Sic Transit Guide
November 21, 2009
It’s been a couple months since I posted here. Real Life came along and gave us some hard hits, and we have had other things going on in SL as well.
As for the topic of this post: the Guide isn’t dead–yet. Nor will it completely die for some time to come! However, the people over at the Radegast Client Project have been doing an amazing job of making their product accessible.
In fact, it is possible (Dianna tells me) to read Scripts. She says she can’t yet edit or create them, but she can read a script from her inventory. This is coming very close to one of my Big Goals! There is a slogan among People With Disabilities that I firmly believe in: “Nothing About Us Without Us.” I have always hoped to see my role as a Scripter for Blind and Visually Impaired people become at least somewhat deprecated. I don’t feel that every Blind or VI user in SL should or even could become a competent Scripter, but the Community as a whole should have a chance to produce some coders who can bring their direct experiences to the task.
It’s an adage in SL as in many other such situations that, if you don’t like what’s already out there, learn LSL and go do your own thing! The problem is that, for now, that’s not really an option for Dianna or others like her. Oh, she could write a script, email it to me, and have me paste it into SL and compile it for her. Think about the cycle of debugging, compiling, tweaking, and compiling again! Doing it through someone else is just not very practical, and bound to create tensions. Besides, I would either have to log in as her (which is OK between a husband and wife, but not necessarily for others!), or she would have to surrender ownership of her code to someone else. LL looks at the name in the “Creator” field, after all. Being able to open the editor, write or paste in her own stuff, and hit “compile” is just the way to go. Once that happens, the Blind Community doesn’t have to try to cajole and convince the Sighted Scripters that what they need is what they want: they CAN do it themselves!
Freedom of the Press belongs to the guy who owns one. Freedom of the Code belongs to the guy with a compiler.
But I digress. 
With the advances we are seeing, Dianna and others are using the Guide less and less, though they keep it for some things. A few have chosen not to switch to Radegast, which is their right! It’s also one of the reasons why I made ScriptAble products Open-Source: others can pick it up and move it in whatever direction works best for them.
With Radegast moving along well, I intend to work more on things that are not so easily solved by making an accessible client. I am working on an accessible sailboat, though I have to be careful of the license on that one, as I am using someone else’s code and the license is not exactly like what I use. I am also working on my crazy building project idea. More on that in the next post.
If you use the Guide and you would like to see a new feature, or if you find a bug? I’M STILL HERE. I haven’t gotten a single feature request or bug report in months, which tells me that people are either well-satisfied, or else they are moving to Radegast and don’t need it. But if somebody needs it, I’m not leaving you adrift! Talk to me.
