> Astronauts do not need a screen reader or other accessibility features
In space, no one can hear your screen? Sorry, I couldn't resist.
The pilot interface, though, is not just for executing single actions; it's for executing against complicated checklists, some of which may be less familiar to pilots, some of which may even be uploaded asynchronously from the ground (for instance, consider the unorthodox procedures developed for the Apollo 13 astronauts), and some of which may be concurrently ongoing.
This lends itself extremely well to hypertext [0] and to interface components such as collapsible sections of text, being able to display multiple procedures simultaneously, being able to resize them relative to a dashboard of diagnostics (if not a window manager, a split-screen), and placing the button(s) required to execute a step directly near that step without needing to manually resize boxes when this is requested. Browser technology is exactly the stack that has solved all these problems!
> nor does the UI need the ability to resize for different monitors
I can see this being the case in the future though
At least in space screen orientation change detection is no longer relevant.
Upon thinking about this, it seems like it's a different problem in that the people are moving while the screen is not. So maybe the screen should have a camera and try to adjust the direction to the way the person is facing? Obviously if the screen is upsidedown that's not great.
(I don't think that anyone does this, but it's a neat thought.)
This would finally enable a window manager feature I have always wanted: "focus on the window I am looking at".
Re:Software Engineering Within SpaceX
by yjftsjthsd-h on Wednesday June 03, 2020 @12:56PM
(#23405653)
This sort of exists, actually... use hover focus and eViacam (https://eviacam.crea-si.com/) together. Of course, that doesn't give you separate control of the mouse, but I'm not sure that's a bug.
What happens when multiple people are looking at it from different directions, as if it was a table?
Then it has to start a pacman game! (I used to love those tables with the games in them that you can play from the person across from you)
I would suggest some manual switch (software or hardware), so that you can rotate displayed image as required, not yourself. Like a selector with 4 buttons, you click the one which is currently up for you and display respects that.
Astronauts do not need a screen reader or other accessibility features; nor does the UI need the ability to resize for different monitors or play nice with the window manager, etc.
Mission-critical UI’s are also deliberately simple control panels that send commands to some other process. In comparison, Electron apps often try to do everything in JS, which can lead to efficiency problems for heavy-duty tasks.