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There's more of this implicit US American bias in modern computing than you would think after the whole ASCII/Unicode mess - I thought they finally learnt somet
by 9dev 4y ago
There's more of this implicit US American bias in modern computing than you would think after the whole ASCII/Unicode mess - I thought they finally learnt something about computers actually being used by other people back then, but no.
One of my pet peeves: Badly implemented "press CTRL + / to search". Entering an actual slash, which requires e.g. SHIFT+7 on German keyboards, won't open the search box, but pressing the key where American layouts have a slash will.
- bombcar 4y agoStuff like this is super, super common. Even where you have things like CTRL + X/C/V for cut/copy/paste it's clear that the letters were picked to be near each other - but then often the shortcuts will remain the same even on keyboards where those keys are nowhere near each other. This can be one of the reasons that switching to Dvorak can be super hard, all the shortcuts become quite weird unless you remap them each by hand.
- jefftk 4y ago9ev: pressing the key where American layouts have a slash will [open the search box] bombcar: often the shortcuts will remain the same even on keyboards where those keys are nowhere near each other You're objecting to opposite things: you don't like that the shortcuts stayed with the same symbols instead of staying with the physical key, and 9ev the other way around. (And also 9ev is objecting to misleading documentation)
- bombcar 4y agoYeah - and balancing the two is something often entirely overlooked and people stuck with the problem have to learn the options and try to determine “is this key the character or the key (in a US layout)”. Issues like this are why often people just give up and learn US English enough to use the computer, then at least it’s tested and consistent.
- yjftsjthsd-h 4y agoYeah, if I could go back in time I would have told my younger self that it's okay to use something other than qwerty, and it's okay to use vim, but trying to to do both was a hilariously terrible idea.
- TremendousJudge 4y agoSome go as far as translating shortcuts, which I dislike even more. In Spanish Windows, copy is CTRL + C (copiar), but paste is... CTRL + P (pegar)
- bombcar 4y agoReminds me of a US tap in Mexico I saw once - the installer obviously decided C must be for caliente which meant the H should be hielo.
- TremendousJudge 4y agoThat's great. To be fair, caliente and helado doesn't seem a very unreasonable interpretation if you're installing in a place where people don't speak English
- a1369209993 4y ago> but paste is... CTRL + P (pegar) ... Oh, for fuck's sake! What English word do they think "V" is short for in the first place, there?
- wizofaus 4y agoYou mean it's not X for xterminate, C for copy and V for velcro?
- lopis 4y agoCTRL + Z for undo in QWERTZ keyboards is just absolutely impractical.
- aendruk 4y agoMy latest peeve here is the websites that try to filter out non-numeric key presses in form fields. You don’t know where my number keys are! Sometimes the only way to enter a number is to copy and paste it from a text editor.
- WA 4y agoEvery small indie game ever: action buttons are x and z. Guess what, y and z are swapped on a German keyboard.
- amadeuspagel 4y agoThat's an illustration that the problem is not so easy. What your parent comment complains about is that the keyboard shortcut is based on the location of the key, and not the letter. What you complain about is that the keyboard shortcut is based on the letter, and not the location. Obviously, these complaints don't contradict each other, both make sense in different circumstances. But figuring that out requires awareness of different keyboard layouts, and of the difference between KeyboardEvent.code (location) and KeyboardEvent.key (letter).
- runarberg 4y agoGive the actions appropriate names and allow users to remap them. Have a few common layouts you can select from. Allow users to select a language and locale (separately) when they first launch. Refer to the actions not the keys in the documentation, and when you do specify key (e.g. in parenthesis) have it dynamically reflect the current setup. Seem rather straight forward.
- wazoox 4y agoAnd W and Z, and Q and A on French keyboard. WASD is totally unusable, and unfortunately quite common in web apps for instance.
- poulpy123 4y agoI would say it's more a problem of the underlying système (game engine or os) that should manage the compatibility between keyboard layout
- amadeuspagel 4y agoThat might a problem with a specific website, but you can easily implement that correctly using the event key property[1]. [1]: https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/API/KeyboardEvent/key https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/API/KeyboardEve...
- 9dev 4y agoThank you for the suggestion, but that's indeed a problem with lots of websites that get this utterly wrong. Browsing the web using a non-US keyboard is fun.
- nells 4y agoIf people of other countries didn’t want American bias in their systems they should’ve made their own and made them better than American ones are.
- 9dev 4y agoIf American businesses wanted the money of people from other countries, they should've made their systems internationally accessible. I mean, seriously, what kind of antiquated statement is that? Do you actually want to keep geographical borders to persist to the internet, or work towards lower barriers for everyone..?
- dietr1ch 4y agoI really hate that so many things break after you switch keyboard layouts. Many shortcuts are positional, like "hjkl" or "wasd" for moving , or control/meta+numbers but there's no good way to denote them without assuming you are using a qwerty keyboard. Programming against them is possible,but many times there's limitations, ignorance about the different layouts, or straight neglect.
- mrzool 4y agoAs multilingual user constantly switching between 3 languages, that's why I fully committed to the US_intl keyboard layout a while ago and ditched the abomination that is QWERTZ. Took a while to get used to, but overall it has been a very noticeable improvement. One layout to cover all languages, no more constant switching. Edit for clarity: I type "a to get ä and 'a to get à. If I want to type actual quotes followed by a vocal I need to “confirm” the quotes with space before typing the vocal. That’s all there is to it, really.
- grishka 4y agoI envy you for all your languages using Latin-based alphabets. I guess I'm stuck with two keyboard layouts for life because I need to be able to type in both Latin and Cyrillic.
- senand 4y agoSame here
- WA 4y agoHow do you type ä ö ü ß ?
- Cockbrand 4y ago⌥u creates the two dots, then you press the key for the vowel to put underneath. ⌥s creates the ß. (Both obviously only applicable for Macs)
- cwillu 4y agoApplicable to linux if you set the mac qwerty keyboard layout, which is surprisingly convenient.
- mrzool 4y agoThat would be… inconvenient. That’s not how I use it. I type "a to get ä and 'a to get à. If I want to type actual quotes followed by a vocal I need to “confirm” the quotes with space before typing the vocal.
- sschueller 4y agoEven at a multinational like apple. I was fighting in the provisioning dash board a few years ago because it would not load. Issue was my last name which has an umlaut in it. This wasn't 1990 it was 2012 issh and I still see companies unable to deal with umlaut. I believe either FedEx or UPS still can't deal with it. In top of that Swiss mail is quite strict to how a letter is addressed and what is written on the mailbox. Luckily the mail carriers know to ignore garbled umlauts.
- Tor3 4y agoWhen I was living in Japan I always had to "romanize" my Japanese address if I got something shipped from USA because USPS only allows ASCII. Even if this did create problems locally - post always arrive quicker (in my experience) if the address is in proper Japanese. When I got mail from my home country I got it forwarded via my company and they always just stuck on a printed label with my address, in Kanji. No problems there. Worked fine for years. However, my home country postal system has since changed to an online system for sending post out of the country: You go to a website and enter the destination address, then you pay and it'll print a code which you just give to the actual post office when you bring the letter/package whatever. What's infuriating is that they don't allow Japanese addresses - I can enter it, but it just creates an error message. So I again have to come up with a crude romanized address and cross fingers that it'll arrive (which it usually does - but up to a few weeks delayed). In short - things are not getting betters over the years.
- rsj_hn 4y agoThe problem is that they were dealing with it successfully before, by either treating the umlaut as a "u" or a "ue". It's not like umlauts are this new technology that English speakers have never been faced with in their business ledgers. But what you see in older business ledgers, is a variety of different spellings, and a human brain that can map them to each other, with a little bit of training. And when software came along, most systems just used the "u" approach, and that kinda worked as software systems grew to massive scale. Now the hard part is changing how to deal with it, because now you need to patch all these huge production systems that were working before, and it's a breaking change. So if you have a big stack: UI --> business layer --> DB You can't just change the UI, as that will cause breakage in the pieces below. You start with the DB change, then the business layer, and you do the UI last. Moreover this is not a simple change. Getting a DB to handle unicode is a known thing, but how do you train your customer support personnel to do data entry with unicode characters? Do you expect the customer to remember the code point? There are many characters that look the same which have different code points. So what you need to do is come up with a list of officially supported extended character code points and do entry with those, but still you will have others -- users of Asian scripts, for example, whose characters will be missing. And you will get customers still doing the old "u" approach together with the official umlaut code point, sometimes for the same name and the same package. People will call up, trying to find their package, and randomly used one convention, since even though you can train your staff (which isn't cheap) you can't train your customers. So you need some system of identifying different orthography for the same underlying name, some with "u" and some with "ü" and some with "ue". And then that's going to require changes in a lot of other systems, for example reporting systems, etc. We see this problem today, taken to the extreme, in the various different spellings of "Gadafi". But really it's worse, as a distributed system has UI <--> business layer <--> regional DB <--> business layer <--> regional UI And now it's much harder to make these changes without taking systems off line, for a distributed global network. What they probably did, as most companies do, is look at all these problems and costs, compare them to relatively small benefits, and kick the can down the road, waiting for the next major system upgrade, and sometimes these next major upgrades can take 20 years to happen. Or even longer. In other words, the hart part is the incremental breaking change to the system, not the dealing with the umlaut. If this was a brand new code base that was just being written, they could make it handle umlaut with much less cost.
- dcminter 4y agoUnless it's changed recently, IntelliJ IDEA has similar annoyances[0]. Again, using the equivalently placed key works instead. Are they using scan-codes for some reason? Seems extra bizarre given that JetBrains isn't even a US based company! [0] https://intellij-support.jetbrains.com/hc/en-us/community/posts/206167969-Foreign-Language-Keyboard-Shortcuts https://intellij-support.jetbrains.com/hc/en-us/community/po...
- deleted 4y ago[deleted]
- jakub_g 4y agoI live in France but use QWERTY instead of AZERTY, and I once had an opposite problem: on a French website, there was an <input> for phone number, validating that it stays [0-9] on each keystroke. The validation was done by checking for the AZERTY-specific key combos that result in 0-9; on AZERTY to get a <number> you need to press SHIFT+<number>. So if you had a QWERTY keyboard, you could not enter your phone number, the input stayed blank. (If you tried with SHIFT, you could get !@#$%^&*(() to the field however.)
- layer8 4y agoThey didn’t allow NumPad?
- generalizations 4y agoThere was a comment the other day in the discussion about incorporation in Germany. Someone complained that in Germany, they conduct their business in German: the justification was, it's our country, our language, get used to it. Maybe the blunt response to complaints about the US American bias is, it's our software, our (ASCII/Unicode) language, get used to it.
- 9dev 4y agoIf I was trying to incorporate in the USA, and the registration form would be unable to process diacritics, sure — even though that would neglect a large part of your own population (see the ASCII debacle) — but we’re talking about internet services marketed globally. I don’t think it’s too much to ask to have an app at least working as designed. We’re not even talking about translating stuff!
- grishka 4y agoA very common bug is people confusing key codes (the raw codes for the physical keys on the keyboard) and characters (what they type). This "works" when you use the QWERTY layout, but completely breaks when it's something else, like ЙЦУКЕН.
- afandian 4y agoIt's amusing that for the huge amounts Google pay developers it doesn't necessarily buy common sense or empathy for the user. Google's currently demanding I settle an invoice for an account I closed... and the only way to do this, or even get support, is if you have a Google account. And zero way of replying to the email their Collections department. On the one hand they have a massive dominant position in multiple markets. On the other hand, if you're even slightly off the happy path you don't exist.