5 ms·

> ... a small minority ... presbyopia ... I think what you just indirectly pointed out is that software is largely written by young, ignorant people who don't

> ... a small minority ... presbyopia ... I think what you just indirectly pointed out is that software is largely written by young, ignorant people who don't appreciate that everyone will get to experience presbyopia, and it happens sooner than you think. Maybe we should require product owners to be at least 40 years old ;-).

nightski 5y ago
I don't think this is reality. There might be some truth to it, but in my opinion the real problem is the platform itself. I'm going to blame it on browsers and web standards. The web was not designed with accessibility as default. Instead it is a significant amount of work to make things accessible. Every project incurs huge cost in order to achieve it. I truly believe from an accessibility standpoint the web is simply broken. So sure, blame it on young programmers. But that's a poor excuse for where we are at today in my humble opinion.
- akersten 5y ago
  > The web was not designed with accessibility as default. Instead it is a significant amount of work to make things accessible. Every project incurs huge cost in order to achieve it. This has got to be satire right? HTML is accessible by default, it's your horrible JS SPA frameworks that break thid. See [0] [0]: https://motherfuckingwebsite.com/ https://motherfuckingwebsite.com/
  - PaulHoule 5y ago
    For my day job I put a lot of effort into making an SPA accessible but it is absolutely important to the business because our customers demand it. I haven't perceived maintaining accessibility to be a big burden in the long term. Interestingly the accessibility project forced me to raise my game on CSS/HTML, graphic design, etc. and probably had a bigger impact on my side projects than it did on my work.
    - nightski 5y ago
      I put in this work as well. It's not about "burden" but cost. Clearly there is a cost here (your time). I don't mind spending the time, but that doesn't mean it costs nothing. Now multiply this times every web app in existence and the cost is quite large. A lot of this could be avoided with a better platform.
  - deleted 5y ago
    [deleted]
- jraph 5y ago
  What? It seems to me the web is accessible by default. Write a plain old HTML page and everybody should be able to read it (assuming they have a computer to open it or a printed version). People go out of their ways to mess this up by using fancy colors, fancy web fonts, messed up JS (frameworks), non standard components because it's cooler, disabling outlines, and so on. Do you have examples where the Web is not accessible by default, apart from the by default unlimited line width which is easily fixable with one line of CSS? Sure you need to use the right markup for the right things (and, no, <div> is usually not the right element for building a button or writing a paragraph, there are dedicated tags for those) but I can't see a way to avoid this.
  - rootusrootus 5y ago
    Yeah I agree. A plain old web page is rarely a problem. Ctrl-plus-plus-plus-plus however many times I need it, and I'm good. It's always 'modern' web pages that insist on fighting me.
    - nightski 5y ago
      We need to admit that "modern" web pages are a thing. If we keep ignoring most of the web because "they are doing it wrong" then accessibility will never be solved.
      - jraph 5y ago
        It seems to me you can build quite complex things that will be accessible by default with the web platform. IF don't fight it and if you respect semantics and progressive enhancement / beautiful degradation. You get so much by default: legible colors and font sizes, tabbed page navigation, alt texts, clickable labels, zoomable interface... When you embrace the platform and its spirit, you get accessible results quite easily. But not a lot of people seem to embrace it. Many people seem to think "what to do for what I want to see" instead of "what to do for what I want to mean", and you lose if you do this. You need to get your meaning right and then decorate it carefully. You should not paint first. But that's probably not a web-specific issue. What's more, building accessible things may make you gain time, by having a robust basis. It's not always a cost.
PaulHoule 5y ago
For years my optometrist told me I would eventually get presbyopia and then finally I reached the point where I need two pairs of glasses. It is on my mind because one of my hobbies is a cyberphysical artsystem that has a small book of design rules and presbyopia is what sets the limits on feature size. (You can't just tell people "hold the card closer")
- johan_felisaz 5y ago
  Could you explain a bit more what do you mean by "cyberphysical artsystem" ? I have no clue what this is, but the name sounds cool
  - PaulHoule 5y ago
    This fills about 1/3 of a wall in my office https://gen5.info/$/XQ*42RXF-TLY:$B.8/ https://gen5.info/$/XQ*42RXF-TLY:$B.8/ and is made of 8″x8″ cards. That's the first constellation I made, most of the output is either stand alone 4″x6″ cards or constellations. I'm working now on my third constellation from images published by Ukraine's MoD. I've been dragging on my feet about blogging a manifesto for the three-sided cards, first because the system was changing by the day (it was a big thing for me to realize I could eliminate paper jams by printing the back side first) and then because I found hugo is good for anything except things that involve quantitative thinking or artistic sensibilities. I am still looking for a static site generator that's the equal of the subjects I want to blog about.
    - falcolas 5y ago
      Thank you for the nerd snipe. Fascinating.
peterkelly 5y ago
And they're using the very latest macbook pro with a fast and reliable internet connection, on which the site/app seems to work just fine and must therefore be ok.
- PaulHoule 5y ago
  It happens to everybody. Circa 2008 I was working on a Silverlight RIA in a company that had MSDN subscriptions for everyone. It worked just fine over the LAN off the server in our Ithaca office but when we demoed it for the people at the office in Rochester it took the application 40 minutes to boot because of all the round tripping. That won me all the arguments I'd been having about excessive round tripping, getting that 40 minutes down to 40 seconds wasn't hard once those questions were resolved.
kenjackson 5y ago
I've become "that guy" in presentations who constantly tells people "fonts too small", "can't read cause the contrast isn't enough", etc... My hope over time is that I stop being invited to meetings or people actually take the time to fix their presentations before it is presented to a wider audience.
- MandieD 5y ago
  I had the old MS Surface Pro 2 (11" screen, I think) as my daily driver for awhile, and found that designing PowerPoints and conference sessions - including code demos - to be legible on that screen led to better presentations.
- thwarted 5y ago
  For presentations, I've observed that constraints on number of slides encourage people to try to stuff a bunch of information at small font sizes on a single slide, often big blocks of text. And they are laying it out on a high dpi screen that ultimately gets scaled down when presenting (especially with screen sharing). They'll have two data points in a small font and massive amount of empty space on the slide. Very few people know how to use presentation tools effectively and most are terrible at information design.
  - PaulHoule 5y ago
    I went through a phase of making sales presentations aimed at C-levels at big co's and was trained to pack the information on two slides into one slide and then consolidate two of those slides into one slide... And do it all without big blocks of texts or small fonts but rather well-planned complex diagrams that would draw people in and provide a great foil for spoken explanation, answering questions, etc. In the hands of a lot of people though Powerpoint is a tool for insulting the intelligence of the whole room.
    - bluGill 5y ago
      If you know what the presentation is about from reading the slides then those are bad slides. Slides exist to support a presentation and should not make sense without someone explaining it. If you want to understand without attending a presentation then what you want is a paper, or book. Those are very different formats.
JJMcJ 5y ago
Also color blindness and low contrast.

nightski 5y ago

I don't think this is reality. There might be some truth to it, but in my opinion the real problem is the platform itself. I'm going to blame it on browsers and web standards. The web was not designed with accessibility as default. Instead it is a significant amount of work to make things accessible. Every project incurs huge cost in order to achieve it. I truly believe from an accessibility standpoint the web is simply broken. So sure, blame it on young programmers. But that's a poor excuse for where we are at today in my humble opinion.

akersten 5y ago
> The web was not designed with accessibility as default. Instead it is a significant amount of work to make things accessible. Every project incurs huge cost in order to achieve it. This has got to be satire right? HTML is accessible by default, it's your horrible JS SPA frameworks that break thid. See [0] [0]: https://motherfuckingwebsite.com/ https://motherfuckingwebsite.com/
- PaulHoule 5y ago
  For my day job I put a lot of effort into making an SPA accessible but it is absolutely important to the business because our customers demand it. I haven't perceived maintaining accessibility to be a big burden in the long term. Interestingly the accessibility project forced me to raise my game on CSS/HTML, graphic design, etc. and probably had a bigger impact on my side projects than it did on my work.
  - nightski 5y ago
    I put in this work as well. It's not about "burden" but cost. Clearly there is a cost here (your time). I don't mind spending the time, but that doesn't mean it costs nothing. Now multiply this times every web app in existence and the cost is quite large. A lot of this could be avoided with a better platform.
- deleted 5y ago
  [deleted]
jraph 5y ago
What? It seems to me the web is accessible by default. Write a plain old HTML page and everybody should be able to read it (assuming they have a computer to open it or a printed version). People go out of their ways to mess this up by using fancy colors, fancy web fonts, messed up JS (frameworks), non standard components because it's cooler, disabling outlines, and so on. Do you have examples where the Web is not accessible by default, apart from the by default unlimited line width which is easily fixable with one line of CSS? Sure you need to use the right markup for the right things (and, no, <div> is usually not the right element for building a button or writing a paragraph, there are dedicated tags for those) but I can't see a way to avoid this.
- rootusrootus 5y ago
  Yeah I agree. A plain old web page is rarely a problem. Ctrl-plus-plus-plus-plus however many times I need it, and I'm good. It's always 'modern' web pages that insist on fighting me.
  - nightski 5y ago
    We need to admit that "modern" web pages are a thing. If we keep ignoring most of the web because "they are doing it wrong" then accessibility will never be solved.
    - jraph 5y ago
      It seems to me you can build quite complex things that will be accessible by default with the web platform. IF don't fight it and if you respect semantics and progressive enhancement / beautiful degradation. You get so much by default: legible colors and font sizes, tabbed page navigation, alt texts, clickable labels, zoomable interface... When you embrace the platform and its spirit, you get accessible results quite easily. But not a lot of people seem to embrace it. Many people seem to think "what to do for what I want to see" instead of "what to do for what I want to mean", and you lose if you do this. You need to get your meaning right and then decorate it carefully. You should not paint first. But that's probably not a web-specific issue. What's more, building accessible things may make you gain time, by having a robust basis. It's not always a cost.

PaulHoule 5y ago

For years my optometrist told me I would eventually get presbyopia and then finally I reached the point where I need two pairs of glasses. It is on my mind because one of my hobbies is a cyberphysical artsystem that has a small book of design rules and presbyopia is what sets the limits on feature size. (You can't just tell people "hold the card closer")

johan_felisaz 5y ago
Could you explain a bit more what do you mean by "cyberphysical artsystem" ? I have no clue what this is, but the name sounds cool
- PaulHoule 5y ago
  This fills about 1/3 of a wall in my office https://gen5.info/$/XQ*42RXF-TLY:$B.8/ https://gen5.info/$/XQ*42RXF-TLY:$B.8/ and is made of 8″x8″ cards. That's the first constellation I made, most of the output is either stand alone 4″x6″ cards or constellations. I'm working now on my third constellation from images published by Ukraine's MoD. I've been dragging on my feet about blogging a manifesto for the three-sided cards, first because the system was changing by the day (it was a big thing for me to realize I could eliminate paper jams by printing the back side first) and then because I found hugo is good for anything except things that involve quantitative thinking or artistic sensibilities. I am still looking for a static site generator that's the equal of the subjects I want to blog about.
  - falcolas 5y ago
    Thank you for the nerd snipe. Fascinating.

peterkelly 5y ago

And they're using the very latest macbook pro with a fast and reliable internet connection, on which the site/app seems to work just fine and must therefore be ok.

PaulHoule 5y ago
It happens to everybody. Circa 2008 I was working on a Silverlight RIA in a company that had MSDN subscriptions for everyone. It worked just fine over the LAN off the server in our Ithaca office but when we demoed it for the people at the office in Rochester it took the application 40 minutes to boot because of all the round tripping. That won me all the arguments I'd been having about excessive round tripping, getting that 40 minutes down to 40 seconds wasn't hard once those questions were resolved.

kenjackson 5y ago

I've become "that guy" in presentations who constantly tells people "fonts too small", "can't read cause the contrast isn't enough", etc... My hope over time is that I stop being invited to meetings or people actually take the time to fix their presentations before it is presented to a wider audience.

MandieD 5y ago
I had the old MS Surface Pro 2 (11" screen, I think) as my daily driver for awhile, and found that designing PowerPoints and conference sessions - including code demos - to be legible on that screen led to better presentations.
thwarted 5y ago
For presentations, I've observed that constraints on number of slides encourage people to try to stuff a bunch of information at small font sizes on a single slide, often big blocks of text. And they are laying it out on a high dpi screen that ultimately gets scaled down when presenting (especially with screen sharing). They'll have two data points in a small font and massive amount of empty space on the slide. Very few people know how to use presentation tools effectively and most are terrible at information design.
- PaulHoule 5y ago
  I went through a phase of making sales presentations aimed at C-levels at big co's and was trained to pack the information on two slides into one slide and then consolidate two of those slides into one slide... And do it all without big blocks of texts or small fonts but rather well-planned complex diagrams that would draw people in and provide a great foil for spoken explanation, answering questions, etc. In the hands of a lot of people though Powerpoint is a tool for insulting the intelligence of the whole room.
  - bluGill 5y ago
    If you know what the presentation is about from reading the slides then those are bad slides. Slides exist to support a presentation and should not make sense without someone explaining it. If you want to understand without attending a presentation then what you want is a paper, or book. Those are very different formats.

JJMcJ 5y ago

Also color blindness and low contrast.