the screen.  Even attempting to use accessibility features does not help for my issues, as the shortcuts rely upon coordinated key strokes or sequences, and that kind of physical coordination, even on a keyboard, is very difficult for me.  I want to be able to type a full command and check it, not attempt to pull up the right function by attempting to remember a key sequence.  If it is not written on the screen, I can't even be certain if I pressed the keys I think I did, and so I can get stuck trying the same wrong things more than once, in other words, I find those settings and functions as difficult as the normal ones.  They are designed for people with very different disabilities than  I have.  I have even experimented with software for the blind, but that, too, is not designed in a way that makes sense for me.

I have attempted to find alternative solutions through Linux and other software, but that also is not a real solution.  Linux does have a robust text based command prompt that can be used as the primary interface, but I found it was not supported in a way that made it reasonable for someone inexperienced to use.  It is designed for those who need power and flexibility and who are aware of how the system works, and that is not me.  

More and more I am finding that my interactions with the world are expected to be mediated through computer systems, and more of those systems are being designed in ways that replicate the problems I face in the real world.  I find it difficult to understand and fill out forms in both physical and digital incarnations, but tell me how I am supposed to do things like submitting work to most journals without using those kinds of systems?  Even email is difficult for me, especially now that Google stopped supporting the Inbox system I had been using for years(it was not perfect, but I knew how it worked well enough.  I can't even find the button for writing a new email most of the time since the change).   I don't know who else is facing this issue, but I am sure I am not alone.  The thing is, though, these are issues that get ignored.  I wonder how many people will read this, and of those who do, how many will dismiss it out of hand?  I wonder who will think of it as important, or interesting, or be glad it is not them, and who will, as so many have when I attempt discussing this, call it silly or idiotic, as if my documented disabilities are not anything, since they are primarily experiential and not apparent at a glance.  Most of all, I wonder if anyone will read this who can see it is real, who thinks about it not just now, but tomorrow, or in a few days, who tries to consider what it would mean for them to take some action to make the world more welcoming to those who experience it differently, who recognizes that all of us are part of making those differences.