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Ask HN: Max line length for visually impaired

4 points by yeukhon ↗ HN
Max line length has always been a hot potato. I want to ask the community, especially those who do research in accessibility and those who are visually impaired, what are your experience/understanding of the effect of line length?

Specifically, there is a great debate over 80 characters, 88 characters, or even 120 characters.

Does max line length matter when visually impaired developers have access to a larger screen?

6 comments

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gostsamo
I'm blind and line length matters to the extend that long lines are harder to edit in the middle.
FeistySkink
Can you elaborate? The reasoning is not immediately clear to me.
gostsamo
If I only need to read some text or code, the line length does not matter, because the sound from the screen reader is linear by nature. There is something to be said about natural breaks on statements and the like, but we assume that we are talking about expressions which just happen to be long.

If I need to edit though, I need to navigate to the section in question. My options are to use word by word navigation either from the line start or word by word from the line end (I have short keys for those). If the line is too long, word by word might take quite the number of keystrokes to reach the target position. ctrl+f might be faster. Some vim magic might be useful for such cases, but it would be an overkill.

Separately, there could be some attention fatigue if I need to here only the end of the line, but it is long and my mind wanders while waiting for the interesting bits. This is a corner case though.

yeukhon
Thank you! Would you mind me asking whether you use any IDE like VS Code, IntelliJ etc?

I think, it would be ideal if the read and edit are fit for your need (say 80 characters max) inside the editor, but when you are committing, there is a pre-commit hook that would automatically reformat (but your IDE can still display and edit as if it was at 80 max characters).

Now sure how practical that is (and I imagine that isn't really a thing today), but what is your take on that?

gostsamo
I'm using vs code for python development and the company has standardized on black with pre-commit hooks. I'm actually happy with the setup. Line length is not important for me, so short lines work too as they work for everyone else.
zer00eyz
Line length matters if you are a heavy zoom user.

This is pretty easy to see for your self, in a browser, on this page by using zoom under "view". Reasonable sized lines and or soft wraps help greatly!