pigeons are domesticated rock doves. rock doves nest in small caves, so the only nest building they need to do is a few sticks to prevent eggs from rolling out of the caves.
seems like in the apollo era crew carried a few in their PPK (personal preference kit), and in the later shuttle era they regularly carried 500-1000 pins per mission.
It’s the same feeling. No different from rebuilding that crazy synth you made one night, succeeding, and then being able to improv/vamp with it during a live session. It is a creative process and I urge anyone who finds the high level aspect of music creation to pursue the lower levels
I've been trying to put together a study group all week!
Is it possible to add a new course to the library? I'd like to make a group for CSS for JavaScript Developers by Josh W Comeau [1] but it seems like I can only make a group for courses in the library.
I like to take this a step further and try to have all my most important tooling be written in my projects major languages. It's not a must have, but having a build system for a go project that is also go under the hood means I'm more comfortable diving into the source if needed.
I don't think it's a requirement, but it's an advantage
It's amazing how many people in this thread are seriously suggesting that these a11y features are not important. Do HN readers not understand that someday they will grow old, and their eyesight will fail, and they will find themselves increasing the font size on their devices?
I used to bring up accessibility concerns quite a lot on HN. I have stopped however, because it is always the same story.
It doesn't seem to matter how nice I am about it, or how accommodating I am towards people just hacking. I never want to stop people's creative spirit. Ever. But I'm one of those people who uses a screen reader. If your app does not work with them, it will not work for me. The amount of weirdly hostile responses I get really puts me off commenting here, so I just don't do it anymore. That doesn't make the issue go away, but it also just does not help.
This isn't entirely unique to HN. It is very easy to dismiss accessibility concerns if you're not affected by them, or don't have anyone close that is. I try not to take it personally, but when many people chime in with comments like it's OK that you can't use this app, you're a minority, your burdens aren't anybody elses, and don't listen to them and go make a cool thing without regard, (not an exaggeration it's all in my comment history) it's a bit hard not to be put off by it.
If I was able to change one or two minds with my little comments, then I'm very happy about that because maybe it means I get to use your next cool app too. I'm just not going to look for it here, and if I find an accessibility flaw, HN will definitely not be where I comment about it. I've gotten some genuinely good responses too. Some of you also tried to defend my point of view. Like Sam. And I'm very grateful for that. Sadly it's the same fight every single time, and I'm a little bit exhausted by it.
From my observation, most folks get there temporarily or faster in their own specific way.
I have friends who lost their hearing early for a variety of reasons.
There are lots of ways to have imperfect eyesight, or lose it temporarily. You can lose your glasses or not be able to wear contact lenses for a while.
Lots of folks with laser surgery eventually regress. Also the surgery itself has visual side-effects.
Look, accessibility* is great and important to many people, and if you can afford to prioritize it early on in your product development, that's great - but it is not productive to treat commercial products like critical infrastructure, ignore the costs of implementing accessibility features (common tooling and standardization make it much easier, thankfully), and exaggerate the benefits.
The article starts off with the over-cited and misunderstood 1/6 figure, which comes from the WHO's claim that 1/6 of the world suffers from a "significant disability". I couldn't find a breakdown of what the WHO considers a significant disability in the first place, but the CDC in the US lists the following six disability categories in one of its studies: hearing, vision, cognitive, mobility, self-care, and independent living. How many of these are actually relevant in software? I have never once heard calls to make software more accessible to people with cognitive disabilities, and mobility/self-care/independent living categories are simply irrelevant to the overwhelming majority of software use cases. So no, you're not growing your audience by 1/6 by implementing screen-reader support for your website. If your product is growing, you're better off focusing on internationalization (which, technically, is a form of accessibility, but obviously not the subject of the article).
* Do we really need to abbreviate "accessibility" everywhere? It's just nine more characters than "a11y" and - speaking of accessibility - is more readable!
Disability accommodations tend to also strongly benefit everyone else. I know this isn't a code thing, but the most useful one I can think of is curb cuts.
Speaking of curb cuts, recently in my town, they ripped up the sidewalks with already existing curb cuts, and added a new yellow pad with raised bumps in addition to new curbs (with the cuts). I was going to ask what this was for, but a quick search indicates that it is likely for blind users to feel the end of the sidewalk with a cane.
Those also have good traction. On a winter morning before anyone gets around to shoveling, those pads might be the only good surfaces on my entire commute. The street corner where cars are turning is a pretty good spot not to be slipping.
Not sure why this comment is being downvoted. Thinking about accessibility is likely to positively impact your product or service's user experience. Not everyone has low/no vision or uses a switch device, but keeping those users in mind will allow abled folks to benefit from your design choices as well. Have you ever used a UI and complained that elements provide ideal contrast, or that you're able to use your keyboard for interactions?
> readers not understand that someday they will grow old, and their eyesight will fail, and they will find themselves increasing the font size on their devices?
let's reverse that, did you as a youth give much thought to what the olds went through on a daily? obviously, depending on age, the olds might not have been using computers to the extent we are today, but it still holds. the hubris of youth is part of growing up. until you personally experience something, it is hard to fully grok it. sure, we can know somethings without experience like not drinking bleach is a good idea. there are other things that are just so outside of the normal experience, it is hard to fathom. for a lighter example, have you ever tried walking in a pair of high heels even if not stilettos? it's painful, and i was on platform heels. i would fall down in 3 seconds flat with stilettos. after several hours, i was complaining about my feet hurting in the shoes. so after walking a mile in another person's shoes, I will never be frustrated if someone in my group needs a break from their shoes during a long night out ever again.
Its not that they arent important when looked at by itself, but it just isnt as important as other things. Nobody cares if a car has poor ui if it doesnt actually work. Get it to run first, then make the ui nice. IIRC theres a phrase for this: make it work, make it right, make it fast.
Except you're not getting it to run first any more than the restaurant that opens with a "no blacks" sign got it to run first for whites. You're discriminating, excluding people based on things they have no control over because you couldn't get over your own self absorbed privilege not unlike operators of diners or busses or taxis in the US South 65 years ago.
No, they don't understand. This isn't a forum of hackers any more, it's a forum of get rich quick capitalists trying to make bank on the latest popular trade. Accessibility is for losers, that's how sociopaths operate and Silicon Valley is a nest of them.
Almost nobody is suggesting this and you can reply to whoever you think is wrong about something. It says 'sneer' in this thing but those are the values of 'sneer' that include 'harangue':
Please don't sneer, including at the rest of the community.
How is iMessage a monopoly? I would like open communications standards as much as the next guy, but next to iMessage there are WhatsApp, Telegram, Signal, WeChat, Facebook Messenger etc. etc.
And as far as I know, you have to use the official WhatsApp app to chat on WhatsApp, same for Telegram, etc. etc. So apart from iMessage not being a monopoly, they are also not more restrictive than their competition.
So besides not matching with our "open" ideology for communication, what exactly has Apple done wrong here?
My view is that all of those messaging platforms blocking alternative clients are equally problematic.
I've arrived at this position because I'm not able to use any of those platforms because they don't provide accessibility tools that I need. Beeper does, and most matrix clients do also.
I recognize that the open source "everything should be open" view is not remotely mainstream, but the only way forward is to demand better.
We have best practices and movies about having too little control of other people's systems too. If law, morality, and debate only required finding whether there was a negative outcome they would be trivial. Unfortunately that doesn't yield practical results. Things need to be weighed and debated on a larger scale.
Throwing in my perspective: I largely agree with the DMA and think while iMessage was found not to be popular enough to qualify in Europe we should have something similar in place in the US and it certainly has enough penetration here to qualify under the same wording. I.e. I think we need something between "free rein" and "monopoly" for very large players which has practical effects on how you're required to interop.
Apples only escape here is that they're only popular in America. Whatsapp, Facebook messenger etc have to open up in the coming months because it's illegal in Europe. Apple should open up too, just like they have to with the App Store (because that is big enough to count as a gatekeeper)
Definitely not true for Telegram, they are completely open about the client side infrastructure: https://telegram.org/apps (and there are dozens of third party clients, some even linked on their official website)
Telegram does have some weird restrictions on third-party clients -- in particular, you'll get blocked if you try to create an account or perform certain other operations using an unofficial client. But generally, yes.
> How is iMessage a monopoly? I would like open communications standards as much as the next guy, but next to iMessage there are WhatsApp, Telegram, Signal, WeChat, Facebook Messenger etc. etc.
Because it's the replacement for SMS for Apple phones and doesn't require an account in the same way those other services do. It just uses the Apple account iPhone owners already need to have.
> But most people don't because it's the default. MS was found to have a monopoly with IE even though there were alternatives.
Windows also was the dominant operating system with a market share in the 90% or higher. iOS isn't even the market leader in the US let alone the world, so can't really be a monopoly now can it?
iPhone and Samsung combined make up almost 80% of smart phone market share in the US. Being as Statistia is a premium thing I can't get accurate numbers, but lets say splitting 50/50 because if it was anything with any serious gap, they wouldn't group them the same. I'd assume they're high 40's and low 50's split between the two, so means iPhone is ~40%, now I ain't no math magician or anything but that leaves ~60% for non-iPhone devices.
In plenty of other threads I've seen people bring up that in the US most phones are iPhones, they are the most popular choice by far. I can't remember where they sourced the info from and not about to research it myself though, at least not at the moment.
No buddy. I've looked up and verified sources in the past, just not willing to do so conversing with you in this particular discussion, especially since your reasoning which was just making assumptions was not very convincing. Thankfully others have already provided better sources.
> Really? It's never insisted upon for any core service?
You might need to qualify "core service" here, but no. Calls, SMS, MMS, internet all work fine without an account. You need an account to download apps from the app store, but that's a different argument. If you wanted to, there are various methods to load apps up without an account too (side loading via Xcode, MDM, etc).
Apparently since Apple made it more convenient to iPhone users to not only message other iPhone users from iMessage, but also receive their text messages in that single app too, it's a monopoly?
That probably didn't help things but I think the root cause comes down to the usual source of monopolies in this case: having vertical integration and a default app. Technically you don't even need an iPhone or SMS service to use iMessage. It is by the most common use case though, and one which increased the amount of integration a bit.
So if your ISP like AOL makes all of their webpages nice and fast but competitors slower and uglier artificially then is AOL abusing their market position here? We already set the precedent here that this is market abuse. This new case is no different.
Also, Apple knows this. They know they'd lose that's why they are already ahead of this by announcing adoption of RCS in 2024.
How can anyone presume that Apple would stand some sort of ideological ground here? We literally have emails where Apple c-suits say that iMessages mistreating android benefits them and they don't want to fix this. This is such a clear case I don't understand how anyone can defend this.
> It required an input key that was unique to our dongle series & our own code that was whatever we wanted. The reply was a hash of both values.
> The last version we used was USB. They retired the parallel style long ago.