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Comment by shepherdjerred | Hacker News Reader

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shepherdjerred

> The real problem is that using spaces for indentation is an accessibility issue.

Not this again

https://github.com/prettier/prettier/issues/7475#issuecommen...

> Blind programmers have no problems with it.

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Not everyone with vision or vision processing issues is blind. Being able to configure custom tab stops is an easy way to control what level of indentation is useful and clear.

As with all other types of data: the right approach is for model and presentation to be separable concerns.

We're struggling with the wrong problem if we aren't asking why the editor can't treat blocks as entities that are displayed however we want.

https://nickgravgaard.com/elastic-tabstops/

  > why the editor can't treat blocks as entities

That might with with C, but won't work with e.g. Python.

Python has syntactic blocks as well, and editors totally can (and do) muck around with their formatting. I don't see any reason why they couldn't handle customizable indentation.

The primary accessibility argument is that spaces waste precious space on braille displays.

There are perfectly good tools for that which don't require text changes.

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