soulshined
commented
4 years ago I sincerely respect your perspective, and although I could never pretend to know what you are going through, I am, what I call, a 99% mouse-free user, all the time, not just vscode.
I have carpel tunnel and using a mouse can quickly agitate the issue as a developer. I wrote this issue roughly a year ago asking for a simple feature to customize a delimiter. Ultimately, they did not find it in the best interest to incorporate this ask, although to be fair it didn't get much traction from the community because it is a very specific need/ask. I'm sure if I submitted a PR it would have been welcomed, but I am going through school and working full time and going through other medical recoveries so it became less of a priority for me. Over time I have learned to take advantage of the keybinds and I personally find what they have very resourceful, especially the expression patterns. And when they don't have a keybind for a certain scenario, you can always switch to tab focus mode, which is effectively like tabbing through a website, but more granular:
command id: editor.action.toggleTabFocusMode
So think moving from one button to the next, even across different panels etc.
Lastly, it may just come down to your hardware. For me, when I switched to a Kinesis Advantage2 Keyboard ref literally all my worries about going to different computer setup or typing effectively disappeared over a week. It also helped me become independent in a way that I didn't rely on companies to implement stuff for me. This keyboard is even compatible with foot pedals so they can act like extra keys or modifier keys/actions.
I know that's probably not the answer you want, but ultimately, I think persons with disabilities, not meant to be taken negatively, will always have to find a way to make it work for them because those who don't have or know someone can't relate, and that will always be reflected in software if those individuals who can't relate are the ones creating the software. Not saying the vscode team doesn't care or isn't trying, I just think the relationship is give and take for both parties.
Have you tried getting a keyboard that is programmable? That way you can program macros or keybindings when whatever software doesn't have features that suffice?
Have you tried the focus tab mode for situations that doesn't have keybinds?
For brevity, I'm not trying to dismiss your concerns, I'm simply offering suggestions the chance you don't know about them. If you do, then just disregard this whole thing :) Maybe someone else will find it useful. For example, if it wasn't for a certain twitch streamer I would have never known about this keyboard, as cliche as it sounds, it really changed my life and how I am able to navigate my operating system. I only use a mouse now for some very very specific use cases. With this keyboard I was able to map the context menu (which is the 'right-click' equivalent) and that was a majority of the struggle for me.
Wish you the best and thanks for sharing your perspective.
Entomy
kelchm
Steps to Reproduce:
Compex, will elaborate after the boilerplate.
Does this issue occur when all extensions are disabled?:
Yes
Necessary background:
Just shy of a month ago I had filed this concern where I had done my best to elaborate various concerns, the majority of which had to do with accessibility handling. I had done my best to explain my concerns.
What I hadn't mentioned at the time, because I wasn't sure if it was transient or worsening, was that various sensory problems I was having had been interfering with my use of a mouse. As it's been almost a month with those issues staying persistent, I suspect it's not a matter of transient issues, as they usually only last for a few days at most for me.
The problem:
As mentioned when I was elaborating my concerns, I have sensory integration/processing issues, which are highly comorbid with autism spectrum disorders. To be specific and formal, I have both Sensory Modulation Disorder and Synesthesia. Because these aren't widely known, I'll provide a basic explanation of them.
SMD's are a highly specific spectrum of sensory disorders where sensory stimuli are overprocessed, underproccessed, or insatiably craved. A very widely known form of this with ASD is the comfort that "weight" on the body can provide. Overprocessing can manifest as extreme reactions to a stimulus, and underprocessing can manifest as a lack of reaction to a stimulus. I both overprocess and underprocess. I do not have any SMD issues specifically related to computers, although some are generic enough that they can still present. Certain tactile stimuli are extremely overprocessed, to the point of certain fabrics making me nauseous and causing a spike in blood pressure. There is no consistency or pattern in how this happens. I generally just have to encounter it and avoid it from then on.
Synesthesia on the other hand, is where a sensory stimulus crosses cognitive pathways. This typically is another sensory pathway, although there are observed cases of it crossing into other non-sensory cognitive pathways (as happens to me sometimes). This is very hard to explain for people who've never experienced it, but basically, certain sensory stimuli cause additional sensations or responses that are not appropriate. The most common type, which I do not have, but is simple to explain, is chromagrapheme synesthesia, whereby graphemes (letters in English) are associated with colors and will be colorized regardless of their printed/displayed color.
The recent problems that have been sticking around is related to a very specific stimulus: my mouse moving over the mousepad. I'm not sure what the specific thing is, whether it's about the sound or texture or whatever. I haven't been able to figure it out. Other mousepads still trigger it, although I don't have another mouse to test with. Some days are better than others, with some not effecting me at all. But it's been bad enough that I can't reasonably maintain use of a mouse for more than few basic operations every hour most days. On one of the particularly bad days, the required mouse use I had to engage in (for something unrelated, but it's the effect that's important), the combination of synesthesia and overprocessing was enough that I had to go mute for the remainder of the day, and completely isolate myself; at the time I hadn't seen my girlfriend in two weeks and that was the day we had planned to do something.
As explained in the aforementioned issue, I was concerned over various accessibility issues your team had found being dismissed. My concern was not so much with the closing of the issue, as much as the given reasons like "working as intended" or "not a problem". Well, no, it is a problem. While I'd like to believe these are cases of blissful ignorance, I have tried to communicate concerns over these things and have been completely unable to.
I believe I had mentioned in my very first ever issue filed here that, among other things, I develop and maintain some extensions for VS Code. I happen to be the developer of the most popular Ada extension by a very large margin:
And yet I haven't been able to work on this extension in the roughly one month where these problems have been severe:
Due to accessibility concerns the testing team had rightfully flagged as issues, that had been dismissed, I simply can't maintain the extensions I've developed for this product, because I can't continue to use this product in a way that does not induce a sensory assault.
Meanwhile, I have had no problem working on other projects where use of the mouse is not required at times:
Concerns:
I have a number of concerns about this I feel that I should bring up. The first is that, by the formally defined process in the wiki for issue grooming:
Well no. The majority of these issues are immediately closed, so people are far less likely to look at them. But also, the way disabilities work are remarkably specific, especially when dealing with sensory issues. By their very nature you're unlikely to get an accessibility concern with over 10 votes.
There's also a huge amount of issues that are closed and not worked on despite meeting this requirement, so the inconsistency renders this clause meaningless.
It's just keybindings. The community can easily chip in. But they have to be aware of the desire.
Furthermore, on the wiki for roadmap:
Well, I've been trying to keep you honest. As of three weeks ago I haven't gotten any additional feedback on my last issue. You tagged this specific "fundamental" as "on going work". Well, as someone with a disability who also worked with others with disabilities (mobility impairments specifically, so I've seen tons of assistive HID's) professionally for five years, I've seen plenty of the kinds of issues people face. I haven't been advocating on the basis of platonic ideals.
I'm also not particularly hopeful on myself creating a pull request to address these issues. As I had mentioned, the use of a mouse is required to navigate certain parts of VS Code, creating a circular problem: In order to address usability concerns about the required use of the mouse, I have to use the mouse to fix the product to where those usability concerns are no longer present, but because of the required use of the mouse, I can't reasonably get the work done in any kind of decent time frame. Because of the highly specific tooling and tight coupling in the dev environment, I don't believe it would be possible for me to use another environment to update VS Code. And in that case, I just wouldn't bother updating VS Code because another tool works fine.
Furthermore, I'm not confident about a pull request even being accepted. After all, some of these issues are "working as intended" or "as designed" or similar. So there's little reason to think a change would be made to what is already considered "correct" behavior.