toad.social is one of the many independent Mastodon servers you can use to participate in the fediverse.
Mastodon server operated by David Troy, a tech pioneer and investigative journalist addressing threats to democracy. Thoughtful participation and discussion welcome.

Administered by:

Server stats:

335
active users

#usability

2 posts2 participants0 posts today
Replied in thread

Nowhere is this type of arrogance more starkly obvious than in this very problem.

The fact that one may be good at coding does not mean they are good systems thinkers, architects, or designers, and one does not necessarily need to be a good coder to be a good at systems architecture or design.

So much of #FOSS #SoftwareDevelopment remains mired in terrible #usability that perpetuates injustice precisely because too many coders refuse to admit their inadequacies and welcome the input of others.

Continued thread

And look, I get it, git’s commands make perfect sense (and, dare I say, are elegant) if one thinks in directed acyclic graphs. The challenge is creating interfaces for all the folks who don’t think in directed acyclic graphs. Or, in simpler terms, a note from one of my earlier talks on design: “Your app shouldn’t look like your database just threw up.”

Which leads us to the difference between inside-out and outside-in design…

More: ar.al/talks/#superheroes-and-v

Aral BalkanTalksI’ve given hundreds of talks over the last two decades and beyond. Here are a few of my favourites in chronological order so you can see how my focus and thoughts have evolved through the years. I hope you enjoy them. PS. If you want me to speak about the Small Web at your event, feel free to send a short message to mail@ar.al with the details. PPS. You can see Laura and me live every third Thursday of the month on Small is Beautiful, which we stream from our own Owncast server.

Frage an die #BahnBubble : Weiß jemand, warum zur Hölle ich mich im #DBNavigator _vor_ dem Such- und Buchungsvorgang entscheiden muss, ob ich eine einfache oder eine Hin- und Rückfahrt möchte? 🤯

Warum wurde die praktische Funktion "Rückfahrt hinzufügen" für einfache Fahrten von anno dazumal abgeschafft?

Und wenn ich vorm Suchen vergessen habe, von "Hin- und Rück" auf "einfache" zu schalten, warum kann ich nicht einfach klicken "jajaja sorry, mach aus der gefundenen Verbindung eine Einzelfahrt", sondern muss abbrechen und von vorn durch den ganzen verdammten Vorgang?

Wie sah der #Usability-Test aus, den das bestanden hat? Und was machen die #UX-Designer der Bahn eigentlich beruflich? 🤪

#Web #usability and #accessibility ...

This is from crimethinc.com, but I'm not trying to pick particularly on them. There are many, many, many sites just as bad or worse.

This is a screenshot from an article on their site today, rendered in Firefox (Linux).

See the hair-thin font? See the fact that it's light grey on a white background? There's virtually no contrast between the text and the background.

This is an accessibility nightmare for those with any sort of vision problem. Picking the colour out of the screenshot (I didn't look at the CSS), it appears the text is basically 45% grey. This is ludicrous.

If the font face had some heft, it might be still be half-assed readable with contrast this low.

But as is... If I were to take my contacts out, I wouldn't even be able to tell that this screenshot *had* any of the normal-sized text in it, much less be able to read any of it.

Web designers, I beg you: please consider more than the appearance of what you're creating when you're making design choices.

Remember that not everyone is a 20- or 30-something with near-perfect vision.

Remember that people have cataracts or other types of eye cloudiness which necessitate high-contrast text to be able to read, even if they scale the fonts up by a huge amount.

Remember that vision degrades naturally in people in many ways other than "just wear glasses" can fix.

In #Munich, the surface metro is called "S"-Bahn and the underground is the "U"-Bahn. There's this elevator on my way to work that has these three buttons: "O", "S" and "U". Which one would you pick to get to the "S"-trains when you're coming from the "U"-trains?

Over and over I've seen tourists with suitcases make the wrong choice in this elevator. It bothered me so much that I've printed a label to fix the #UX of this #usability disaster.

It's been there for 2 weeks now ✌️

Recent datepicker experience:
1. Control is presented as three separate spin controls, supporting the Up/Down Arrow keys to increment and decrement the value as well as manual typing. But because they're not text inputs, I can't use the Left/Right Arrow keys to review what each separate one contains, only to move between day, month, and year.
2. I tab to year.
3. I press Down Arrow, and the value is set to 2075. I'm unclear how many use cases require the year to be frequently set to 2075, but I can't imagine it's many so this seems like a fairly ridiculous starting point.
4. I press Up Arrow, and the value gets set to 0001. The number of applications for which 0001 is a valid year is likewise vanishingly small.
5. I delete the 0001, at which point my #screenReader reports that the current value is "0". Also not a valid year.
6. Out of curiosity, I inspect the element to see which third-party component is being used to create this mess... only to find that it's a native `<input>` with `type="date"` and this is just how Google Chrome presents it.

A good reminder that #HTML is not always the most #accessible or user-friendly.