A pretty good rule for software in the era of accelerating “innovative” destruction.
Older stuff keeps working. Newer stuff fails.
When I switched from Win 7 to Win 11 last month, the rule held firm. Preparing for the switchover I bought some newer helper progs that allegedly work better on 11. They don’t. My main old tools, Kedit and File Commander/Windows, still work nicely. Poser 9, the last non-subscription version, needed some twiddling with config files and reinstalling, but now it works properly. Irfan and Amapi work without any twiddling. Most of them were written in the Win XP era. Kedit began on DOS in 1983, and I started using it on DOS in 1987.
Several of them belong to the ‘Eastern Orthodox’ tribe of software, the Soviet zone tradition of maintaining primary keyboard control while allowing some mouse turds. Kedit and FC/W are firmly Eastern Orthodox. Irfan started there but more recent versions have yielded too much ground to the mice. [FC/W was written in Russia, Irfan in Croatia.]
My earlier Windows-based courseware followed the Orthodox tradition. I made it easy to control things with single keystrokes.
From Audin, written in 2000:
From Anatesse, written in 1996 and last revised in 2012:
All main functions could be performed by hitting a button with the mouse or hitting a letter or arrow on the keyboard.
The later online versions have dropped the keyboard action. I wanted to keep it, but the NYC publisher who was supervising the transformation in 2014 insisted on removing it.
This month I’m making some quick and unpleasant revisions to create a separate edition for ADA requirements, which have suddenly been enforced after 30 years of inactivity. (I suspect the enforcement is “Resistance” by bureaucrats, but my suspicions are irrelevant.)
The work is unpleasant for two reasons: (1) There are very few blind students in speech and hearing. There are LOTS of deaf and hearing-impaired students for obvious reasons, and I’ve always kept them in mind when writing the regular software. (2) This part of the curriculum is intensely and intrinsically visual, with lots of anatomical diagrams and graphs. Most of the pages in these lessons include highlighters, hitting a button to label or flash part of the image. Verbal description is absurd and futile, but the “law” requires it so I do it. I’m trying to crank through this futile part as fast as possible so I can start on the NON-FUTILE part, a full Braille edition of the lessons. Contour pictures are the proper way of transforming images.
= = = = =
Now back to the starting point: Narrator software makes heavy use of the keyboard, not the mouse. If I had been allowed to retain my old Eastern Orthodox style, much less conversion would be needed now. More broadly, if the web had been developed in Eastern Orthodox style, much less adaptation would be needed in general.
Polistra's Mill 