[tlug] Re: Top posting craziness

["Shannon Jacobs" <shannon.jacobs@??>]

I knew I shouldn't have touched this topic with the ten-foot pole. I
am only going to address two aspects of the topic. I am going to leave
below only one part that is related to one of the aspects I am
addressing, and I am not attempting to twist or distort your [Mr.
Turnbull's] comments, nor to remove them from their supporting
context, but only to conserve resources while providing convenient
access to the only part of a long post that I am addressing fairly
directly.

First, as regards accessibility, I do a lot of work for an
accessibility research group, allowing me to see the general picture
of accessibility issues, and I also have several years of frequent
contact working with a particular blind person, which I feel leads me
to a fairly clear picture of the particulars. I firmly believe that
you [Mr. Turnbull] are completely wrong on this issue and that you
have little or no firsthand experience with how screen reading
software works or with how blind people construct complete mental
models from narrow 2-D streams of data. All I can suggest is trying to
imagine in your head memorizing a short story related to a previous
story. Now try to imagine one story interleaved with a different,
probably conflicting story. Which model of the two stories are you
going to find easier to keep in your mind? (By the way, I admit that
I'm somewhat touchy on this issue, since some of my close relatives
suffered from accessibility-related conditions, though not from
blindness per se.)

That particular post actually claimed it was intended to show a
problem with top posting--but somehow forgot to say what the problem
was. I'm forced to guess that it was an attempt to prove by example
that a top-posted reply can be quite confrontational. If asked, I
suppose I should stipulate that notion--but yet another advantage of
top-posting in such a case is that without the camouflage of the
interleaved post, it is possible to more quickly decide whether or not
to continue reading.

(However, I actually found it more amusing that Mr. Turnbull lapsed
into inline posting at the end. If his goal was in fact to be
confrontational, then we see where it wound up... Or perhaps his
actual point was to say that top posting leads to inline posting?)

<snip>
> Date: Mon, 12 Feb 2007 12:07:06 +0900
> From: "Stephen J. Turnbull" <stephen@??>
<snip>
> The claim that top-posting is more accessible to blind people is
> silly.  Quite the reverse, unless the quoted material is clearly
> marked as "for reference only as needed", eg by inclusion as an
> attachment.  Alternatively, the marking could be by custom, but that
> would require a near absolute prohibition of the interlinear style,
> which Shannon admits to being necessary in critical analysis.