On 6/10/19, Samuel Thibault <sthiba...@debian.org> wrote: > Hello, > > I'm here looking for opinions from debian-accessibility from people with > low vision. > > Samuel Thibault, le lun. 10 juin 2019 22:02:05 +0200, a ecrit: >> > whenever i have to use the linux console, i have significant >> > neurological issues, due to the blinking cursor. >> >> Oh, I did not know that even just the blinking cursor could have an >> impact. >> >> > there is an ansi sequence that turns off blinking, but it >> > frequently gets reset again for unknown reasons. > > We can probably try to change the default value in the kernel (it's > really not only about Debian), if it makes consensus that it doesn't > hurt most people. I guess the kernel uses a small blinking cursor by > default solely because that was the default VGA hardware parameter. > > When looking around in xterms and such, I see that they are using by > default a blocked cursor. Xterms usually don't make it blink, I see only > Gnome-terminal making it blink by default. > > A non-blinking small cursor would pose visibility problem, but perhaps a > non-blinking big cursor would be fine? (perhaps even more visible than > the current blinking small cursor?)
Hi, Samuel.. #ThankYou for all the work you do! I do know that blink rates are one touch point on something like the W3C (World Wide Web Consortium) list of considerations with respect to epilepsy. Outside of that, I really don't have much feedback, BUT... I remembered seeing a toggle for cursor blinking. I got lucky and FOUND IT! It's a preference for xfce4-terminal. It's under Edit > Preferences and then on the front, default "General" tab. I'm on a small screen where activities like that get chopped off with no work-around to pop them into view. I got lucky because that cursor blink option is the last thing visible on my screen here. Yay! But now I'm sitting here thinking I remember seeing a toggle somewhere about the actual rate of blinking, too. If it's on that xfce4-terminal screen, it's out range for my little laptop to view. It's possible that was also something on a text editor, instead and maybe.... This is one of those things where there's never going to be a 100% consensus, that's for sure. I choose to have the blinking cursor on because it's a visual trigger that's *cognitively friendly*. A blinking cursor's presence helps my mental focus'er find it amongst all the "gobblety-goop" that some pages look like on some days. While I do like it to blink, I'm also hinky about the rate of flashing... because too fast is distracting to a point of being almost "irritating". My ultimate take on this is that it's much more *fair* for me to have to track down and manually toggle that feature ON in a new setup than it is for someone with epilepsy to have to risk being detrimentally triggered if that feature was instead turned on and thus flashing by default..... Cindy :) -- Cindy-Sue Causey Talking Rock, Pickens County, Georgia, USA * runs with birdseed *