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Comment by coldtea | Hacker News Reader

>one of them uses tab-width 1 because he uses such a gigantic font-size

But if they use a "giganting font-size" to see the letters, spaces would still be proportionally gigantic. Why would they need to have custom indent size, since everything will play along with their font-size choice?

That is, why someone might want to use gigantic fonts but constraint that gigantic-ness to the actual letters, and not the indents too? Isn't it equally important to see indentation clearly?

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I don't know how bad the eyesight of the mentioned person was, but you may not be thinking gigantic enough. I know of people who zoom into the text to the level where maybe two-three words are visible in a line. (not all the time, but at the extreme, when reading something specific) By injecting more indent, you have to scroll a lot horizontally, or potentially miss an extra word from view if you get 2-3 extra levels of indent. If your space is at a few cm wide, it may be enough indication. Then, there are also ways of colouring indents for better visibility. (not sure if that's used for accessibility though, but it does make large indents not as important for me)

Why challenge someone's self-selected, battle-won access solutions before you spend time with them understanding their choices?

For me the challenge is part of understanding choices. I don’t think of challenge as conflict, but as a way of looking at different possibilities to learn more about why.

There are many ways to pose a challenge.

> I don’t think of challenge as conflict

Agree, but I like to think of it as retrofixing your reasoning for the different view: "You tell me A, but I used to believe B because of C, D, etc. Can we investigate whether my reasoning was lacking, those are also in conflict with A, A and B are not actually in conflict, or B has a validity not influenced by A"

I like this symbolic way of putting it. I struggle with communicating that in a way that is non-threatening to people who are sensitive or defensive of their supporting beliefs E,F, etc for why A.

Because "self-selected" can be far from optimal -- lots of people self-select solutions and even insist they "work for them" that are not only sub-optimal but even medically or otherwise detrimental for them.

I'm guessing when your fonts are sufficiently gigantic indents of 1 char are more than enough to see the indentation clearly (try it out). Actually, less than 1 char might be good enough or even better.

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