[tlug] Re: Top posting craziness

["Stephen J. Turnbull" <stephen@??>]

Shannon Jacobs writes:

 > I am not attempting to twist or distort your [Mr. Turnbull's]
 > comments, nor to remove them from their supporting context,

Nevertheless, you've succeeded in losing relevant context.  The
overall context is discussion of posting styles for a discussion list,
but you're focusing exclusively on the accessibility issue without
integrating it with the needs of the 100% of active TLUG participants
who don't use screen readers, and the unknown (but probably well over
90%) fraction of lurkers who don't use screen readers either.

I.e., the question is "how can the flow of a discussion list thread be
enhanced for the primary audience, without impairing accessibility?"
There is ample evidence that replying inline helps posters to maintain
locality of reference and relevance, i.e., "coherence".  Specifically,
in your top-post: you consistently missed my point and hit yours.  Had
you replied inline, I suspect you would have more often been on-target.

 > but only to conserve resources while providing convenient access to
 > the only part of a long post that I am addressing fairly directly.

Would it not have been more convenient and relevant, not to mention
shorter and with a much lower pomposity quotient[1] (C&C footnote),
had you replaced your long disclaimer with the words you intend to
quote later?  Seems to me that again, inline style would have been a
big win.

 > First, as regards accessibility, I do a lot of work for an
 > accessibility research group, I also have several years of frequent
 > contact working with a particular blind person [...]. I firmly
 > believe that you [Mr. Turnbull] [...] 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 of this is ad hominem, you know.  I thought you disapproved of
such arguments?  How about something like this:

    My limited but years-long experience with T. V. Raman, who wrote
    the Emacspeak screen reader, is that he invariably top-posts
    himself, but has never requested that others do so in threads
    where he is participating.  Nor does he evidence any difficulty in
    comprehending nested interlined posts.  The absence of a request
    is significant, though not at all proof, in that I have observed
    him to make *other* requests related to improving communication
    with him.  He's not shy about his disability, at least not if it
    gets in the way of getting work done.

 > 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.

Why "different and probably conflicting"?  But OK, let's accept your
assumption that the reply is autistic.  Please explain how an autistic
top-post is going to facilitate communication vis-a-vis an autistic
inline reply.

The key point here is not going to be posting style, I'm afraid.  The
important point is that whatever style is chosen, it be coherent and
well-structured, and self-contained so that need for "random access"
to an inherently sequential medium is minimized.


Footnotes: 
[1]  It should be obvious that I am eminently qualified to measure
pomposity on the "takes one to know one" (aka p-k-b) theory.