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Boot up a Linux live usb on a Windows machine, then rename cmd.exe to utilman.exe and after rebooting select accessibility options which now opens a command line and then 'net user username owned' to reset user 'username' password to 'owned'. Been using this for years..13
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!(short rant)
Look I understand online privacy is a concern and we should really be very much aware about what data we are giving to whom. But when does it turn from being aware to just being paranoid and a maniac about it.? I mean okay, I know facebook has access to your data including your whatsapp chat (presumably), google listens to your conversations and snoops on your mail and shit, amazon advertises that you must have their spy system (read alexa) install in your homes and numerous other cases. But in the end it really boils down to "everyone wants your data but who do you trust your data with?"
For me, facebook and the so-called social media sites are a strict no-no but I use whatsapp as my primary chating application. I like to use google for my searches because yaa it gives me more accurate search results as compared to ddg because it has my search history. I use gmail as my primary as well as work email because it is convinient and an adv here and there doesnt bother me. Their spam filters, the easy accessibility options, the storage they offer everything is much more convinient for me. I use linux for my work related stuff (obviously) but I play my games on windows. Alexa and such type of products are again a big no-no for me but I regularly shop from amazon and unless I am searching for some weird ass shit (which if you want to, do it in some incognito mode) I am fine with coming across some advs about things I searched for. Sometimes it reminds me of things I need to buy which I might have put off and later on forgot. I have an amazon prime account because prime video has some good shows in there. My primary web browser is chrome because I simply love its developer tools and I now have gotten used to it. So unless chrome is very much hogging on my ram, in which case I switch over to firefox for some of my tabs, I am okay with using chrome. I have a motorola phone with stock android which means all google apps pre-installed. I use hangouts, google keep, google map(cannot live without it now), heck even google photos, but I also deny certain accesses to apps which I find fishy like if you are a game, you should not have access to my gps. I live in India where we have aadhar cards(like the social securtiy number in the USA) where the government has our fingerprints and all our data because every damn thing now needs to be linked with your aadhar otherwise your service will be terminated. Like your mobile number, your investment policies, your income tax, heck even your marraige certificates need to be linked with your aadhar card. Here, I dont have any option but to give in because somehow "its in the interest of the nation". Not surprisingly, this thing recently came to light where you can get your hands on anyone's aadhar details including their fingerprints for just ₹50($1). Fuck that shit.
tl;dr
There are and should be always exceptions when it comes to privacy because when you give the other person your data, it sometimes makes your life much easier. On the other hand, people/services asking for your data with the sole purpose of infilterating into your private life and not providing any usefulness should just be boycotted. It all boils down to till what extent you wish to share your data(ranging from literally installing a spying device in your house to them knowing that I want to understand how spring security works) and how much do you trust the service with your data. Example being, I just shared most of my private data in this rant with a group of unknown people and I am okay with it, because I know I can trust dev rant with my posts(unlike facebook).29 -
Please. Hear me out.
I've been doing frontend for six years already. I've been a junior dev, then in was all up to the CTO. I've worked for very small companies. Also, for the very large ones. Then, for huge enterprises. And also for startups. I've been developing for IE5.5, just for fun. I've done all kinds of stuff — accessibility, responsive design (with or without breakpoints), web components, workers, PWA, I've used frameworks from Backbone to React. My favourite language is CSS, and you probably know it. The bottom line is, you name it — I did it.
And, I want to say that Safari is a very good browser.
It's very fast. Especially on M1 Macs. Yes, it lacks customization and flexibility of Firefox, but general people, not developers, like to use it. Also, Safari is very important — Apple is a huge opposing force to Google when it comes to web standards. When Google pushes their BS like banning ad blockers, Apple never moves an inch. If we lose Safari, you'll notice.
As for the Safari-specific bugs situation, well… To me, Safari serves as a very good indicator: if your website breaks in Safari, chances are you used some hacks that are no good. Safari is a good litmus test I use to find the parts of my code that could've been better.
The only Safari-specific BUG I encountered was a blurry black segment in linear gradients that go from opaque to transparent. So, instead of linear-gradient(#f00, transparent), just do linear-gradient(#f00f, #f000).
This is the ONLY bug I encountered. Every single time my website broke in Safari other than that, was for some ugly hack I used.
You don't have to love it. I don't even use it, my browser of choice is Firefox. But, I'm grateful to Safari, just because it exists. Why? Well, if Safari ceases to exist, Google will just leave both W3C and WhatWG, and declare they'll be doing things their way from now on. Obey or die.
Firefox alone is just not big enough. But, together with Safari, they oppose Google's tyranny in web standards game.
Google will declare the victory and will turn the web into an authoritarian dictatorship. No ad blockers will be allowed. You won't be able to block Google's trackers. Google already owns the internet, well, almost, and this will be their final, devastating victory.
But Safari is the atlas that keeps the web from destruction.22 -
Dev: This content might be too large to fit into this area on mobile.
We might need to add scrolling or design it differently.
Designer: It fits perfectly in the design.
Dev: But the user might have a smaller screen size than in the design.
Designer: We don‘t optimize for small screens.
Dev: But we still need to handle it somehow.
Also, the text might be longer for other languages.
Designer: No problem, we will provide short text for all translations.
Dev: We have 30 languages and the translations are made by a third party. We can not control it.
Designer: We‘ll manage somehow.
Dev: Also, the user might be using an accessibility setting on the device which makes the font size larger.
Designer: Unlikely
Dev: Also, the available screen size might be reduced by the on-screen keyboard.
Designer: … Ok then.
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It‘s always a conversation like this. It repeats indefinitely.9 -
What's with the 4 pixel wide scrollbars on some desktop software these days? Does nobody care about accessibility anymore?
No seriously.
Fuck you.
And why the fuck does open source software seem to be the main culprit - as usual.
And tutorials telling us to add an extra blank line to our source code because fucking Linux distros decide to put an overlay horizontal scrollbar just over the top of where the last visible line in an editor appears.8 -
!rant
There are some extremely competent, blind developers where I work. They have a tool that read screen elements out loud to them.
At first it was chocking to see they work with the screen off. It makes total sense though, however this thought never crossed my mind before. Their headphones serve as screen to them, which is pretty cool.9 -
I tried to convince my boss that using 3d rendering to display information on webpage is unnecessary luxury.
The web browser would hang if the user is using an average pc and there is too much data to render.
This product is aimed for average joe, but he argues that computers in foreign countries are high end devices ONLY.
Such a bullshit.
I asked what if someone with low spec laptop tries to view the webpage.
He said, we will set a min spec requirements for using the website.
Are you fucking kidding me?! RAM and Graphics requirements for a webpage?!
My instinct says that the thing I'm working on would probably end up as waste of time.
But I'd probably learn cool tricks of threejs.5 -
Dear fellow developers,
please make your software more accessible.
Thanks.
Link to an article from a blind developer about his work:
https://medium.freecodecamp.com/loo...
I found this link in a comment on devRant posted by @nickpapoutsis.2 -
“I Pay $900 A Month for student loans.”
Not sure why there’s a video about this but let’s watch it...
*Sad music is playing*
“My name is _____ and I pay $900 a month for student loans..”
Yeah so what?
*Sad music continues*
??
*Woman makes a call and asks about when they’re going to make a student loan reform aggressively*
????
Then I realized my family was eligible for low income and I received Cal and Pell grants to pay for my tuition and living.
Then I realized that the salary for my computer science degree has numbed me to a point where $900 a month doesn’t seem too bad. Or awful. I mean I just leased a new car for my mom! And didn’t hesitate (only when having fun negotiating though).
Back then, I would be shocked. But it’s a surreal feeling to see now that I don’t. I was literally confused at the basis of this video. And now I’m surprised at my disconnect from it.
I also realized that they make videos based on how society should react to it. Am I an outcast to society because of this? Why am I not reacting the same way?
Maybe society (nowadays) would disdain me because I’ve come into high income like we all will because of our passion (and the demand for it).
But fuck society. It’s full of the very same people who use technology each and every day. Protesting for things they found trending on Twitter. The ones who refused to learn even though it’s a huge part of their lives. They’re the ones holding us back for an Engel’s Technological Utopia (idk if I’m even correct about the philosopher but anyways..)
We’re above them. We make things they’ll use and in massive numbers.
Don’t let them dictate what you should like. How you should act. Whether or not you should feel lonely while they’re posting pictures of fun times on Facebook.
We should be the ones doing that. Because we are the ones doing that.
That’s why we’re given the best to perform what we love most.
So devs, continue what you’re doing. Small or big, you’re still driving the world forward. Opening pull requests and contributing to open source projects. Answering questions on Stack Overflow not only for the person intended but for the beginner or even experienced professional who may stumble upon it later in a Google search.
And be highly rewarded for it. How society feels doesn’t matter any more when it comes to your passion. You’re important. Your work helps others in ways you can’t even imagine. We’re like one big fucking hivemind of engineers with the accessibility of the internet.
I love drinking on a Sunday!12 -
Devs: "Accessibility? Not a high priority for now"
Also Devs (in tech conferences): "I can't read, can you please increase the font size?"
"Also, dark mode everywhere please"4 -
While this wasn't technically a real client, it's still one of the most insane requests I've ever had.
I chose to specialize in software engineering for the last year and a half of my degree, which meant a lot of subjects were based around teamwork, proper engineering practises, accessibility, agile methods, basically a lot of stuff to get us ready to work in a proper corporate dev environment. One of our subjects was all about project management, and the semester-long coursework project (that was in lieu of a final exam) was to develop a real project for a real client. And, very very smartly, the professors set up a meeting with the clients so that the clients could tell us what they wanted with sixty-odd students providing enough questions. They basically wanted a management service for their day-center along with an app for the people there. One of the optional requirements was a text chat. Personally not something I'm super interested in doing but whatever, it's a group project, I'll do my part.
The actual development of the project was an absolute nightmare, but that's a story for another day. All I'll say is that seven juniors with zero experience in the framework we chose does not make a balanced dev team.
Anyway, like three months into the four-month project we've got a somewhat functional program, we just need to get the server side part running and are working our asses off (some more than others) when the client comes in and says that 'hey, nice app, nobody else has added the chat yet, but could you do voice recognition okay thanks?'.
Fucking.
Voice.
Recognition.
This was a fucking basic-ass management app with the most complicated task being 'make it look pretty' and 'hook up a DB to an API' and they want us to add voice recognition after sitting on their ass for three months??? The entire team collectively flipped its shit the second they were out of earshot. The client would not take no for an answer, the professor simply told us that they asked for it and it was up to us whether we delivered or not. Someone working on the frontend had the genius idea of 'just get them to use google voice recognition' so we added the how-to in the manual and ticked the requirement box.
What amazes me about all that is how the client probably had no idea that their new last-minute request was even a problem for us, let alone it being in a completely different ballpark in terms of implementing from scratch.8 -
Add a random string (like "AnyBrowser/1.2.3") to your user agent string, and get warnings about unsupported browsers, reduced functionality, and Google drive completely refusing to start at all.
It's the very same browser, just another user agent string. Ever heard of feature detection? Ever heard of usability, accessibility, progressive enhancement? How can developers be so lost in 2022?
I just tried to reproduce the reason why Vivaldi stopped adding their brand to user agent strings but sails under false flag pretending to be Google chrome. So it doesn't show up in browser statistics either and Google people can keep thinking everyone is using their shitware.3 -
He wanted to hire me as CTO but insisted of defining architecture himself even though he admitted he has no tech background. He insisted that his CRM doesn’t even need backend because “we have database”. He was dysgraphc but completely ignored accessibility, including measures for dyslexic people. He called his product “startup” but denied that startups need to constantly validate ideas and denied the conception of a/b testing, offering no alternative.
He also wanted me to work for free.
Bruh you’re not a clown, you’re an entire circus.5 -
Forms with autofocus. What are your opinions on that?
My boss keeps asking us to always give autofocus to the first input of a form, without any UX study to support it, just his opinion ("I think it makes sense"). I fucking hate it. He says it's nice for keyboard users, but I'm a keyboard user myself and I say that's what the tab key is for. To fucking focus stuff.
It really annoys me to no end when things like this are requested, but it's ok to have buttons, checkboxes, etc without fucking :focus and :active styles. Just :hover is not enough ffs.
And "links" that work with "onclick". Damn how I want to kill anyone that does that.5 -
A typical bouba coder:
- thinks a kilobyte contains 1024 bytes
- thinks Object.assign clones an object
- codes in react.js, thinks he knows reactive programming
- “amd is better for games, intel is better for work”
- thinks that the main advantage of ssh is that you don’t need to enter your password manually
- watches porn in incognito mode
- “crapple”
- “uhm, is it immutable?”
- thinks “persistent” means saved to local storage
- thinks designer is an inferior job because “they only draw shapes”
- thinks good accessibility is when the tab key works
- “All non-mechanical keyboards are trash”
- “C is outdated and nobody uses it anymore”
- “Zuck quit uni and now he’s a billionaire, everybody should quit”
- thinks “pointer” is a shape of the cursor53 -
I can’t stand how designers insist on over designing <select> elements. No, 50 divs with aria attrs will not make this component as usable as the native elements4
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Even with something as simple as pagination, it's possible to create a complete accessibility abomination. Dear designer, you've perfected your flat design style.
Fuck you! I'm not coding this.
It's a website about selling solar panels, underfloor heating etc... Not a single piece of design reminds it.
7 -
Hands down, my favorite part being a dev the HUGE range of industries I can apply my craft to.
In 10 years, I've bounced from structural engineering, to vision accessibility, to healthcare, to eCommerce. All from the comfort of my developer's keyboard.
While this isn't necessarily unique to the dev role, it's the spice of life that keeps my mind to young.2 -
i hate group assignments. why is this guy doing a class in accessibility if he's not gonna pay attention and not gonna make the code accessible? and the audacity to tell us that "we can fix the accessibility stuff afterwards". the accessibility is literally the assignment!!! you're not doing shit!!!3
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Spec meeting with my client: "Accessibility is very, very important to us. We want to be sure that we meet AA guidelines, at a minimum."
Client delivers front end mockups, can do nothing. Not one single element on it is compliant - have to send it back for revisions.
The fact that they were aware of the WCAG and the AA tier guidelines, and still handed me these shitty designs is pretty impressively stupid.2 -
!Rant
Reading through MDN's accessibility guidelines and realize I've never consider how disabled people would browse on my sites. From now on,I will try to make my sites accessible as much as possible for those people too.1 -
JS interview:
– we expect you to know the concepts of immutability, persistence, software architecture and systems theory, methods of analyzing complexity beyond the big-O notation, safe parallel code execution with web workers, WASM, modern web standards including working drafts, progressive enhancement and graceful degradation, WCAG recommendations and web accessibility in general, UX strategies and modern graphic design trends. Nice 20k github stars you got there. By the way, what's your opinion on modern optimistic UX?
– I know this all but I somewhat disagree with some status-quo UX strategies
– unfortunately it's a no
PHP interview:
– Do you know how to wipe your ass?
– *excited hysterical jumping with head nodding*
– You're hired25 -
So yesterday I discussed how I am using speech to text to do approximately 50% of my rants. I am now doing a growing percentage of my outlook emails by voice as the human-computer voice interaction is pleasing and very natural. I have even named my iPhone 'little jumpshot' today.
Today I experimented with text to speech so that my rants are automatically read back to me before I send them. Some decent results.
In settings - general - accessibility you will find voice over (not recommended - be careful). Below that is Speech - speak selection or speak screen options.
Speak selection allows you to highlight text to be spoken. Too much human interaction for my purposes of walking hopefully not tripping be looking down. Using up my nine lives 😐
Below voiceover is - Speak screen - which allows you to pull down the screen with two fingers to speak what is on the screen. This will read the rant or of there are multiple rants on the screen it will read those as well.
It works but it will take a bit of getting used to. It also requires a few clicks here and there.
My goal is to interact with devRant fluidly 100% by voice. Just talking to 'little jumpshot' and him creating and posting all of my rants and reading all the other rants developers post.
For a few days experimenting I am satisfied with the progress but there is a long way to go.
Hopefully, in the end, this may help some people. Any ideas are very welcome.4 -
Backend devs (and yes, even full-stack folks) who naively dismiss the nuance of a frontend dev role have clearly never tried to do a really good job at it. Or, don't realize the fullness of the responsibilities, more like.
Frontend devs have to reconcile all the requirements (and sometimes whims) of the following people:
- End Users, obviously
- Desires of Business stakeholders
- Visual Designers
- UX (Yes, it's a different discipline from vis design)
- Fellow frontend devs
- Performance budgets
- Accessibility specialists
- Content Authors (if using a CMS)
And rarely are they ever ALL aligned. Some days, it feels less like development and more like brokering deals and compromises.5 -
I was trying to improve the UX of my design by not forgetting the accessibility and by making the contrast as obvious as possible without sacrificing the look. I took my glasses off. I never thought I was doing this for me all this time.
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I just officially graduated from a web dev program and it feels...
Very underwhelming.
Learned ES6, React, Webpack, service workers, offline databases, accessibility, (...bla bla bla)
And my knowledge with data structures and algorithms isn't even that great yet.
I look at the stuff I still don't know and wonder if I'll ever be comfortable with my level of expertise.13 -
Most web developers don't seem to care at all about ecological footprint and UX/UI impact on people and society, like they never cared about accessibility either, desperately dreaming to work for the Californian oligopoly companies that shaped our current digital infrastructure.
Meanwhile, rivers run dry, forest are burning, people starving and soldiers killing people.
But politics is taboo, even on devrant. Let's post a funny thank-God(?!)-it's-Friday GIF animation instead!?
What kind of people do we want to be?14 -
We had some PR’s this morning. Colleage rewrote an app. Restructured everything. Broke some things. Not a single comment and merged to master.
I get questions like: WhY dO yOu PuT a BuTtOnPrEsS aNd A mOuSeCliCk HeRe?
FOR ACCESSIBILITY ASSHOLE!!! SOMETHING YOU OBVIOUSLY NEVER HEARD OF!!!4 -
Whenever I want to type the shrug emoji, I copy it from a Google note ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
I can type emojis just fine, enjoy a 🍓, yet there is a clear lack of accessibility for ASCII-emojis input on any device.
How is this fair!?
PS: I do know that this shrug is actually utf8 and not ascii. But that's beside the point. Also try saying “utf8 emoji” three time in a row.8 -
What game engine would you recommend to an indie developer? The type who can't afford a fucking server to run the bloated and buggy unity editor but is actually a developer so isn't afraid of typing.
I've had enough of the improper sandboxing (will crash bc of game scripts), tempfile-based crash-unaware instance tracking (won't restart afterwards) and lack of UI scaling (seriously, that's like accessibility/retina support basics) that is the unity editor. If they had command line tools I'd use them happily.10 -
Took a web accessibility course somewhat recently. Here’s the list of typical accessibility problems according to those who use assistive technologies, from the most common to the least common:
1. CAPTCHA
2. Buttons and links that don’t work
3. Lacking/incorrect alt attribute
4. No input labels
5. Sudden layout shifts/content changes
6. Lacking/wrong headings
7. No keyboard access
8. Too many links
9. No skip link in header (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...)
10. Lacking/broken search
11. Complicated and/or long forms
12. No closed captions for videos
13. Bad grammar
14. Bad contrast
15. Custom checkboxes
16. Custom dropdowns
17. Font size
I never knew CAPTCHA was THE worst offender. I also never knew that font size was perhaps the least problematic aspect.11 -
This is to anyone that has a MacBook Pro that has a Touch Bar.
When you’ve programmed on the MacBook have you ever implemented the Touch Bar’s accessibility into the application? And is it easier or more out of the way to try to implement it into the application. Also could non OSX related languages be used or can only Swift, Objective-C, etc
Only curiousity, my MacBook Air doesn’t have one, and I’m gonna eventually upgrade to a pro and I’ve heard good things about the Touch Bar but not about using it in applications.3 -
TL;DR: When picking vendors to outsource work to, vet them really well.
Backstory:
Got a large redesign project that involves rebuilding a website's main navigation (accessibility reasons).
Project is too big just for our dev team to handle with our workload so we got to bring a 3rd party vendor to help us. We do this often so no big deal.
But, this time the twist was Senior Management already had retained hours with a dev shop so they want us to use them for project. Okay...
It begins:
Have our scope / discovery meeting about the changes and our expected DevOps workflow.
Devs work Local and push changes to our Github, that kicks off the build and we test on Dev, then it goes to Staging for more testing & PM review. Once ready we can push to prod, or whenever needed. All is agreed, everyone was happy.
Emailed the vendors' project manager to ask for their devs Github accounts so we can add them to the project. Got no reply for 3 days.
4th day, I get back "Who sets up the Github accounts?"
fuck me. they've never used Github before but in our scope meeting 4 days ago you said Github was fine...??
Whatever, fuck it. I'll make the accounts and add them.
Added 4 devs to the repo and setup new branch. 40min later get an email that they can't setup dev environment now, the dev doesn't know how to setup our CMS locally, "not working for some reason."
So, they ask for permission to develop on our STAGING server.. "because it's already setup"... they want to actively dev on our staging where we get PM/Senior Management approvals?
We have dev, staging, production instances and you want to dev in staging, not dev?... nay nay good sir.
This is whom senior management wants us to use, already paid for via retainer no less. They are a major dev shop and they're useless...
😢😭
Cant wait for today's progress checkup meeting. 😐😐
/rant1 -
The worst thing about building an "accessible" app is that you might just have 4 users out of the million who need it.
Either they don't know it exists or it needs to be modified for every user!4 -
We are in AI era but screen readers and softwares for disabled people are still immensely retarded, so we still have to do accessibility by hand, now enforced by EU.17
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Scrolljacking is an act against accessibility so harmful that it is never realistically outweighed by the possible benefits.
https://www.indesit.co.uk/2 -
A large update on UI rolls out, after around 10 rounds of public testing. Waves of complaints finally arrive.
Complaint 1: I liked the old plaintext UI because the UI now has some markdown
Complaint 2: I wish the tabs weren't multiline but I don't want to reduce the number of tabs nor sacrifice the accessibility by making it scrollable or something
Complaint 3: Why did you make boxes we did it fine with a single box filled with plaintext
Complaint 4: The lag is gone but I liked the old laggy UI because it was there for years
Me: dafuq?
PS: dev lead is happy with the results so things are okay at least for now3 -
Hey guys so we need to start taking accessibility seriously, it’s the law - right now we currently do nothing.
So let’s start with something super simple. Alt text has to be provided for an image...
“This is all bollocks let’s be honest”
😳🤦🏻♂️
Um...so I don’t make the rules, the W3C define the standards for the web. Disabled users matter...7 -
Got this design for a button.
Now I'm writing an essay in the ticket about how this is problematic for localization and accessibility.
37 -
Out of curiosity for all the front-end web developers, do you normally test to make sure that your websites are accessible to the blind, color-blind etc.. ? (and i'm not just talking about "alt" attributes)
I've been working as a web developer for over 5 years now at several different companies with close to 100 websites and not a single one seemed to have even considered it. The first time it came up was because a client REQUIRED conformance level AA or higher (I had no idea this was even a thing). In my opinion, ensuring that your website is at least somewhat accessible should be an essential step in every project.
If anyone's looking for some tools to make testing easier you can check these out:
- axe - Web Accessibility Testing (chrome extension)
- Accessibility Insights for Web (chrome extension)12 -
If you’re ignoring accessibility on the web, you’re making UIs exclusively for American white rich healthy neurotypical straight cisgender male Chrome users with gigabit internet and top of the line computers.17
-
Fuck accessibility.
No WAIT, before you call me an asshole hear me out.
So when you use CSS grid to create layouts you're supposed to not use the features it has (reordering items) too much, and instead keep the HTML structured the way it's supposed to be read.
When you add a picture of a cat you're supposed to put a alt="Brown cat sitting on a chair" there.
Also you should test for all kinds of sight disabilities and use high contrast colors.
All that for likely <1% of your users.
What would be the alternative? HTML is a markup language, and not supposed to be directly read by humans. Invest the time ONCE for screenreaders to understand CSS positioning and read content in a sensible order. Use image recognition to describe pictures (with selectable levels of detail). Let the browser modify colors on the fly for better readability.
Don't spend time and money to solve a problem 100000 Times that could be solved once.
Fuck accessibility.28 -
>>Server sind für mich "Neuland".<<
I want to switch to a new server with my website. I have a bunch of questions and hope you beautiful people will help me out.
1. I've decided to switch from shared hosting to an virtual server. Therefore I am going to rent the cheapest VS from hetzner.de. is this a good choice?
2. What do I have to care about and what stuff there is to be done in the beginning?
3. The reasons I want to switch are more root accessibility and I want to switch to https. What about that? Is let's encrypt enough?
4. How do I move the server from a to b?
5. What OS should I choose?
6. What about security?
7. Any further advice from experienced people is welcome!
Sry for those noob questions, but I've never been in touch with server work...23 -
So I figure since I straight up don't care about the Ada community anymore, and my programming focus is languages and language tooling, I'd rant a bit about some stupid things the language did. Necessary disclaimer though, I still really like the language, I just take issue with defense of things that are straight up bad. Just admit at the time it was good, but in hindsight it wasn't. That's okay.
For the many of you unfamiliar, Ada is a high security / mission critical focused language designed in the 80's. So you'd expect it to be pretty damn resilient.
Inheritance is implemented through "tagged records" rather than contained in classes, but dispatching basically works as you'd expect. Only problem is, there's no sealing of these types. So you, always, have to design everything with the assumption that someone can inherit from your type and manipulate it. There's also limited accessibility modifiers and it's not granular, so if you inherit from the type you have access to _everything_ as if they were all protected/friend.
Switch/case statements are only checked that all valid values are handled. Read that carefully. All _valid_ values are handled. You don't need a "default" (what Ada calls "when others" ). Unchecked conversions, view overlays, deserialization, and more can introduce invalid values. The default case is meant to handle this, but Ada just goes "nah you're good bro, you handled everything you said would be passed to me".
Like I alluded to earlier, there's limited accessibility modifiers. It uses sections, which is fine, but not my preference. But it also only has three options and it's bizarre. One is publicly in the specification, just like "public" normally. One is in the "private" part of the specification, but this is actually just "protected/friend". And one is in the implementation, which is the actual" private". Now Ada doesn't use classes, so the accessibility blocks are in the package (namespace). So guess what? Everything in your type has exactly the same visibility! Better hope people don't modify things you wanted to keep hidden.
That brings me to another bad decision. There is no "read-only" protection. Granted this is only a compiler check and can be bypassed, but it still helps prevent a lot of errors. There is const and it works well, better than in most languages I feel. But if you want a field within a record to not be changeable? Yeah too bad.
And if you think properties could fix this? Yeah no. Transparent functions that do validation on superficial fields? Nah.
The community loves to praise the language for being highly resilient and "for serious engineers", but oh my god. These are awful decisions.
Now again there's a lot of reasons why I still like the language, but holy shit does it scare me when I see things like an auto maker switching over to it.
The leading Ada compiler is literally the buggiest compiler I've ever used in my life. The leading Ada IDE is literally the buggiest IDE I've ever used in my life. And they are written in Ada.
Side note: good resilient systems are a byproduct of knowledge, diligence, and discipline, not the tool you used. -
There's too many web apps out there that advertise having great accessibility, but whose only claim to that is that they work okay-ish with screenreaders.
There's more to accessibility, darnit! Not just blind people, also remember people with impaired colour perception, people who have to use increased font sizes, people with poor contrast perception (can we please not do light-gray text, links, or buttons on white background anymore?), and many more.
The amount of apps alone that just are impossible to use properly with increased font sizes due to cut-off unscrollable text or buttons pushed out of the visible part of the page is staggering. Or where you get permanently stuck inside a rich-text editor if you can only navigate by keyboard, or where whole parts of the page are impossible to properly use with background images turned off...
I'm aware this might sound unreasonable and I know it's extra effort to learn all the rules, but once these things are not an afterthought, but rather something to take care of starting even during first implementation, it starts to come naturally.
But would it be unreasonable to ask of an architect to not put the restrooms, conference rooms, managers office, where they can only be reached by stairs? I don't think it would be. Sure it makes placing them more complicated, but excluding people from being able to use the building due to circumstances beyond their control feels a bit elitist and snobby to me.
Saw an app last week where a lot of features were behind click-handlers on elements that are not supposed to be interactive like <div>, <li>, and <span> tags. How's someone who can't use the visual clues even supposed to know that the element is interactive?
And yes, there's some of these points where ensuring accessibility is not just the devs job but also the designer's responsibility (contrast rules for example), but in my experience if the devs notice "oh hey, this could be problematic" then the design people usually listen.
Honestly in the case of accessibility I believe that putting off some features for later to make time to ensure that what's there is accessible, even if it only affects 1% of visitors, belongs into the "social responsibility" category, and most clients I've worked with were open to the subject.
I do believe it's something that everyone should take time to learn.
PS: I don't mean to attack anyone, I just wish it were something that more people watch out for.5 -
I wanted to build a website to search for aircraft accidents, so scraped the NTSB and FAA websites and built a database out of it.
Then I went to write search fields for Make and Model. I wanted it to be easy to know if there were results for a given Make before someone tried to query by it. And then fell into the rabbithole of how to make something like that accessible.
One thing led to another and: https://github.com/amyshackles/...
Still need to add testing and better documentation and clean it up a bunch, but it’s starting to look like something, maybe. -
As a web developer who focuses on accessibility, why is it so goddamn hard to get buy-in for accessible design?!
If you design to be the most accessible possible regular users benefit from an experience that works, for as many people as possible, in more situations than most test for normally!5 -
I have a question, but first some background. When I got my first job, it wasn't clear cut what I would do, but I ended up doing frontend. I really liked doing frontend, so I continued doing so and I still do to this day. I even work alongside designers in a design studio, so I feel very much like a frontend developer.
Obviously, the term "frontend" these days implies someone, in some ways, writing a web, mobile or desktop app using javascript. For me, frontend is also about stuff like accessibility, design, code delivery, and understanding the end-users and the designers that may have prototyped something for you.
I have not been active in any other dev communities than this place, but it seems to me like a frontend developer is pretty much the lowest common denominator ( I guess in terms of skills). If I am right, I do not know why, which is why I'm hoping someone could explain.9 -
I can't sign in to my wifi router on my phone because of a stupid JS bug. When you tap on the password box it uses JS to check if the username field is blank. If it is, it auto focuses on that instead. The problem is that it doesn't it think the username field has any content even when it does. So I can't enter my password! I tried blocking JS, then it doesn't render anything. It has no accessibility at all. Thanks a lot TP-Link.8
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I gained 10kg from eating shitting and writing code.
Time to move on or I will die with head in my keyboard.
I was planning to buy a water rover so I don’t have to get out from home during winter but well I don’t know. The gym is across the road and to get a decent water rover I need to spend 3 years of gym. I can’t decide if gym is better than exercise at home. You have greater accessibility to the training device at home.
What you think ?
Should I buy a water rover or go to gym ?9 -
I have to write my IoT coursework in an Ubuntu VM running on Linux 3.2. VBox Guest Additions doesn't support this Ubuntu version, neither does anything else. Contiki, the operating system we're coding for has been abandoned for many years, the devs moved to a new project called Contiki NG. If I try to compile with any standard above ANSI C it fails with cryptic errors deep inside the OS. The docs for the old Contiki are paginated with JS so I can't use the browser's fulltext search, but they also don't have proper bulitin search.
This cannot be legal. They are violating every accessibility guideline in existence. I just need the text to be slightly larger and even I have to go through hell. I imagine blind, deaf or dyslexic students just give up.3 -
Ok, let's do the opposite (reference to a previous rant).
Should a frontend developer know about:
- Data structures and algorithms?
- User interface design patterns and usability?
- User experience heuristics?
- Accessibility?
- Design tools?
- How websites work on the browser after the frameworks have done their job?
- Data flow, and artifacts like user stories?13 -
Sometimes I feel that as we have some rules and accessibility guidelines for 18+ when they visit any website, play a game etc., we should also think about 60+ who are not technology friendly. I've explained to many elders why they should not share their personal information on public forums like facebook or twitter, or why should they not reply a spam mail.... but :(1
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React Native testing is hair pulling.
Every test needs to have 100 different mocks in place and there are: 3 different methods to mock a function (mock, mockImplementation, and fn), 3 different types of query methods to get elements (get, find, and query), and 5 different selectors to query on (accessibility label, testId, accessibility hint, accessibility value, etc.)
And after reading all this, being diligent and learning the difference between stupid, synonymously-named functions which have wildly different side effects like "getByA11yHint" and "findByA11yHint" (ugh...), after all that, you write out a test with all the appropriate mocks and you want to do something simple and it beats you up all over again.
Button enabled or button disabled. Simple right? Logically the former is "expect(elem).toBeEnabled()" and the latter is "expect(elem).not.toBeEnabled()", right?
Wrong! You're an imbecile. Your tests will fail and never tell you that ".not.toBeEnabled()" and ".toBeDisabled()" don't do the same thing even though they look and sound exactly the same. Only the latter will work. The former makes all your tests fail. Where is this written in the docs? Nowhere?! Great!
👌😄🔫3 -
Atlassian needs improvement!
Screenshot from the Jira "Accessibility" settings page where I hoped to find a dark mode switch.
When I wanted to send them feedback about the settings page, the feedback form failed, cluttering vintage style error messages with poor UX writing all over the page.
> Help us improve!
>
> We’d love to hear more about your experience with the new accessibility settings in Jira. Any thoughts on what you liked and where we could improve are more than welcome.
> Oops! Something went wrong...
>
> There was a problem submitting your feedback, likely due to the configuration of this form. You might want to contact the site owner to let them know about this issue.
P.S. Thinking of accessibility: there is not way to enter an ALT text to image uploads on devrant? seriously?
6 -
So Google is banning app access to Accessibility. So that's fun....
I get the security standpoint they are trying to make but this feels like the wrong move for the system. Feels like another knee jerk reaction by Google.2 -
It would be great if we can pull to refresh on a post because the refresh button seems like it's in Paris while I'm in Colorado. It's a commonly used action, so it's position should be well deserved.1
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I just started a new job last week. Old-school sysadmin role for a pretty old-school company, but the pay is nice and the kids've gotta eat.
They gave me a windows laptop. I haven't used windows for work or as a daily driver since 2016, and now, a week into trying to make this machine work for me, I have the following observations to report.
WSL is nice. It's nice to have it installed(though actually installing it was an adventure unto itself), and to set alacritty to open my default user prompt straight into that is very nice. As terminal emulators are by far my most used piece of software, that's nice to have.
Command-line software management through powershell, winget, and chocolatey are also very nice.
I like the accessibility offered by autohotkey, though there is something of a learning curve on it. Once I get better with it, I suspect that what follows will be largely mitigated.
The Bad:
In general, Windows is janky. It feels like it's all kinda taped together without any particular cohesion in mind. As a desktop, it feels decidedly amateur, compared to the feature-mountain polish of MacOS, and especially compared to the flexibility and infinite possibilities of Linux.
Lots of screen real estate is wasted, with window decorations, and fonts that look terrible at smaller sizes, because the antialiasing of fonts is just terrible. Almost all the features I depend on in other desktops: ad-hoc searches and launches(alfred, rofi) are-- again --janky. They work, but they typically require more typing than alfred or rofi. I admit I haven't spent weeks on this problem yet, but I haven't found a workable solution yet with wox, hain, and keypirinha. Quick searches like what you get with alfred, alfred workflows, and the swiss army knife that is rofi, just aren't possible or reliable with the tools I've used so far, and most require some kind of indexing agent to fully function.
It beggars imagination that a desktop in which users are subjected to "default apps" that is purported to be acceptable for enterprise, professional use, does not have a default entry for text editor. I installed nvim-qt, and I want to use it to edit anything and everything I ever edit with text, but all too often, apps have hard-coded instructions to open text files with notepad.
I want to open certain URLs with firefox, certain ones with firefox developer edition, and others with vivaldi, and yet there is not an app available that I have seen yet in my searches that allows me to set this kind of configuration. I found one that's supposed to, but it just ignores everything I put into its config, and just opens MS Edge for everything. Jank.
Simple things take too long. Like the delay between when I laboriously hit ctrl-alt-del to bring up the login and when the actual text field appears, and the delay between that and when I want to start using the computer.
Changing some settings requires a reboot. Updating some software requires a reboot. Updating permissions on something sometimes requires a reboot. And those are all on top of the frequent requests to reboot for updates.
I would have thought Windows would have overcome most of the issues that create these problems, but it's just, as I said, amateur.1 -
I really like the details disclosure element:
https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US...
I've heard there's some accessibility concerns, but man I really like it...
I kinda wish HTML had more every day kinda functions built in. Yeah it's not hard to build these make them modular in your own code, but it would be nice if HTML had some of them standard.4 -
When developers have no idea what the fundamental concepts of semantic html is and a solid grasp of Accessibility Design Patterns and just stuff improperly used aria tags everywhere - aka - the output of every enterprise CMS I come across **cough** Sitecore **cough** but it's apparently WCAG 2.0 "friendly". 😪😪 Do you even aria tags bro?!
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If any iOS developers are wanting a good repo to follow, I believe HeadGazeLib is about to take off.
There's been a few articles about how eBay is using head tracking to allow for hands free shopping (huge for accessibility!) If the rumors are true, then Apple should be announcing many more devices that support Facial Recognition (like the iPhone X). If they do, then there will a huge surge in games/apps that tap into that technology.
HeadGazeLib makes it super easy to incorporate Head Tracking in your apps, so I think with all the publicity, it will quickly rise to the #1 head tracking "add-on".
https://github.com/eBay/HeadGazeLib2 -
Dev goals for 2022? Best and worst DX in the past?
Wish to prioritize customers with useful business goals who are open to sustainable web dev, usability and accessibility.
Want to use even more CSS and find a way to use new features like parent selectors without sacrificing compatibility.
Continue learning and using Symfony, but also continue with my full-stack side project using JS or even better TypeScript for the backend also for the backend.
Best developer experience: getting new customers for my own business after leaving a company last winter.
Worst developer experiences:
Corporate customers with large budgets and design agencies seem to fancy all the antipatterns I thought bad and obsolete, like carousel content, animations everywhere, and autoplay videos on the home page. Poorly written, poorly thought, and sometimes contradictory, requirements. Customers and agencies changing their mind halfway through a project.
"Agile" daily meetings, not giving devops necessary repository permissions, and making Webpack mandatory for no real reason.2 -
I’ve been doing web development and mostly focusing on the frontend side of things professionally for almost 10 years. Still, I have to put up with some backend developer who did a couple of years of frontend development who now thinks he knows it all. Everytime someone reports a UX problem or asks for a feature that has some complexity and needs more thought to have a good enough solution, he steps out of his lane with “suggestions” on how to get it done with solutions that are half baked and don’t consider things like accessibility, responsiveness, or even semantics. Still, he is the hero and we’re the bad guys when we call him out for only providing crappy solutions and presenting them as complete solutions.
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please i need your advice :)
I need to reform a service that offers legal advice and thus serves around 5000 Microsoft Word legal advice documents for the end user and every year there are 200 more documents created and published and changed manually.
So i had this idea to use a CMS, Git and continuous integration for
- automatic spell checking
- automatic assigning the copy text to translation bureaus, and get translations back.
- version control the texts and translations.
- document generation in multiple formats
- checking the text flow in the document (no overflown text)
- Checking for accessibility for the handy caped
- Deploying it on the Website
Do you think this is feasible? Can something that was made for code also be used to handle copy text documents? In my head this would save so much work but i'm no expert in CI/CD.
Thank you for your advice!8 -
Since my XPS battery is dying I'm flirting with an idea of a new laptop. Requirements:
- 13" display
- 4k display (I'm so used to high-res that x1080 looks like accessibility mode)
- 16 (worst case), 32 (OK), 64 (possible?) GB RAM
- long battery life
- i7 or Ryzen equivalent (I need lots of ram, lots of computing power)
- plays nice with Linux
- GPU preferably integrated (don't need a separate GPU)
- ultrabook (small, compact, light) (I don't like to exercise while carrying it. God forbid I'd grow a muscle... )
- purrrrtty :)
So far the best candidate I've found is... XPS13 again :D The setup I'm after costs ~1.6k€ which is not that bad, really.
Is there anything else in the market that'd meet the criteria? Anything worth looking into? Better deals?19 -
I'm frustrated with the Firefox Quantum. When a perform a query it takes a long time. I've unchecked the Prevent Accessibility option, I've reseted it, removed all plugins, reinstalled,... I do not know what else to do... Change to chrome?
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Does anyone actually rely on voice assistants? I.e. would they be missed if they went away? I’m leaving out cases where they are absolutely necessary for accessibility purposes.6
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Yesterday they was a designer or a developer, today they’re an “accessibility expert”.
Those kind of people are the worst, discrediting accessibility by thinking of it as a “I’m always superior because I do the right thing” card while they never really do anything but defending their own arbitrary emotional assumptions by calling it “fighting for human rights”.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/...1 -
I fucking hate it that "front end developer" came to mean "data flow for react engineer". It seems most frontenders now don't understand shit about HTML and its standards, don't know anything about basic accessibility and proper content structuring.
It's even worse with the styling. Cascade? The fuck is cascade? Scope everything! And, of course, write that CSS as a JS object because how else. Fluid typography? If by fluid you mean 16px, sure. Any more advanced techniques? Lol forget you're getting rounded boxes with a shadow and you're gonna like them.
But yeah, I'm glad they're overengineering Redux again because their reactivity model is fundamentally broken. That's exactly what """frontend""" should be about.10 -
Customers CEO insists we need to start the 3 weeks to deliver crunch website project by having the hottest UX design on the planet done by a professional UX specialist specializing in hotness who might charge a lot and take a few weeks and leave us no time to deliver said hotness. Grrrr.
I felt like Sirus Black as a dog bouncing of the chest of the werewolf.
When I explained in full why it's a great idea to have a great UX concept, the project is an education website, for the government, and it's WCAG AA. Balanced against all the reasons that we had more urgent things to look at with such a short timeframe they insisted "The UX Guy" will save us. Dear fascist bully boy. I am a UX guy! I may not be "The UX Guy" but I remember when Javascript was for popups and the extent of most peoples PHP was sending forms via anonymous SMTP. I bet the design will look something like the CNN website or Apple.com. Both bastions of web accessibility standards. Grrrrrr. -
Dear web developers, please think of the boot disk users.
Users might have to boot their computer from external bootable media such as a live USB stick, SSD, or live CD/DVD, after their operating system caught a problem that prevents it from booting.
Emergency boot media usually has earlier versions of web browsers because they are not frequently used, much less updated. Sadly, the developers of many websites have a habit of breaking compatibility for older web browsers. For example, the new audio player used by the Internet Archive (Archive.org) does not even support Firefox 57, a version that was released as recently as November 2017!
Therefore, websites should retain support for old web browsers. If not all features can be made to work, at least the essential features should work on older browser versions. Websites should not let down people who are stuck due to a computer problem. Those users should still be able to browse the Internet for help, and perhaps enjoy basic entertainment such as watching videos (YouTube, Dailymotion) and listenening to music or audio books (SoundCloud, Internet Archive) while at it.
The attached screenshot shows something no internet user wants to be "greeted" with.
Keep the Internet accessible.
18 -
Chromium dev tools and Lighthouse audits sound like a Chrome features marketing campaign, once you proceed beyond basic optimizations and bug fixes, like
use our new image formats, stop shipping old JavaScript to new browsers, provide a source map, use web font preload but only if you use it exactly matching the best case scenario, rewrite your manifest file which used to work just fine etc.
actively encourage people to exclude up to 5% of global website audience?!
"This means that 95% of global web traffic comes from browsers that support the most widely used JavaScript language features from the past 10 years"
https://web.dev/publish-modern-java... -
BLOODY FILTER KEYS. Suddenly my keyboard stopped working altogether. Why? Because Windows decided to filter my keyboard out, thanks to some accessibility setting. I had unchecked all the boxes in the accessibility settings, like I always do on a fresh Windows installation - BUT one that I forgot. I've always thought these accessibilty options are a FREAKING NUISANCE! Just because there are a few handicapped people who cannot use a keyboard normally, we all have to suffer :( These settings should be part of the installation like "Enable accessibilty settings by default" instead of something you must remember to disable afterwards.
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As many of us are filling out applications right now, I have another complaint about accessibility. If a company ever reps for Accessibe or their clients use accessibe, then ghost them immediately (they don’t care about developers opinion).6
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Finding out React components score very low on accessibility tests.
This applies especially to imported libraries.
If anyone has any good tips after a similar experience, do share. -
The worst part about being an accessibility expert in these times is getting a redundant flood of a11y stuff on developer knowledge email subscriptions.
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I really hate accessibility defects. Not because I have to give special treatment to someone, but because every single goddamn screen reader interprets HTML tags and aria attributes differently. So you can't just write well formed HTML and add aria attributes, you have to also add all kinds of crap to the HTML and JavaScript so it will work on all the various mobile and desktop screen readers.
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Does anybody know about to text from an iPhone on a Windows 10 PC? I doubt I'll ever get a Mac... and would like to write a texting client if there is not already one available. Apple's bullshit lack of compatibility and accessibility to developers off of their platform probably means cutting corners, but I figured if there was a way this community is the fastest way to find out..3
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