Case insensitivity helps with accessibility and inclusivity in both software development and software use.
Posted by jpluimers on 2023/11/06
We should do more to increase the accessibility of both software developers and users of software.
[Wayback/Archive] Serge Lachapelle 🇺🇦🇸🇪 on Twitter: “Quote of the day from @Vintharas. Don’t think of it as accessibility in your product design. Think of it as inclusivity.
#a11y#i9y“which refers to both
a11y– (computer) accessibility andi9y– inclusive design.
An important aspect there is to support case insensitive environments for both software developers and software users.
This sounds strange, as it makes systems less strict, but with the diversity of people not doing so makes it less accessible and decreases inclusivity.
It all started with reading [Wayback/Archive] /Fay-lee-nuh/ on Twitter: “Totally agree with this, case sensitivity does not add a lot apart from errors. Also note that some languages (Arabic, for example) do not have uppercase letters! So the whole idea of “case sensitive” to some people is new (and thus can make learning to program a lot harder)”.
Parts of the responses there and in the tweet Felienne quoted, were from people still insisting on case sensitivity or even limiting identifiers and filenames to US 7-bit ASCII.
I totally disagree, so I wrote a long thread in response, starting with [Wayback/Archive] “@Felienne @guido_leenders Sentence 2 in your first tweet should be an eye opener to everyone….” archived at the ThreadReaderApp as [Wayback/Archive] Thread by @jpluimers on Thread Reader App:
Sentence 2 in your first tweet should be an eye opener to everyone.
I still know it didn’t see the full implications when a student, that immigrated and learned the Dutch and English languages, told me this some 20 years ago.
Looking back my first glimpse was this:
1/
Long ago, while teaching about how to use the Delphi
TTabSet(way before Tab Controls in Windows) with my standard example “put new tabs for all 26 alphabet letters”, my Nordic students responded “are you sure?” implicating they had 29 letters.[Wayback/Archive] About Tab Controls – Win32 apps
2/
Speaking semi-fluent German (writing any natural language is still hard for me), I knew about umlauts so my first guess was “umlauted letters are distinct over there”.
Wrong!
Æ/æ, Ø/ø, and Å/å are at the end of their alphabet.
Norwegian orthography – Wikipedia
3/
It helped much when my best friend fell in love with (his now wife) Eldbjørg: I knew how to pronounce that!
I already knew a bit about Unicode, but it was so vast that only few people could explain the implications well.
So I still miss Michael: Michael Kaplan Obituary – Berkowitz-Kumin-Bookatz | Cleveland Heights OH (and a whole bunch of info in zero width Unicode stuff)
4/
Another simple thing taught me more: the Turkish dotted uppercase İ just scratch the surface of international teams. So I wrote a blog post on it:
5/
While speaking about .NET and Delphi I met so many people on conferences and am still amazed – with their various alphabets like Hebrew, Arabic, Hindi, Japanese or Chines – how well they managed to learn both English*and* programming languages.
6/
So Tweets like
[Wayback/Archive] /Fay-lee-nuh/ on Twitter: “You know those things 0 to 9 that we call Arabic numerals?! The actual Arabic language uses different ones* But of course, we support that now too!!! * Fun fact I did not know until embarrassingly recently…”
bring me joy: other people that understand that struggle and try to help with it.
Over the decades I also became more relaxed about not phrasing languages (natural or programming) well: for most making language mistakes is not laziness!
7/
It also means that I am (at slow pace as I am still rapidly exhausted; I will take a break after these tweets) to read some 20 pages of The Programmer’s Brain.
[Wayback/Archive] The Programmer’s Brain
What every programmer needs to know about cognition
Felienne Hermans, August 2021 · ISBN 9781617298677 · 256 pages · printed in black & whiteThere is so much insight there from we can both learn and improve the developer’s world.
/end
With proper IDE support, getting the case right for people will be far less of a problem than in the past.
Quoted tweets:
- [Wayback/Archive] Jeffrey Snover on Twitter: “Unpopular but correct opinion: Case sensitivity in programming languages provides minimal real utility while exponentially increasing the potential for errors. It was a reasonable call when most variables where 1-3 characters but that was many decades ago. Not today.” / Twitter
- [Wayback/Archive] Khalid @ GDC 🕹️ on Twitter: “Spicy thought: C# could appeal to more folks if there was a case insensitive mode. Like an “easy mode” for beginners or hobbyest.”
–jeroen
The Wiert Corner - irregular stream of stuff 
Leave a comment