- VSCode Version: Anything <= 1.41.1
- OS Version: Windows_NT x64 10.0.18363
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:
Has the community at large expressed interest in this functionality? I.e. has it gathered more than 10 up-votes or more than 10 comments?
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.
Can our team afford to implement the feature? I.e. are the costs to implement the functionality reasonable compared to the size of our team?
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:
Make VS Code an outstandingly accessible developer tool. We'll engage and work with our community to get input and guidance, and we need you to keep us honest.
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.
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.