July 29, 2020 • 47 mins
Being left-handed in a world primarily shaped by and for right-handed people can be a challenge, particularly with technology. In this episode, we look at how a right-handed bias can create frustrations for left handers, and how bias in tech can take on more sinister aspects. That was a pun.
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Episode Transcript
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Speaker 1 (00:04):
Welcome to text Time, a production from I Heart Radio.
Hey there, and welcome to tex Stuff. I'm your host,
Jonathan Strickland. I'm an executive producer with I Heart Radio,
and I love all things tech and it is a
story time you guys. Now, those of you who follow
(00:27):
my personal account over on Twitter, which is at John Strickland,
it's j O. N. Strickland. If you're morbidly curious. Those
of you who do follow me, you might know that
I was eagerly anticipating the delivery of a Squire Classic
Sixties Vibe Stratocaster, an electric guitar. And you know, I've
(00:52):
done episodes about electric guitars, I've talked about them a lot,
and I thought, I really want one of these. It
would be really nice to have one. This would have
been my first six string electric guitar. And I figured,
since you know, I'm working from home now, it would
be good to pick up a new skill to keep
my mind sharp and occupied, and you know, to help
(01:13):
me get into a sort of meditative state to help
manage anxiety. By the way, um, anxiety is a real
pain in the butt, and I recommend anyone who has
anxiety to look into ways to manage it in a
really healthy manner, because that stuff is no joke, and
it's obviously getting more challenging to deal with that. Anyway,
(01:33):
back to my story, I had been thinking about getting
a guitar, and I wanted it to be a decent guitar,
you know, something I would actually want to pick up
and play. I didn't want to buy something super cheap
and then find out I didn't like the feel of
it or how it sounded, because that would discourage me
from playing it. I would just set it down and
(01:55):
never pick it up again. But on the other hand,
I also didn't want to go crazy and buy some
sort of, you know, super expensive guitar, because guitars can
get real expensive, y'all. I mean, what if I didn't
like playing guitar just because I didn't like it? Right?
What if I decided that I didn't enjoy playing. I
am forty five years old this year, and skills just
(02:16):
don't come to me as quickly as they used to.
So it's entirely possible that I could become frustrated or
I could become bored, even with a really nice guitar,
and then just set it down and let it collect dust.
So I would have wasted a lot of money on
a really expensive decoration at that point, and that would
(02:38):
be really irresponsible even in a good economic climate, let
alone one as uncertain as the one we find ourselves
in today. So I did what I do. I did
a lot of research, like a lot of research. My
wife was getting amused by how frequently I was watching
videos about different guitars and different price ranges, weighing them, saying, well, yeah,
(03:03):
this is gonna be a slightly less expensive guitar, which
means it's going to have these sort of things that
I'll have to consider. But but on the other hand,
it's better than this other guitar, you know. I went
through all of that. Ultimately I decided I wanted a
strato caster, a classic electric guitar. The strato caster is
made by Fender, and I really like the sound of
(03:27):
strato casters now. I love stuff like surf rock, and
Dick Dale, one of the most famous surf rock guitarists,
played a strat But I also wanted to be financially
responsible because there are a lot of different strato casters
out there, and generally they mostly share a couple of
common traits. Most strato casters have three single coil pickups,
(03:51):
and the pickups are the components that pick up the
vibration of the strings and then convert that into electric
signals that can then feed out to an amplifier and speakers.
Strats have three of these, typically one near the base
of the neck of the guitar the neck pickup, one
in the middle of the body of the guitar, and
one towards the bridge of the guitar. A switch on
(04:15):
the strat lets you select which pickup or which pair
of pickups are active at any given time, and that
changes the sound you get out of the guitar when
it plays through an amplifier. But beyond these general similarities,
there are a ton of different options. You can buy
a starter entry level strat for less than two hundred dollars,
(04:37):
or you could go bunkers and buy a mod shop
guitar for around eight hundred dollars. So yeah, there is
a range, and of course if you went full custom
shop it could be way more expensive. So I looked
into the Squire line of guitars. Now this is Fender's
budget line, but they tend to measure up pretty well
(04:58):
to guitars from the more prestigious official Fender line, particularly
in the Squire Classic Vibe series, which are guitars they
are designed to be closer to the style of the
classic electric guitars of the fifties and sixties. Now, I'm
left handed, and that's really what I'm going to get
into in this episode, because being left handed means there
(05:21):
are a lot of little struggles in your life. Most
of the time, they aren't particularly meaningful or noteworthy. They
tend to mostly be slightly frustrating at worst, and that's
about it most of the time. So I want to
stress from the beginning of this episode that the stuff
I'm going to talk about is really not that big
(05:42):
a deal in the grand scheme of things most of
the time. But being left handed often means that when
it comes to purchasing stuff where handedness is a factor,
like guitars, you're faced with fewer options than you're right
handed counterparts. For example, if you were to go to
Fenders website the morning that I wrote this, and you
(06:03):
were to look at the different options for electric guitars
that they had in stock, you would see at that
time that the company had one hundred eleven guitars for
right handers in stock for left handers eight eight versus
one hundred eleven. Now, typically a left hander has fewer options,
(06:25):
and then fewer choices within those options, choices like the
color of the guitar, for example. So while I could
have loved a Candy Apple red left handed Squire Classic
Sixties Vibes stratocaster, that was not an option. Nor could
I get the lovely Lake Placid blue option that right
(06:46):
handers could get. Those right handed versions had Candy Apple
red and Lake Placid blue, but for left handers you
didn't have a choice. There was only one color option, sunburst,
which sadly is my least favorite of the three colors.
But hey, them's the brakes. And while I wasn't in
love with the color, I could live with it. And
(07:07):
I did love all the things I read about the
line of guitars, so I didn't really let that bother
me so much. And before anyone pipes up about restringing
a guitar so that you can convert a right handed
guitar into a left handed guitar, yeah, I could technically
have purchased a right handed Candy Apple red model, taking
(07:29):
the strings off, taking the nut off, the top of
the neck, flip the nut around, reinserted it, then restrung
the guitar so that it was a left handed guitar.
But that would also mean that all the controls for
the guitar, like the volume and tone knobs and the
tremolo or whammy bar would have been on the wrong side,
and I would have to figure out how to deal
(07:50):
with that in order to play it properly. So I
wasn't really keen on trying to make a product that
had been made for a right hander work for a
left hander. I had a few gift cards for Amazon,
not a sponsor, and that sealed the deal for me.
I said, I'm gonna use these gift cards toward buying
a guitar. I would buy a Squire Strato caster for
(08:11):
four hundred dollars, which is not an insignificant sum of money,
particularly if you're trying to stay economically responsible during a
time of uncertainty. But with the gift cards, that would
bring the price down to about half price, and I
figured I would splurge on myself as sort of a
late birthday present. I figured, if nothing else, I could
(08:32):
consider it an investment in my mental health. I placed
my order on a Saturday, and I was predicted to
receive the guitar on the following Friday, so a week later. Now,
over the course of that week, I grew a bit
anxious because when I would check on the order status,
it hadn't changed. It had registered order, but it never
(08:52):
moved to shipping, let alone out for delivery. And then
on that Friday that I was to receive it, July fourth,
twenty that was the morning that I wrote this, I
finally got an email that said my order had been
canceled due to quote lack of availability end quote. Now,
(09:13):
Amazon's system had said that there was only one of
these guitars and stock, but apparently they just couldn't locate it,
and so I did not get my guitar, though I
did receive the accessories I had ordered. So now I've
got a guitar stand and a guitar strap, but no
guitar to go with it. Sad trombone. Now, I don't
(09:37):
tell this story just because I'm bummed out and I
want to grouse about it, though I admit that's definitely
part of it. I want to talk about the problems
that left handers face when it comes to certain technologies,
and how those relatively minor problems can open the door
to the realization and acknowledgement that other people face much
(09:58):
more serious challenges when it comes to tech and bias
and accessibility. And before I get into it too much,
let's talk about why I'm not upset at Fender Guitars
for this in general, I'm not even really upset at Amazon.
I mean, when it comes down to one unit in
all of Amazon, I imagine it's not that uncommon for
(10:21):
something to appear in an online inventory, and yet you
can actually track down the physical thing when someone places
in order. You just can't figure out where it is
in a warehouse somewhere. That's got to happen, you know,
fairly frequently. The prevailing wisdom is that left handers make
up about ten of the total population. Now that number
(10:44):
is sometimes disputed. Some argue there are way more lefties
than that, but the general consensus is that nine out
of ten people are right handed. So if you are
making products where handedness matters, it makes far more sense
to dedicate your or focus on the right handers. They
make up the bulk of the population, they represent your
(11:05):
primary customers, and that will guide many of your other decisions.
For example, if what you're making requires mass production, you
have to create an assembly process, and that assembly process
needs to be as efficient as possible. Efficiency relates to cost,
so the more efficient you are able to make the
(11:26):
production process, the less it costs to make the thing
you're making, and that means you can be competitive in
your pricing. When you put your product up on the
market against products from other companies. You need to charge
more than it costs to make so that you can
make a profit. You don't want to sell things at
a loss typically, but you can also be competitive against
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those other companies that are also making whatever it is
you're making. But this means your assembly process needs to
be fine tuned toward that product. You can imagine that
there is an ideal version of whatever it is you're making.
This is the model you're working off of. This is
what you're trying to replicate every single time. So your
goal is to produce stuff like guitars that match that
(12:10):
model as much as possible. And with guitars made from wood,
this is actually impossible. You're never going to have two
guitars come out exactly the same because there's going to
be variations in the wood. You'll be able to see
and maybe even feel minor differences from guitar to guitar,
even in the same line, even produced on the same day.
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But the goal is to get each guitar as close
to this standard as you possibly can, and that means
that the whole process needs to be precise, consistent, and
easy to replicate. So the process works great as long
as you're producing the same thing over and over. You'll
get small variations, but in general you'll chug along and
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you'll build however many guitars as your facility can manage
given the process of materials, as long as all these
guitars require that same process. And that's where the left
handed problem comes in. To make a left handed guitar,
you need to flip everything a hundred eighty degrees. The
string order is reversed, the headstock has to be flipped,
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the tuners will have to be on the opposite side
of a right handed guitar. The controls like volume and tone,
and the tremolo or wamy bar have to be on
the opposite side. The pickguard has to be flipped. You
get the idea. The real problem is you can't just
flip a switch on the assembly line to go from
right handed to left handed and have the whole process
(13:41):
PLoP out ten left handed guitars for every one right
handed guitars. It doesn't work that way. Instead, you either
need a parallel assembly line just for left handed guitars,
but that doesn't make much sense because you're never going
to need to produce as many left handed guitars, or
you have to retool your normal assembly process in order
(14:04):
to occasionally produce some left handed models. Either way, producing
a left handed guitar isn't as efficient as producing a
right handed one, and that means it costs more to make.
Now you could charge more for a left handed guitar,
and some companies do, or you could resign yourself to
the fact that you just won't make as much money
(14:27):
selling a left handed guitar as you would selling a
right handed guitar. Either way, you're not likely to make
that many left handed guitars, and it's important that you
know I am not criticizing that decision. It makes no
economic sense to produce left handed anything's in the same
(14:47):
amount as right handed ones. You would never sell them
all because there's just not enough left handers to make
up the market. The same is true for all the
different options you find with products like guitars. Sure you
could spend the time and effort necessary to provide the
exact same options to lefties as you do to right ease,
(15:08):
but there's a good chance you would end up with
a lot of unsold stock. You might eventually move that
unsold stock by selling products at a huge discount, but
by then you could be looking at maybe breaking even
or perhaps even selling them at a loss. It makes
way more sense to just never make the ding dang
durned things in the first place. So this means that
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left handers often have to make some compromises when it
comes to technology. Either we have to make do with
things that were made for right handers and find a
way to make it work, or we are left with
a limited number of options that pales in comparison to
what is available for right handers. When we come back,
we'll talk about how the more sinister among us have
(15:54):
to navigate technology, But first let's take a quick break. Now,
I'm not going to go into the history of how
being left handed is or was a taboo in many
cultures that gets outside the realm of tech stuff, but
(16:17):
it mostly comes down to how groups of people are
pretty good at identifying individuals who do not fit the norm,
and then they attempt to find ways to explain why
that person is different, and those ways often can end
up being negative. Going into left handed technology is interesting
because in some cultures the typical approach to dealing with
(16:39):
left handers was to force them to perform tasks as
a right hander. Forcing people to write with their right
hand even if they were left handed. You hear the
story all the time, and this is not always easy
for left handers. I mean, assuming you're not ambidexterous, I
imagine there are things that you would find fairly simple
to do with your dominant hand that become frustratingly difficult
(17:03):
to do with your non dominant hand. I figured we'd
start with a technology that I found quite vexing in
my youth, a very simple technology, scissors. Let's talk about
how scissors work. So scissors are a type of compound machine,
and a compound machine is one that makes use of
(17:24):
two or more simple machines. The six simple machines. The
classic simple machines are the wheel and axle, the lever,
the inclined plane, the pulley, the screw, and the wedge. Now, interestingly,
the pully, screw, and wedge are all extensions of the
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first three machines, and simple machines are intended to change
the magnitude of a force or the direction of that force.
A pair of scissors consists of two blades, which are
essentially wedges, and that's one of the simple machines. They
are also mounted in a cross shape around a fulcrum,
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and that turns the handles of the scissors into levers,
another simple machine. So pushing the levers together brings the
wedge blades together, and that's what allows you to cut stuff. Moreover,
the process of squeezing the handles actually creates pressure that
squeezes the blades together, not just up and down, but
left and right, so there's a sort of pinching action
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happening between the blades that allows for a nice clean cut.
That is, they do this if you happen to be
using the scissors in the proper hand. If a left
hander tries to use right handed scissors with their left hand,
they will find that the blades tend to create a
space between them as they close, so they close up
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and down, but there's a space left and right that
allows whatever you're cutting to bend between the blades, which
usually means you don't tend to cut anything at all,
or if you do cut, you do so in a
way where you're mauling whatever it is you're trying to cut.
I can't tell you how many times I ended up
with what looked like shredded paper instead of a nice
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clean cut. The squeezing action with the left hand just
creates a force along that fulcrum that moves the blades
apart rather than squeezing them together. Now, left handers can
attempt to compensate for this by creating a different force
with their fingers, essentially pushing their thumbs and index fingers
in a way to create that pinching force. You're forcing
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the blades together. The boy, howdy, that is not comfortable.
It hurts. Moreover, the position of the blades means that
the top blade is always on the right side. You
can flip the blades over, but that means the top
blade is still on the right side. This actually makes
it really hard for left handers to see what they
are cutting. If they're trying to cut with their left
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hand because the blade is in the way. Left handed
scissor have the top blade on the left side rather
than the right side. That there are so called left
handed scissors that don't do this, but they are left
handed only in the sense that they have handles that
have contours that better fit the left hand. But without
changing that blade orientation, you really haven't solved the problem.
(20:19):
You still can't really see what you're cutting, and you're
still going to be forcing those blades apart from each other. Now.
Fun fact, I never learned to use left handed scissors
because when I was going to school, my school just
didn't have any. I would use right handed scissors, either
trying desperately to get them to work with my left
hand or just giving up and using my right hand,
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knowing that whatever I was going to cut was going
to look awful because of my lack of fine motor
skills with my non dominant hand. For another common tool,
one much more advanced than a pair of scissors, let
us consider the computer mouse. Now, your typical computer mouse
tends to have at least two buttons, one on the
(21:00):
left and one on the right. There are ones that don't.
They're the single button mouse. Types like the ones that
are used with certain max that kind of thing. But
your typical computer mouse has at least two buttons, a
left click and a right click, and they tend to
be contoured in such a way the mouse is that
they have a nice fit with the right hand. They
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don't fit the left hand the same way. They're just
not contoured that way. And most programs tend to incorporate
mouse commands by shifting important functions for the keyboard to
the left side of that keyboard, so that way you've
got the mouse in your right hand and your left
hand remains free on the left side of the keyboard
to do whatever other functions you need to do to
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navigate the program. Computer games tend to be a good
example of how this plays out in favor of right ees.
So take a first person shooter game like Doom. The
mouse controls your point of view or your aim the game.
You use your mouse to direct your line of sight
and thus where you have your big zappy gun pointed
at any given moment so you can shoot all those
(22:08):
little demon critters. Your character's movement maps typically to the
WAZA keys, the W A S D keys w being
forward s being backward and A and D typically being
straffe left and strafe right, respectively. In a shooting game,
you need to have precise aim to compete at really
(22:29):
high levels. If you watch some pro e sports players
and you really pay attention to how fast and precise
they are with their aim, it's incredible and it requires
a highly developed fine motor skill set with whatever hand
you're using to aim. In contrast, your movement in these
style of games is important, but typically does not need
the same level of precision as aiming, so offloading movement
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to the non dominant hand isn't a huge problem. Left
handers have it harder. If they're using a traditional right
handed set up. They're aiming with their non dominant hand,
and thus they tend to be less precise and less accurate.
Now I know that's the case with me, and of
course I'm also older, so my reaction times are slowing
(23:14):
down too. I guess what I'm saying is you really
don't want me to be on your Overwatch team. There
are left handed versions of the computer mouse out there,
and the fact that we've gone to USB connections rather
than the old PS slash two ports that computers and
stuff like keyboards and mice used to depend on. We
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don't use those anymore, which that usually means you actually
have more options of where you can connect stuff to
your computer, so cable management isn't as big a pain
in the neck because you typically have more options of
where that USB cable can plug into. If the game
developers thought it through, you might even be able to
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map your computer keys so that your movement stuff can
go to a different set of four keys, such as I, J, K, L,
or the number pad. If you can't map keys, then
it means the left hander has to deal with sitting
in an odd way or positioning their keyboard in an
offset way so that the right hand can control those
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W A, S D keys. Now, I used video games
as my example, but of course the computer mouse is
a standard input device for all sorts of PC programs.
I'm the only left handed person in my family, so
our computers at home all had a right handed set up,
right handed computer mouse and all that kind of stuff. Likewise,
(24:37):
when I got to high school and they just started
to offer classes using computers, all of those machines had
a right handed mouse as well. Some of the programs
would allow you to switch the mouse to a left
handed mode. But really all that meant was that the
left and right mouse buttons flipped what they did, so
that a right mouse click was the equivalent to a
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right hander using a left mouse click. It didn't magically
change the shape of the mouse or how it connected
to the PC, so it might still not really be convenient.
So as a result, I taught myself to use a
mouse right handed early on. It wasn't that big a
deal because most of the stuff I was doing didn't
require lightning, fast reactions or anything, so I could take
(25:20):
my time moving my wobbly little cursor to the right
spot on the screen. A few times I tried to
use a left handed mouse. I hated it because all
the important keyboard functions were on the wrong side of
the keyboard and the user interface was clearly biased toward
right handers. It was just more convenient, though less precise,
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to use my right hand on the mouse. Sticking with
video games, let's talk about consoles for a second. The
standard console controller these days has two thumbsticks, one for
each thumb. The left thumbstick typically control stuff like movement,
a right control stuff like camera angle or aim. So
(26:04):
again the task that requires the most precise fine tuning
goes to the right side. Some games do allow you
to change this. That's nice, but it's a bit weird
when you first do it, particularly since a lot of
games also include platforming elements where you need to access
controls that are mapped to the buttons on the controller.
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The buttons on most controllers are, you guessed it over,
on the right side, so you have to take your
thumb off the right stick to hit the buttons on
the right side of the controller. If aim is going
to the left thumbstick and movement is going to the
right thumb stick, suddenly you can't jump and move at
the same time because you have to take your thumb
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off the thumbstick and it has to do all the work.
You could conceivably buy a really expensive controller with stuff
like extra paddles and trigger buttons and map things out
to improve matters, but it's really hard to compensate for
this design using just a standard controller, and not all
games allow you to map controls like that. Now, I
(27:09):
don't mean to suggest that being left handed immediately means
a person is going to be bad at stuff like
video games. There are left handed players out there who
are amazing. Many have spent countless hours training their non
dominant hand to do more finely tuned tasks, and they
can compete at a professional level. But for a lot
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of us, these basic approaches to design stand as an
extra challenge we face on top of whatever it is
we actually want to do now. I mentioned UI or
user interface a moment ago. The user interface of a
technology is exactly what it sounds like. It's the method
by which a user interacts with the technology. It includes
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not just the physical interaction, such as the keyboard amouse
of a PC, or the touch screen of a smartphone
or the controller for a video game console. It also
includes the actual design of the software and how things
are laid out, and sometimes developers will build it in
a system that just favors right handedness in more subtle ways.
(28:13):
For example, I can't tell you how many on screen
smartphone keyboards I've used that become a total hassle because
I would be using my left hand and I would
hit keys a little to the left of center, and
the keys were really designed to be hit a little
to the right of center. I've practiced using my right
index finger to try and type things out much more
(28:35):
smoothly then if I were to use my left hand.
But I am left handed. I want to use my
left hand. I'm faster at it. It's more comfortable, at
least it would be, but I have to end up
thinking about aiming a little to the right of where
I think I need to go in order to hit
the key I want. Otherwise I'm just getting typos and
nonsense all the time. This sort of bias in design
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can be found in a lot of other places too.
For example, the typical student desk tends to have a
shape that caters to right handers. Often there's a place
for the right arm to rest while the student is writing,
whereas on the left side of the desk it's typically open.
So if you're a lefty, you're writing with no support
for your left arm. And when I went to high school,
(29:19):
they had just switched over to these asymmetric desks and
they had more surface area on the right side. So
that's great if you're a right hander, your your notebook
is supported, you can just right that way. But as
a lefty, it meant that I had to twist a
bit in my seat just to write stuff down. Even
notebooks are laid out in a way that work better
(29:41):
for right handers than left handers, at least for those
of us in the Western hemisphere who are writing left
to right. The binding of a notebook is on the
left side. Now, that's not in the way if you're
a right hander. But if you're a lefty, then you've
got that binding to deal with, which means you're either
contorting yourself to work around it, or you're starting a
good deal further into the page than your right handed
(30:04):
counterparts are. Curse you notebook bindings. For that reason, when
I use notebooks, I typically either flip them upside down,
or I flipped them over and I start from the
back and I worked my way forward that way. The
binding is on the right side. I still right left
to right, but now the spiral of rings is on
(30:25):
the right hand side, and they don't get in my way. Now.
So far, most of the stuff I've mentioned has been frustrating,
but ultimately not really that big a deal. Yeah, it's
not fun to compensate to interact with a world that
was designed for people who aren't like you. But for
the most part, the examples I've used are fairly benign,
(30:45):
but just you wait, we'll be right back after this
short break. Left handers aren't strangers to facing struggles using
technology meant for right handers. And when we're lucky, someone
has created a left handed version for us to use.
(31:07):
When we're really lucky, that left handed version works just
as well as the right handed one does. When we're
crazy lucky, whatever it is we're doing with that left
handed tool doesn't otherwise have handedness entering into the picture.
But now we're gonna talk about chain saws. Yeah, chainsaws.
(31:32):
These are really useful and potentially extremely dangerous, and their
design favors right handers, which means that for people like me,
they become much more potentially dangerous tools. Now, chainsaw has
two handles. One is at the very rear of the chainsaw.
(31:53):
That's where the throttle control is, and that's meant for
the dominant hand. Really, it's meant for the right hand.
And then there's a front handle, and typically that's an
arc that goes along the top and side the left
side of the chainsaw. It's meant for the left hand
to be there to help guide the chainsaw. Many chainsaws
have that front handle join with the body of the chainsaw.
(32:16):
Itself close to the top right side of the device,
which means that even if you wanted to hold it
as a left hander, you would be very limited and
where your right hand could go, they couldn't go all
the way to the edge because that's where the are
the handle actually joins the body of the chainsaw. But
if you're holding the chainsaw with your right hand on
the rear handle, there's plenty of space for your left
(32:37):
hand to hold onto the front handle. That gives you
lots of different options for grips when you need to
use the chainsaw on different orientations, But typically you just
don't have that level of versatility on the right side
of the front handle, so if you were to try
and hold it left handed, you would already be facing
some limitations and controls really important when you've got a
(32:57):
whirling chain blade right in front of you. You want
that dominant hand on the back to control the overall
motion of the chainsaw and to deal with any kickback
you might have. The non dominant hand is really meant
to use to to guide the specific angle of attack
of the chainsaw. Chainsaws typically have a guard that's called
(33:19):
a chain break like a break like a kind you
would have in a car, and that's mounted in front
of the front handle. The chain break is essentially a
lever that, if it gets pushed beyond a fail point,
will cut off power to the blade. So let's say
that you're using the chainsaw. The chainsaw bucks back so
(33:39):
that the blade is now arching up so it would
be coming towards your head. The lever is positioned in
such a way that it will make contact with the
back of your leading hand, your left hand, and it'll
trip that lever, cutting off power to the blade. That's
the idea. The problem here is that if you are
(34:00):
using it the other way around, with your left hand
on the rear handle, your right hand might not be
in the right position to really engage with that chain break,
so if something bad happens, there may be no way
to stop it. That's not great. Or you could be
operating it as a right hander, but it means your
(34:20):
non dominant hand is the one that's trying to control
the overall motion of the blade. That's not a great
option either. Now I have used chainsaws a few times,
I've always had to revert to using them as if
I were right handed, which in my mind is the
least bad of all the different options I had in
front of me. And this is just one example of
(34:41):
a power tool that is designed to be used by
right handers. Pretty Much every tool is biased toward being
right handed. Either the tools are contoured in a way
where they fit the right hand but not the left,
or they operate in such a way that you really
need to be using them in your right hand, or
(35:01):
the line of sight doesn't really work unless you're using
it with the right hand dominant side. Whether it's a
table saw or a drill press or a power drill,
a lot of these tools just work best if they're
operated by a right hander, and at worst they can
be dangerous if they are operated any other way. The
(35:21):
same thing is true with firearms. Now, I am not
a gun guy. I have not fired any type of
firearm in a really long time, but if I did,
I'd likely be frustrated by the lack of options for me.
Most handguns that have an external safety catch place that
(35:42):
on the left side of the gun so that your
right thumb can easily disengage the catch whenever you are
ready to actually fire the handgun. But if you're holding
this in your left hand, the catches on the opposite
side of the gun from where your thumb rests. It's
no longer where you can easily disengage it. Many rifles
(36:02):
are designed specifically to use with the butt of the
stock up against your right side. They expend spent casings
out the right side of the firearm, so they're away
from the shooter. If you were to try and fire
left handed, you would be dealing with this, and it
would make the experience less safe for you and as
(36:23):
well as less safe for anyone who happens to be
around you. It's not great. Now there are manufacturers that
make ambidextrous models of firearms, meaning that at least in theory,
they can be fired either by a right hander or
a left hander with no real difference in performance. And
then there are a few that will make left handed
(36:46):
models of certain firearms, but these tend to be more
expensive than the exact same models that were made for
right handers, for much the same reason that it's hard
to find good options for left handed guitars. That being,
the manufacturing process has been streamlined to create a certain
type of product in a very particular way, and that
(37:07):
process works great when that's all you want to do.
But if you want to do anything besides make the
exact same product with the exact same orientation, that assembly
line cannot really accommodate that. So yeah, we left handers
need to make do, or maybe spend more money so
that we don't have to make do now. There is
a small, nearly cottage industry business of creating left handed
(37:31):
versions of many common utensils, tools, and gadgets. For left handers,
there are left handed can openers, for example, since using
a right handed can opener is tricky and at best
of pain in the well the hands, I guess. For
left handers, there are rulers that have measurements that go
(37:52):
from right to left, which is useful if you're a
lefty and you want to draw a line as a
precise length. Otherwise, my mo was to start at the
end result and work back at zero. So if I
needed to draw a three inch line, I would start
on the three inch mark and then draw toward the zero,
because then it was just easier for me to see
(38:13):
what I was doing. There are left handed cork screws
because it's easier to use because the twisting motion ends
up being counterclockwise rather than clockwise. There are left handed
measuring cups and left handed playing cards. These have markings
on the opposite side of where you would find them
on the right handed version or the standard version. The
(38:34):
products are otherwise identical to right handed whatever's right right,
A left handed measuring cup is exactly the same as
a right hand measuring cup, except the markings are on
the opposite side of the cup. That's it. For that
wonderful little flip, You're gonna be paying a premium, I mean,
like sometimes a crazy premium. You might see a measuring
(38:54):
cup that would cost five bucks end up being a
twenty dollar cup because it is a left handed one.
So yes, there is a certain selection of common tools
and utensils that you can find in a left handed orientation.
They typically cost more than the right handed version for
the reasons that I've given already, and sometimes they don't
even work as well as the right handed versions because
(39:16):
sometimes they're just made by right handers. But if you look,
you can often find them. So being left handed in
a world that has largely been designed by and for
right handed people isn't always easy or even safe. There
have even been numerous studies that suggest that left handers
may have a lower life expectancy than right handers, not
(39:40):
because we are somehow inherently less healthy, but perhaps because
we might be a little more accident prone than right handers.
You know, maybe we're using those right handed chainsaws in
a way that is most assuredly going to result in catastrophe.
There are a lot of little tasks that just become
a touch harder for the poor lefties of us out there.
(40:03):
All that being said, I chose this topic not just
a grouse about how irritating it is to be left
handed sometimes, though again that was a big part of it,
but to show how this is just one way that
bias can have an impact on a population. In this case,
I'm talking about handedness. And it's pretty obvious that most
(40:24):
of the time the bias against left handers isn't malicious.
It's not intentional. It's not like right handers are trying
to wipe out the left handers by creating stuff like
can openers or pencil sharpeners or chainsaws that really only
operate properly if they're used as a right handed way.
They're just making stuff that works for them, and that's
(40:45):
one of the really insidious things about bias. It doesn't
have to be an intentional malicious thing. When engineers are
building something, they want to make something that works, and
you have to consider what the problem is and how
you intend to solve that problem, and then you design
that solution. And many times engineers are looking at problems
(41:06):
from their own perspectives, but not from the perspective of
someone who is not like them, And for that reason,
we sometimes get technologies that work really great if you
happen to match the same general demographic and perspective as
the engineer who made it, but not so great if
you don't. This becomes an enormous issue with stuff like accessibility,
(41:29):
where people who might be differently abled are trying to
use technology. Those who have challenges with hearing or vision
or what have you might find it extra difficult to
make use of certain technologies because those technologies depend rather
heavily upon faculties that the differently abled may not possess,
or at least may not possess to the same degree.
(41:52):
And so a gadget that an able bodied person might
think is life changing could be completely useless in the
hands of someone else. And it doesn't always have to
be that way. Designing things with accessibility in mind presents
new challenges, no doubt about that. But that's what engineering
is all about. It's about overcoming challenges. Moreover, it means
(42:15):
more people can directly benefit from the solutions that engineers create,
and bias can emerge in lots of other ways. I've
recently had shows where I've mentioned bias in the design
of systems that use artificial intelligence and machine learning. If
you train a system using a data set that is biased,
the end result will reflect that bias. For example, if
(42:38):
you train an image recognition system to identify a face
and you only train the system using a data set
that includes photos of white people, that system could have
problems working when you feed in pictures of people who
aren't white. We've seen this happen with some pretty awful results.
More than a few facial recognition systems have shown to
(42:59):
work well when they're identifying white people, but not well
whenever trying to identify people of color. That bias leads
us to a technological kind of racism that has real
world effects and consequences, much worse effects than the little
frustrations I've encountered as a left handed person I can't
even begin to understand how that all plays out in
(43:21):
a day to day life, except to know that it's
just worse than what I have to cope with. So
that's really the message of this episode. It's not that
we need more left handed strato caster guitars, though that
is also true. We do need them more specifically, I
need them even more specifically. I just need one, really,
(43:44):
and it's gonna be a while before I can justify
buying a silver burst left handed strato caster, So get
on that fender. No, the real message of this episode
is that the purpose of technology, when you really it
down to it, is to make our lives better. But
that's only true if we're designing technology that addresses the
(44:07):
needs of people in general, not subsets of people or
through excluding groups of people. Whether you are designing a
physical gadget or an app or whatever, it is important
to step outside of yourself and to think about how
people who are different from you will be accessing and
experiencing the use of that technology. It could be that
(44:30):
with just a few tweaks, you could turn what was
a decent idea into a world changing one. I plan
on doing more episodes like this one, and I hope
to get some women on this show to talk about
how the tech world has tried to cater to women
in various ways, sometimes successfully and perhaps way too frequently,
(44:53):
sometimes in colossal failures. Just look at all the pink stuff.
But I think that that is really a related issue,
particularly in an industry that is still dominated by male
designers and engineers and executives. It's a problem that we
have to confront and fix in order to make stuff
(45:15):
that really works for everybody, or at least works for
the intended audience, because otherwise you just get a bunch
of you know, knuckle headed guys saying, you know, I
think women like pink things, Let's make it pink. That's
so not cool. Anyway. This is an issue that obviously
(45:38):
goes beyond technology, but we see it really with laser
focus in the tech world over and over again. That's
why I wanted to bring it up. And I brought
up the left handed perspective because it's one I can
speak to directly. It's one that I have experienced, and
I can acknowledge that while it can be frustrating, it's
nothing like what other people go through through all the time.
(46:01):
In their day to day lives. So that's it for
this episode. More of a kind of abstract approach to technology,
but one I think is important and our goal, I
think should always be to create technologies that work for
as many people as possible, to improve things as much
as possible, and not just to you know, throw in
(46:23):
a feature because you think it's cool, or to throw
in a feature and call it accessibility in order to
have a little box checked off of your to do list.
That's not good enough. If you guys have suggestions for
future topics of tech stuff, whether it's a specific technology,
maybe it's a company, maybe it's a person in tech,
maybe it's a theme, let me know. Reach out on Twitter.
(46:44):
The handle is tech stuff H. S W and I'll
talk to you again really soon. Text Stuff is an
I Heart Radio production. For more podcasts from my Heart Radio,
visit the i Heart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever
you listen to your favorite shows. H
Welcome to text Time, a production from I Heart Radio.
Hey there, and welcome to tex Stuff. I'm your host,
Jonathan Strickland. I'm an executive producer with I Heart Radio,
and I love all things tech and it is a
story time you guys. Now, those of you who follow
(00:27):
my personal account over on Twitter, which is at John Strickland,
it's j O. N. Strickland. If you're morbidly curious. Those
of you who do follow me, you might know that
I was eagerly anticipating the delivery of a Squire Classic
Sixties Vibe Stratocaster, an electric guitar. And you know, I've
(00:52):
done episodes about electric guitars, I've talked about them a lot,
and I thought, I really want one of these. It
would be really nice to have one. This would have
been my first six string electric guitar. And I figured,
since you know, I'm working from home now, it would
be good to pick up a new skill to keep
my mind sharp and occupied, and you know, to help
(01:13):
me get into a sort of meditative state to help
manage anxiety. By the way, um, anxiety is a real
pain in the butt, and I recommend anyone who has
anxiety to look into ways to manage it in a
really healthy manner, because that stuff is no joke, and
it's obviously getting more challenging to deal with that. Anyway,
(01:33):
back to my story, I had been thinking about getting
a guitar, and I wanted it to be a decent guitar,
you know, something I would actually want to pick up
and play. I didn't want to buy something super cheap
and then find out I didn't like the feel of
it or how it sounded, because that would discourage me
from playing it. I would just set it down and
(01:55):
never pick it up again. But on the other hand,
I also didn't want to go crazy and buy some
sort of, you know, super expensive guitar, because guitars can
get real expensive, y'all. I mean, what if I didn't
like playing guitar just because I didn't like it? Right?
What if I decided that I didn't enjoy playing. I
am forty five years old this year, and skills just
(02:16):
don't come to me as quickly as they used to.
So it's entirely possible that I could become frustrated or
I could become bored, even with a really nice guitar,
and then just set it down and let it collect dust.
So I would have wasted a lot of money on
a really expensive decoration at that point, and that would
(02:38):
be really irresponsible even in a good economic climate, let
alone one as uncertain as the one we find ourselves
in today. So I did what I do. I did
a lot of research, like a lot of research. My
wife was getting amused by how frequently I was watching
videos about different guitars and different price ranges, weighing them, saying, well, yeah,
(03:03):
this is gonna be a slightly less expensive guitar, which
means it's going to have these sort of things that
I'll have to consider. But but on the other hand,
it's better than this other guitar, you know. I went
through all of that. Ultimately I decided I wanted a
strato caster, a classic electric guitar. The strato caster is
made by Fender, and I really like the sound of
(03:27):
strato casters now. I love stuff like surf rock, and
Dick Dale, one of the most famous surf rock guitarists,
played a strat But I also wanted to be financially
responsible because there are a lot of different strato casters
out there, and generally they mostly share a couple of
common traits. Most strato casters have three single coil pickups,
(03:51):
and the pickups are the components that pick up the
vibration of the strings and then convert that into electric
signals that can then feed out to an amplifier and speakers.
Strats have three of these, typically one near the base
of the neck of the guitar the neck pickup, one
in the middle of the body of the guitar, and
one towards the bridge of the guitar. A switch on
(04:15):
the strat lets you select which pickup or which pair
of pickups are active at any given time, and that
changes the sound you get out of the guitar when
it plays through an amplifier. But beyond these general similarities,
there are a ton of different options. You can buy
a starter entry level strat for less than two hundred dollars,
(04:37):
or you could go bunkers and buy a mod shop
guitar for around eight hundred dollars. So yeah, there is
a range, and of course if you went full custom
shop it could be way more expensive. So I looked
into the Squire line of guitars. Now this is Fender's
budget line, but they tend to measure up pretty well
(04:58):
to guitars from the more prestigious official Fender line, particularly
in the Squire Classic Vibe series, which are guitars they
are designed to be closer to the style of the
classic electric guitars of the fifties and sixties. Now, I'm
left handed, and that's really what I'm going to get
into in this episode, because being left handed means there
(05:21):
are a lot of little struggles in your life. Most
of the time, they aren't particularly meaningful or noteworthy. They
tend to mostly be slightly frustrating at worst, and that's
about it most of the time. So I want to
stress from the beginning of this episode that the stuff
I'm going to talk about is really not that big
(05:42):
a deal in the grand scheme of things most of
the time. But being left handed often means that when
it comes to purchasing stuff where handedness is a factor,
like guitars, you're faced with fewer options than you're right
handed counterparts. For example, if you were to go to
Fenders website the morning that I wrote this, and you
(06:03):
were to look at the different options for electric guitars
that they had in stock, you would see at that
time that the company had one hundred eleven guitars for
right handers in stock for left handers eight eight versus
one hundred eleven. Now, typically a left hander has fewer options,
(06:25):
and then fewer choices within those options, choices like the
color of the guitar, for example. So while I could
have loved a Candy Apple red left handed Squire Classic
Sixties Vibes stratocaster, that was not an option. Nor could
I get the lovely Lake Placid blue option that right
(06:46):
handers could get. Those right handed versions had Candy Apple
red and Lake Placid blue, but for left handers you
didn't have a choice. There was only one color option, sunburst,
which sadly is my least favorite of the three colors.
But hey, them's the brakes. And while I wasn't in
love with the color, I could live with it. And
(07:07):
I did love all the things I read about the
line of guitars, so I didn't really let that bother
me so much. And before anyone pipes up about restringing
a guitar so that you can convert a right handed
guitar into a left handed guitar, yeah, I could technically
have purchased a right handed Candy Apple red model, taking
(07:29):
the strings off, taking the nut off, the top of
the neck, flip the nut around, reinserted it, then restrung
the guitar so that it was a left handed guitar.
But that would also mean that all the controls for
the guitar, like the volume and tone knobs and the
tremolo or whammy bar would have been on the wrong side,
and I would have to figure out how to deal
(07:50):
with that in order to play it properly. So I
wasn't really keen on trying to make a product that
had been made for a right hander work for a
left hander. I had a few gift cards for Amazon,
not a sponsor, and that sealed the deal for me.
I said, I'm gonna use these gift cards toward buying
a guitar. I would buy a Squire Strato caster for
(08:11):
four hundred dollars, which is not an insignificant sum of money,
particularly if you're trying to stay economically responsible during a
time of uncertainty. But with the gift cards, that would
bring the price down to about half price, and I
figured I would splurge on myself as sort of a
late birthday present. I figured, if nothing else, I could
(08:32):
consider it an investment in my mental health. I placed
my order on a Saturday, and I was predicted to
receive the guitar on the following Friday, so a week later. Now,
over the course of that week, I grew a bit
anxious because when I would check on the order status,
it hadn't changed. It had registered order, but it never
(08:52):
moved to shipping, let alone out for delivery. And then
on that Friday that I was to receive it, July fourth,
twenty that was the morning that I wrote this, I
finally got an email that said my order had been
canceled due to quote lack of availability end quote. Now,
(09:13):
Amazon's system had said that there was only one of
these guitars and stock, but apparently they just couldn't locate it,
and so I did not get my guitar, though I
did receive the accessories I had ordered. So now I've
got a guitar stand and a guitar strap, but no
guitar to go with it. Sad trombone. Now, I don't
(09:37):
tell this story just because I'm bummed out and I
want to grouse about it, though I admit that's definitely
part of it. I want to talk about the problems
that left handers face when it comes to certain technologies,
and how those relatively minor problems can open the door
to the realization and acknowledgement that other people face much
(09:58):
more serious challenges when it comes to tech and bias
and accessibility. And before I get into it too much,
let's talk about why I'm not upset at Fender Guitars
for this in general, I'm not even really upset at Amazon.
I mean, when it comes down to one unit in
all of Amazon, I imagine it's not that uncommon for
(10:21):
something to appear in an online inventory, and yet you
can actually track down the physical thing when someone places
in order. You just can't figure out where it is
in a warehouse somewhere. That's got to happen, you know,
fairly frequently. The prevailing wisdom is that left handers make
up about ten of the total population. Now that number
(10:44):
is sometimes disputed. Some argue there are way more lefties
than that, but the general consensus is that nine out
of ten people are right handed. So if you are
making products where handedness matters, it makes far more sense
to dedicate your or focus on the right handers. They
make up the bulk of the population, they represent your
(11:05):
primary customers, and that will guide many of your other decisions.
For example, if what you're making requires mass production, you
have to create an assembly process, and that assembly process
needs to be as efficient as possible. Efficiency relates to cost,
so the more efficient you are able to make the
(11:26):
production process, the less it costs to make the thing
you're making, and that means you can be competitive in
your pricing. When you put your product up on the
market against products from other companies. You need to charge
more than it costs to make so that you can
make a profit. You don't want to sell things at
a loss typically, but you can also be competitive against
(11:47):
those other companies that are also making whatever it is
you're making. But this means your assembly process needs to
be fine tuned toward that product. You can imagine that
there is an ideal version of whatever it is you're making.
This is the model you're working off of. This is
what you're trying to replicate every single time. So your
goal is to produce stuff like guitars that match that
(12:10):
model as much as possible. And with guitars made from wood,
this is actually impossible. You're never going to have two
guitars come out exactly the same because there's going to
be variations in the wood. You'll be able to see
and maybe even feel minor differences from guitar to guitar,
even in the same line, even produced on the same day.
(12:33):
But the goal is to get each guitar as close
to this standard as you possibly can, and that means
that the whole process needs to be precise, consistent, and
easy to replicate. So the process works great as long
as you're producing the same thing over and over. You'll
get small variations, but in general you'll chug along and
(12:56):
you'll build however many guitars as your facility can manage
given the process of materials, as long as all these
guitars require that same process. And that's where the left
handed problem comes in. To make a left handed guitar,
you need to flip everything a hundred eighty degrees. The
string order is reversed, the headstock has to be flipped,
(13:19):
the tuners will have to be on the opposite side
of a right handed guitar. The controls like volume and tone,
and the tremolo or wamy bar have to be on
the opposite side. The pickguard has to be flipped. You
get the idea. The real problem is you can't just
flip a switch on the assembly line to go from
right handed to left handed and have the whole process
(13:41):
PLoP out ten left handed guitars for every one right
handed guitars. It doesn't work that way. Instead, you either
need a parallel assembly line just for left handed guitars,
but that doesn't make much sense because you're never going
to need to produce as many left handed guitars, or
you have to retool your normal assembly process in order
(14:04):
to occasionally produce some left handed models. Either way, producing
a left handed guitar isn't as efficient as producing a
right handed one, and that means it costs more to make.
Now you could charge more for a left handed guitar,
and some companies do, or you could resign yourself to
the fact that you just won't make as much money
(14:27):
selling a left handed guitar as you would selling a
right handed guitar. Either way, you're not likely to make
that many left handed guitars, and it's important that you
know I am not criticizing that decision. It makes no
economic sense to produce left handed anything's in the same
(14:47):
amount as right handed ones. You would never sell them
all because there's just not enough left handers to make
up the market. The same is true for all the
different options you find with products like guitars. Sure you
could spend the time and effort necessary to provide the
exact same options to lefties as you do to right ease,
(15:08):
but there's a good chance you would end up with
a lot of unsold stock. You might eventually move that
unsold stock by selling products at a huge discount, but
by then you could be looking at maybe breaking even
or perhaps even selling them at a loss. It makes
way more sense to just never make the ding dang
durned things in the first place. So this means that
(15:32):
left handers often have to make some compromises when it
comes to technology. Either we have to make do with
things that were made for right handers and find a
way to make it work, or we are left with
a limited number of options that pales in comparison to
what is available for right handers. When we come back,
we'll talk about how the more sinister among us have
(15:54):
to navigate technology, But first let's take a quick break. Now,
I'm not going to go into the history of how
being left handed is or was a taboo in many
cultures that gets outside the realm of tech stuff, but
(16:17):
it mostly comes down to how groups of people are
pretty good at identifying individuals who do not fit the norm,
and then they attempt to find ways to explain why
that person is different, and those ways often can end
up being negative. Going into left handed technology is interesting
because in some cultures the typical approach to dealing with
(16:39):
left handers was to force them to perform tasks as
a right hander. Forcing people to write with their right
hand even if they were left handed. You hear the
story all the time, and this is not always easy
for left handers. I mean, assuming you're not ambidexterous, I
imagine there are things that you would find fairly simple
to do with your dominant hand that become frustratingly difficult
(17:03):
to do with your non dominant hand. I figured we'd
start with a technology that I found quite vexing in
my youth, a very simple technology, scissors. Let's talk about
how scissors work. So scissors are a type of compound machine,
and a compound machine is one that makes use of
(17:24):
two or more simple machines. The six simple machines. The
classic simple machines are the wheel and axle, the lever,
the inclined plane, the pulley, the screw, and the wedge. Now, interestingly,
the pully, screw, and wedge are all extensions of the
(17:44):
first three machines, and simple machines are intended to change
the magnitude of a force or the direction of that force.
A pair of scissors consists of two blades, which are
essentially wedges, and that's one of the simple machines. They
are also mounted in a cross shape around a fulcrum,
(18:06):
and that turns the handles of the scissors into levers,
another simple machine. So pushing the levers together brings the
wedge blades together, and that's what allows you to cut stuff. Moreover,
the process of squeezing the handles actually creates pressure that
squeezes the blades together, not just up and down, but
left and right, so there's a sort of pinching action
(18:29):
happening between the blades that allows for a nice clean cut.
That is, they do this if you happen to be
using the scissors in the proper hand. If a left
hander tries to use right handed scissors with their left hand,
they will find that the blades tend to create a
space between them as they close, so they close up
(18:51):
and down, but there's a space left and right that
allows whatever you're cutting to bend between the blades, which
usually means you don't tend to cut anything at all,
or if you do cut, you do so in a
way where you're mauling whatever it is you're trying to cut.
I can't tell you how many times I ended up
with what looked like shredded paper instead of a nice
(19:14):
clean cut. The squeezing action with the left hand just
creates a force along that fulcrum that moves the blades
apart rather than squeezing them together. Now, left handers can
attempt to compensate for this by creating a different force
with their fingers, essentially pushing their thumbs and index fingers
in a way to create that pinching force. You're forcing
(19:34):
the blades together. The boy, howdy, that is not comfortable.
It hurts. Moreover, the position of the blades means that
the top blade is always on the right side. You
can flip the blades over, but that means the top
blade is still on the right side. This actually makes
it really hard for left handers to see what they
are cutting. If they're trying to cut with their left
(19:56):
hand because the blade is in the way. Left handed
scissor have the top blade on the left side rather
than the right side. That there are so called left
handed scissors that don't do this, but they are left
handed only in the sense that they have handles that
have contours that better fit the left hand. But without
changing that blade orientation, you really haven't solved the problem.
(20:19):
You still can't really see what you're cutting, and you're
still going to be forcing those blades apart from each other. Now.
Fun fact, I never learned to use left handed scissors
because when I was going to school, my school just
didn't have any. I would use right handed scissors, either
trying desperately to get them to work with my left
hand or just giving up and using my right hand,
(20:40):
knowing that whatever I was going to cut was going
to look awful because of my lack of fine motor
skills with my non dominant hand. For another common tool,
one much more advanced than a pair of scissors, let
us consider the computer mouse. Now, your typical computer mouse
tends to have at least two buttons, one on the
(21:00):
left and one on the right. There are ones that don't.
They're the single button mouse. Types like the ones that
are used with certain max that kind of thing. But
your typical computer mouse has at least two buttons, a
left click and a right click, and they tend to
be contoured in such a way the mouse is that
they have a nice fit with the right hand. They
(21:23):
don't fit the left hand the same way. They're just
not contoured that way. And most programs tend to incorporate
mouse commands by shifting important functions for the keyboard to
the left side of that keyboard, so that way you've
got the mouse in your right hand and your left
hand remains free on the left side of the keyboard
to do whatever other functions you need to do to
(21:46):
navigate the program. Computer games tend to be a good
example of how this plays out in favor of right ees.
So take a first person shooter game like Doom. The
mouse controls your point of view or your aim the game.
You use your mouse to direct your line of sight
and thus where you have your big zappy gun pointed
at any given moment so you can shoot all those
(22:08):
little demon critters. Your character's movement maps typically to the
WAZA keys, the W A S D keys w being
forward s being backward and A and D typically being
straffe left and strafe right, respectively. In a shooting game,
you need to have precise aim to compete at really
(22:29):
high levels. If you watch some pro e sports players
and you really pay attention to how fast and precise
they are with their aim, it's incredible and it requires
a highly developed fine motor skill set with whatever hand
you're using to aim. In contrast, your movement in these
style of games is important, but typically does not need
the same level of precision as aiming, so offloading movement
(22:53):
to the non dominant hand isn't a huge problem. Left
handers have it harder. If they're using a traditional right
handed set up. They're aiming with their non dominant hand,
and thus they tend to be less precise and less accurate.
Now I know that's the case with me, and of
course I'm also older, so my reaction times are slowing
(23:14):
down too. I guess what I'm saying is you really
don't want me to be on your Overwatch team. There
are left handed versions of the computer mouse out there,
and the fact that we've gone to USB connections rather
than the old PS slash two ports that computers and
stuff like keyboards and mice used to depend on. We
(23:35):
don't use those anymore, which that usually means you actually
have more options of where you can connect stuff to
your computer, so cable management isn't as big a pain
in the neck because you typically have more options of
where that USB cable can plug into. If the game
developers thought it through, you might even be able to
(23:55):
map your computer keys so that your movement stuff can
go to a different set of four keys, such as I, J, K, L,
or the number pad. If you can't map keys, then
it means the left hander has to deal with sitting
in an odd way or positioning their keyboard in an
offset way so that the right hand can control those
(24:16):
W A, S D keys. Now, I used video games
as my example, but of course the computer mouse is
a standard input device for all sorts of PC programs.
I'm the only left handed person in my family, so
our computers at home all had a right handed set up,
right handed computer mouse and all that kind of stuff. Likewise,
(24:37):
when I got to high school and they just started
to offer classes using computers, all of those machines had
a right handed mouse as well. Some of the programs
would allow you to switch the mouse to a left
handed mode. But really all that meant was that the
left and right mouse buttons flipped what they did, so
that a right mouse click was the equivalent to a
(24:58):
right hander using a left mouse click. It didn't magically
change the shape of the mouse or how it connected
to the PC, so it might still not really be convenient.
So as a result, I taught myself to use a
mouse right handed early on. It wasn't that big a
deal because most of the stuff I was doing didn't
require lightning, fast reactions or anything, so I could take
(25:20):
my time moving my wobbly little cursor to the right
spot on the screen. A few times I tried to
use a left handed mouse. I hated it because all
the important keyboard functions were on the wrong side of
the keyboard and the user interface was clearly biased toward
right handers. It was just more convenient, though less precise,
(25:42):
to use my right hand on the mouse. Sticking with
video games, let's talk about consoles for a second. The
standard console controller these days has two thumbsticks, one for
each thumb. The left thumbstick typically control stuff like movement,
a right control stuff like camera angle or aim. So
(26:04):
again the task that requires the most precise fine tuning
goes to the right side. Some games do allow you
to change this. That's nice, but it's a bit weird
when you first do it, particularly since a lot of
games also include platforming elements where you need to access
controls that are mapped to the buttons on the controller.
(26:26):
The buttons on most controllers are, you guessed it over,
on the right side, so you have to take your
thumb off the right stick to hit the buttons on
the right side of the controller. If aim is going
to the left thumbstick and movement is going to the
right thumb stick, suddenly you can't jump and move at
the same time because you have to take your thumb
(26:48):
off the thumbstick and it has to do all the work.
You could conceivably buy a really expensive controller with stuff
like extra paddles and trigger buttons and map things out
to improve matters, but it's really hard to compensate for
this design using just a standard controller, and not all
games allow you to map controls like that. Now, I
(27:09):
don't mean to suggest that being left handed immediately means
a person is going to be bad at stuff like
video games. There are left handed players out there who
are amazing. Many have spent countless hours training their non
dominant hand to do more finely tuned tasks, and they
can compete at a professional level. But for a lot
(27:29):
of us, these basic approaches to design stand as an
extra challenge we face on top of whatever it is
we actually want to do now. I mentioned UI or
user interface a moment ago. The user interface of a
technology is exactly what it sounds like. It's the method
by which a user interacts with the technology. It includes
(27:51):
not just the physical interaction, such as the keyboard amouse
of a PC, or the touch screen of a smartphone
or the controller for a video game console. It also
includes the actual design of the software and how things
are laid out, and sometimes developers will build it in
a system that just favors right handedness in more subtle ways.
(28:13):
For example, I can't tell you how many on screen
smartphone keyboards I've used that become a total hassle because
I would be using my left hand and I would
hit keys a little to the left of center, and
the keys were really designed to be hit a little
to the right of center. I've practiced using my right
index finger to try and type things out much more
(28:35):
smoothly then if I were to use my left hand.
But I am left handed. I want to use my
left hand. I'm faster at it. It's more comfortable, at
least it would be, but I have to end up
thinking about aiming a little to the right of where
I think I need to go in order to hit
the key I want. Otherwise I'm just getting typos and
nonsense all the time. This sort of bias in design
(28:58):
can be found in a lot of other places too.
For example, the typical student desk tends to have a
shape that caters to right handers. Often there's a place
for the right arm to rest while the student is writing,
whereas on the left side of the desk it's typically open.
So if you're a lefty, you're writing with no support
for your left arm. And when I went to high school,
(29:19):
they had just switched over to these asymmetric desks and
they had more surface area on the right side. So
that's great if you're a right hander, your your notebook
is supported, you can just right that way. But as
a lefty, it meant that I had to twist a
bit in my seat just to write stuff down. Even
notebooks are laid out in a way that work better
(29:41):
for right handers than left handers, at least for those
of us in the Western hemisphere who are writing left
to right. The binding of a notebook is on the
left side. Now, that's not in the way if you're
a right hander. But if you're a lefty, then you've
got that binding to deal with, which means you're either
contorting yourself to work around it, or you're starting a
good deal further into the page than your right handed
(30:04):
counterparts are. Curse you notebook bindings. For that reason, when
I use notebooks, I typically either flip them upside down,
or I flipped them over and I start from the
back and I worked my way forward that way. The
binding is on the right side. I still right left
to right, but now the spiral of rings is on
(30:25):
the right hand side, and they don't get in my way. Now.
So far, most of the stuff I've mentioned has been frustrating,
but ultimately not really that big a deal. Yeah, it's
not fun to compensate to interact with a world that
was designed for people who aren't like you. But for
the most part, the examples I've used are fairly benign,
(30:45):
but just you wait, we'll be right back after this
short break. Left handers aren't strangers to facing struggles using
technology meant for right handers. And when we're lucky, someone
has created a left handed version for us to use.
(31:07):
When we're really lucky, that left handed version works just
as well as the right handed one does. When we're
crazy lucky, whatever it is we're doing with that left
handed tool doesn't otherwise have handedness entering into the picture.
But now we're gonna talk about chain saws. Yeah, chainsaws.
(31:32):
These are really useful and potentially extremely dangerous, and their
design favors right handers, which means that for people like me,
they become much more potentially dangerous tools. Now, chainsaw has
two handles. One is at the very rear of the chainsaw.
(31:53):
That's where the throttle control is, and that's meant for
the dominant hand. Really, it's meant for the right hand.
And then there's a front handle, and typically that's an
arc that goes along the top and side the left
side of the chainsaw. It's meant for the left hand
to be there to help guide the chainsaw. Many chainsaws
have that front handle join with the body of the chainsaw.
(32:16):
Itself close to the top right side of the device,
which means that even if you wanted to hold it
as a left hander, you would be very limited and
where your right hand could go, they couldn't go all
the way to the edge because that's where the are
the handle actually joins the body of the chainsaw. But
if you're holding the chainsaw with your right hand on
the rear handle, there's plenty of space for your left
(32:37):
hand to hold onto the front handle. That gives you
lots of different options for grips when you need to
use the chainsaw on different orientations, But typically you just
don't have that level of versatility on the right side
of the front handle, so if you were to try
and hold it left handed, you would already be facing
some limitations and controls really important when you've got a
(32:57):
whirling chain blade right in front of you. You want
that dominant hand on the back to control the overall
motion of the chainsaw and to deal with any kickback
you might have. The non dominant hand is really meant
to use to to guide the specific angle of attack
of the chainsaw. Chainsaws typically have a guard that's called
(33:19):
a chain break like a break like a kind you
would have in a car, and that's mounted in front
of the front handle. The chain break is essentially a
lever that, if it gets pushed beyond a fail point,
will cut off power to the blade. So let's say
that you're using the chainsaw. The chainsaw bucks back so
(33:39):
that the blade is now arching up so it would
be coming towards your head. The lever is positioned in
such a way that it will make contact with the
back of your leading hand, your left hand, and it'll
trip that lever, cutting off power to the blade. That's
the idea. The problem here is that if you are
(34:00):
using it the other way around, with your left hand
on the rear handle, your right hand might not be
in the right position to really engage with that chain break,
so if something bad happens, there may be no way
to stop it. That's not great. Or you could be
operating it as a right hander, but it means your
(34:20):
non dominant hand is the one that's trying to control
the overall motion of the blade. That's not a great
option either. Now I have used chainsaws a few times,
I've always had to revert to using them as if
I were right handed, which in my mind is the
least bad of all the different options I had in
front of me. And this is just one example of
(34:41):
a power tool that is designed to be used by
right handers. Pretty Much every tool is biased toward being
right handed. Either the tools are contoured in a way
where they fit the right hand but not the left,
or they operate in such a way that you really
need to be using them in your right hand, or
(35:01):
the line of sight doesn't really work unless you're using
it with the right hand dominant side. Whether it's a
table saw or a drill press or a power drill,
a lot of these tools just work best if they're
operated by a right hander, and at worst they can
be dangerous if they are operated any other way. The
(35:21):
same thing is true with firearms. Now, I am not
a gun guy. I have not fired any type of
firearm in a really long time, but if I did,
I'd likely be frustrated by the lack of options for me.
Most handguns that have an external safety catch place that
(35:42):
on the left side of the gun so that your
right thumb can easily disengage the catch whenever you are
ready to actually fire the handgun. But if you're holding
this in your left hand, the catches on the opposite
side of the gun from where your thumb rests. It's
no longer where you can easily disengage it. Many rifles
(36:02):
are designed specifically to use with the butt of the
stock up against your right side. They expend spent casings
out the right side of the firearm, so they're away
from the shooter. If you were to try and fire
left handed, you would be dealing with this, and it
would make the experience less safe for you and as
(36:23):
well as less safe for anyone who happens to be
around you. It's not great. Now there are manufacturers that
make ambidextrous models of firearms, meaning that at least in theory,
they can be fired either by a right hander or
a left hander with no real difference in performance. And
then there are a few that will make left handed
(36:46):
models of certain firearms, but these tend to be more
expensive than the exact same models that were made for
right handers, for much the same reason that it's hard
to find good options for left handed guitars. That being,
the manufacturing process has been streamlined to create a certain
type of product in a very particular way, and that
(37:07):
process works great when that's all you want to do.
But if you want to do anything besides make the
exact same product with the exact same orientation, that assembly
line cannot really accommodate that. So yeah, we left handers
need to make do, or maybe spend more money so
that we don't have to make do now. There is
a small, nearly cottage industry business of creating left handed
(37:31):
versions of many common utensils, tools, and gadgets. For left handers,
there are left handed can openers, for example, since using
a right handed can opener is tricky and at best
of pain in the well the hands, I guess. For
left handers, there are rulers that have measurements that go
(37:52):
from right to left, which is useful if you're a
lefty and you want to draw a line as a
precise length. Otherwise, my mo was to start at the
end result and work back at zero. So if I
needed to draw a three inch line, I would start
on the three inch mark and then draw toward the zero,
because then it was just easier for me to see
(38:13):
what I was doing. There are left handed cork screws
because it's easier to use because the twisting motion ends
up being counterclockwise rather than clockwise. There are left handed
measuring cups and left handed playing cards. These have markings
on the opposite side of where you would find them
on the right handed version or the standard version. The
(38:34):
products are otherwise identical to right handed whatever's right right,
A left handed measuring cup is exactly the same as
a right hand measuring cup, except the markings are on
the opposite side of the cup. That's it. For that
wonderful little flip, You're gonna be paying a premium, I mean,
like sometimes a crazy premium. You might see a measuring
(38:54):
cup that would cost five bucks end up being a
twenty dollar cup because it is a left handed one.
So yes, there is a certain selection of common tools
and utensils that you can find in a left handed orientation.
They typically cost more than the right handed version for
the reasons that I've given already, and sometimes they don't
even work as well as the right handed versions because
(39:16):
sometimes they're just made by right handers. But if you look,
you can often find them. So being left handed in
a world that has largely been designed by and for
right handed people isn't always easy or even safe. There
have even been numerous studies that suggest that left handers
may have a lower life expectancy than right handers, not
(39:40):
because we are somehow inherently less healthy, but perhaps because
we might be a little more accident prone than right handers.
You know, maybe we're using those right handed chainsaws in
a way that is most assuredly going to result in catastrophe.
There are a lot of little tasks that just become
a touch harder for the poor lefties of us out there.
(40:03):
All that being said, I chose this topic not just
a grouse about how irritating it is to be left
handed sometimes, though again that was a big part of it,
but to show how this is just one way that
bias can have an impact on a population. In this case,
I'm talking about handedness. And it's pretty obvious that most
(40:24):
of the time the bias against left handers isn't malicious.
It's not intentional. It's not like right handers are trying
to wipe out the left handers by creating stuff like
can openers or pencil sharpeners or chainsaws that really only
operate properly if they're used as a right handed way.
They're just making stuff that works for them, and that's
(40:45):
one of the really insidious things about bias. It doesn't
have to be an intentional malicious thing. When engineers are
building something, they want to make something that works, and
you have to consider what the problem is and how
you intend to solve that problem, and then you design
that solution. And many times engineers are looking at problems
(41:06):
from their own perspectives, but not from the perspective of
someone who is not like them, And for that reason,
we sometimes get technologies that work really great if you
happen to match the same general demographic and perspective as
the engineer who made it, but not so great if
you don't. This becomes an enormous issue with stuff like accessibility,
(41:29):
where people who might be differently abled are trying to
use technology. Those who have challenges with hearing or vision
or what have you might find it extra difficult to
make use of certain technologies because those technologies depend rather
heavily upon faculties that the differently abled may not possess,
or at least may not possess to the same degree.
(41:52):
And so a gadget that an able bodied person might
think is life changing could be completely useless in the
hands of someone else. And it doesn't always have to
be that way. Designing things with accessibility in mind presents
new challenges, no doubt about that. But that's what engineering
is all about. It's about overcoming challenges. Moreover, it means
(42:15):
more people can directly benefit from the solutions that engineers create,
and bias can emerge in lots of other ways. I've
recently had shows where I've mentioned bias in the design
of systems that use artificial intelligence and machine learning. If
you train a system using a data set that is biased,
the end result will reflect that bias. For example, if
(42:38):
you train an image recognition system to identify a face
and you only train the system using a data set
that includes photos of white people, that system could have
problems working when you feed in pictures of people who
aren't white. We've seen this happen with some pretty awful results.
More than a few facial recognition systems have shown to
(42:59):
work well when they're identifying white people, but not well
whenever trying to identify people of color. That bias leads
us to a technological kind of racism that has real
world effects and consequences, much worse effects than the little
frustrations I've encountered as a left handed person I can't
even begin to understand how that all plays out in
(43:21):
a day to day life, except to know that it's
just worse than what I have to cope with. So
that's really the message of this episode. It's not that
we need more left handed strato caster guitars, though that
is also true. We do need them more specifically, I
need them even more specifically. I just need one, really,
(43:44):
and it's gonna be a while before I can justify
buying a silver burst left handed strato caster, So get
on that fender. No, the real message of this episode
is that the purpose of technology, when you really it
down to it, is to make our lives better. But
that's only true if we're designing technology that addresses the
(44:07):
needs of people in general, not subsets of people or
through excluding groups of people. Whether you are designing a
physical gadget or an app or whatever, it is important
to step outside of yourself and to think about how
people who are different from you will be accessing and
experiencing the use of that technology. It could be that
(44:30):
with just a few tweaks, you could turn what was
a decent idea into a world changing one. I plan
on doing more episodes like this one, and I hope
to get some women on this show to talk about
how the tech world has tried to cater to women
in various ways, sometimes successfully and perhaps way too frequently,
(44:53):
sometimes in colossal failures. Just look at all the pink stuff.
But I think that that is really a related issue,
particularly in an industry that is still dominated by male
designers and engineers and executives. It's a problem that we
have to confront and fix in order to make stuff
(45:15):
that really works for everybody, or at least works for
the intended audience, because otherwise you just get a bunch
of you know, knuckle headed guys saying, you know, I
think women like pink things, Let's make it pink. That's
so not cool. Anyway. This is an issue that obviously
(45:38):
goes beyond technology, but we see it really with laser
focus in the tech world over and over again. That's
why I wanted to bring it up. And I brought
up the left handed perspective because it's one I can
speak to directly. It's one that I have experienced, and
I can acknowledge that while it can be frustrating, it's
nothing like what other people go through through all the time.
(46:01):
In their day to day lives. So that's it for
this episode. More of a kind of abstract approach to technology,
but one I think is important and our goal, I
think should always be to create technologies that work for
as many people as possible, to improve things as much
as possible, and not just to you know, throw in
(46:23):
a feature because you think it's cool, or to throw
in a feature and call it accessibility in order to
have a little box checked off of your to do list.
That's not good enough. If you guys have suggestions for
future topics of tech stuff, whether it's a specific technology,
maybe it's a company, maybe it's a person in tech,
maybe it's a theme, let me know. Reach out on Twitter.
(46:44):
The handle is tech stuff H. S W and I'll
talk to you again really soon. Text Stuff is an
I Heart Radio production. For more podcasts from my Heart Radio,
visit the i Heart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever
you listen to your favorite shows. H
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