playpause (u/playpause)

playpause commented on The A11Y Project Checklist a11yproject.com/checklist... · Posted by u/divbzero

extra88 · 3 years ago

Checklists are not a place for nuance. A search engine landing page is a place where using autofocus in the search field is perfectly appropriate; autofocusing a search field that's in the header of every page is not.

playpause · 3 years ago

I agree, autofocusing a search field that's in the header of every page is not generally appropriate, but that's not specifically about accessibility. It would be annoying for anyone on a mobile device (keyboard pops up on every page), and the focus ring and/or blinking cursor would be distracting.

What about cases where it is appropriate to autofocus the search input (as it's the primary action on the page) but where there also might (sometimes) be an important text notice above the search input? Sighted users would see the notice fine, while screenreader users would be 'teleported' (MDN's word) straight past it, missing the notice.

playpause commented on The A11Y Project Checklist a11yproject.com/checklist... · Posted by u/divbzero

playpause · 3 years ago

This looks like a great resource. Human checklists are not perfect but they tend to be better than automated checks for this sort of thing.

But there is a common form of accessibility guideline that I have a problem with, and this one illustrates it well: "Avoid using the autofocus attribute." The problem here is it quietly pits users with special accessibility needs against the rest - "Just don't use feature X." OK, but what should I do instead for the rest of my users who benefited from feature X? What if I'm making a search engine landing page and I want to automatically focus the input on page load (and automatically bring up their keyboard if touchscreen)? Is there some other approach that achieves the same UX as the autofocus attribute but without creating accessibility problems?

According to MDN, "When autofocus is assigned, screen-readers 'teleport' their user to the form control without warning them beforehand." OK, but really? Why? Why don't they offer the user the option to not do that?

playpause commented on Apple is discontinuing the iPod apple.com/newsroom/2022/0... · Posted by u/minimaxir

playpause · 3 years ago

For the last 2 years I’ve been using an iPod touch as my “downtime” device. I usually put my iPhone away in a drawer from early evening until I’m ready to start work the next day. I found this impossible to stick to until I got an iPod touch, because in the evenings and mornings I often need to manage things like HomeKit devices or other Apple ecosystem things like Reminders. I don’t have any distracting or time-sucking apps on the iPod touch, and the screen is small and fiddly, so I barely use it except for a few seconds here and there for something practical. The difference in stress levels and mindset has been huge. I can’t recommend highly enough separating your phone usage into ‘social/work/news/comms’ and ‘practical/home/calm’ categories, on different physical devices.

I have tried using the new iOS Focus and Downtime features to make my iPhone work a similar way (hide all the time-sucking apps at certain times of day etc), but having a dedicated device for the purpose is much simpler and much more effective.

playpause commented on Nature has enormous emotional and cognitive benefits on people npr.org/2022/04/14/109282... · Posted by u/happy-go-lucky

koboll · 3 years ago

I wonder if this title isn't a bit backwards. We are creatures that emerged from nature; being in nature is baseline to us. A better way to phrase this might be "being constantly trapped in a world made of concrete and drywall causes enormous emotional and cognitive detriments to people".

playpause · 3 years ago

I imagine your comment was meant with a bit of humour, so don't read too much into the following! But it got me thinking about optimism and pessimism.

The HN post title (at time of writing):

> Nature has enormous emotional and cognitive benefits on people

Yours:

> Being constantly trapped in a world made of concrete and drywall causes enormous emotional and cognitive detriments to people

It's just "Things could be better" vs "Things are bad". They are pretty much the same in terms of what they say/imply about current reality.

I think the HN title is actually closer to an objective statement than yours. Yours is ornately, floridly pessimistic. I think a lot of people (esp. engineering types, including me) suffer from a recurring tacit belief that: pessimism is better than optimism for getting at objective truth. I used to argue that both leanings are equally likely to result in poor judgement, with 'realism' smack in the middle. But I now go further and believe that fostering a slightly optimistic lean is actually better than 'no lean' – not just in the sense that 'you'll have a nicer time', but in terms of maximising how often you are correct in your observations of reality, in the long term. Because zero lean is impossible to maintain all the time. Our observations almost always rely on heuristics to accommodate for incomplete data or insufficient time. So you are going to err in your objective judgements about reality sometimes. And when you err on the optimistic side in a way that matters, reality tends to tap you on the nose and correct you fairly promptly. Which can hurt a bit, especially for someone who spends most of their waking life working with complex systems that are unforgiving about tiny details being incorrect - this trains us to to think of all the ways something might go wrong, so we feel bad when we failed to predict a negative event. But for most of life outside of solving engineering problems, eg, dealing with more organic/nebulous things like 'other people' or 'long term goals' or 'relaxing', being optimistically incorrect in your judgements and then being corrected by reality is better than being pessimistically incorrect and not being corrected. When you make pessimistic errors in judgement, you don't get actively corrected as much, so your ability to make objective observations drifts further pessimistic, worsening your decision making, worsening your situation, and it cycles downward. Eventually some kind of correction comes, but usually after hitting a new low, by which point a few things have gone wrong in your life and the climb back up is difficult. A slightly optimistic lean doesn't seem to have the equivalent problem (of drifting ever more optimistic until you're problematically divorced from reality). At least for me, anyway. I think this might be because a positive state of mind tends to be more active and therefore able to run more thoughts in parallel, including thoughts that can gently correct others that have gone a bit too far, while a negative mindset is more monotone.

playpause commented on An illustrated guide to plastic straws (2021) hwfo.substack.com/p/an-il... · Posted by u/worldvoyageur

andjd · 3 years ago

The author is conflating two separate issues.

Their main point is at the end:

> Banning plastic straws is stupid.

They're probably right that throwing out plastic straws is better than throwing them in the recycling, assuming that plastic straws can't be efficiently recycled. That being said, many US recycling utilities typically sort the recycling on shore, and plastics that are too small to be efficiently identified and recycled (such as straws and loose bottle caps) will just be sent to the landfill regardless. How recycling is processed differs a lot across the country, so it's hard to make generalizations.

But that doesn't support their final conclusion about whether plastic straws should be banned. The author doesn't give a reason, but implicitly that they think paper straws suck, and must suck. Which a lot of the ones today do. But it's an odd hill to die on, given that basically all straws before 1960 were made of paper. Their ire should probably be directed at the establishments they frequent for buying cheap and terrible paper straws instead of spending a bit more to get good quality paper straws. Such companies probably want to get you pissed off by paper straws to demand that your government remind the ban so they can go back to using cheaper plastic straws.

playpause · 3 years ago

> spending a bit more to get good quality paper straws

I am yet to see one of these

playpause commented on An illustrated guide to plastic straws (2021) hwfo.substack.com/p/an-il... · Posted by u/worldvoyageur

Syonyk · 3 years ago

> At this speed of advancement in less than 100 years I am sure we will have figure out something for the plastic we have generated meanwhile.

The problem is that today's plastic, in far less than 100 years, is reasonably likely to be finely divided into small numbers of molecule sized chunks, and spread evenly throughout the entire biological systems of the planet. We find microplastic in ants in the middle of untouched forestland, because it spreads so well on the wind.

> ...and advance technology as fast as we can.

It's an interesting gamble, certainly - solving the problems created by our current technological development path by pushing further down that development path.

It's just not one I expect to work. You don't generally solve problems by "doing more of what made them in the first place."

playpause · 3 years ago

Your implied plan (doing less of what made the problem in the first place) seems like more of a stretch to me. It would be nice, but I can’t see many countries giving up plastic. It’s too useful. I think focusing international collaboration efforts on better waste/pollution management (eg getting more waste plastic into properly managed landfills) seems a lot more plausible.

playpause commented on Twitter re-examines Elon Musk’s bid, may be more receptive to a deal wsj.com/articles/twitter-... · Posted by u/jbegley

SpikeDad · 3 years ago

Accomplished? He's got money and hired some smart people. And tech media is more than happy to ignore all the stupid shit he's done and tried.

playpause · 3 years ago

He’s the chief engineer and product designer at Tesla, and the chief engineer at SpaceX, as well as CEO of both. He led the design and engineering of rockets that land, cutting the cost of space travel by one order of magnitude. Meanwhile he created the most valuable car maker in the world and forced the rest of the industry to bring forward their electric car plans by a decade. And these things weren’t accidents, he often tells the world what his goals are before accomplishing them. And he’s the richest man in the world. He’s many things, but not unaccomplished.

playpause commented on No one expects young men to do anything and they are responding by doing nothing robkhenderson.substack.co... · Posted by u/Bostonian

franciscop · 3 years ago

This has been a really good read! Thanks for sharing, the only place where I had a strong disagreement was this, which could definitely be based on cultural differences:

> The people with the most money and education—the class most responsible for shaping culture and customs—ensure that their children are raised in stable homes. But actively undermine the norm for everyone else.

I am not from the USA but I don't believe this is true in e.g. Europe. At least in my country (Spain) and where I live now (Japan), it is understood even by the upper class that it's better to live in an educated society than in a criminal one. Sure there's some within that upper class that might want it, but I'd say it's a tiny minority of classists and not the upper class overall. But I also believe that in these countries the upper class is closer to the middle/lower classes, while in the USA I can see how the huge gap might make more people in the upper class think that it's an impossible goal and just give up and try to isolate the classes.

playpause · 3 years ago

My feeling is that the 'undermining' the author refers to is not a conscious attempt to keep the lower classes down. It's just middle/upper class people spouting fashionable political views, going along with the 'right message', and not really thinking about it. When it comes to their own personal behavioural decisions that will affect their kids, they take it more seriously, basing their decisions on their deep-down sense of 'how things really are', and then they come up with some kind of rationalisation of how this conservative behaviour actually fits in with their anti-conservative political views. This rationalising process has become second nature and they don't notice they are doing it at all.

playpause commented on HUDS and GUIs: an inspiration resource site featuring Future User Interfaces hudsandguis.com... · Posted by u/harporoeder

mike_hearn · 3 years ago

A few observations:

- Film "FUIs" are almost invariably dark these days. I wonder to what extent the designers are influenced by the dark modes in the tools they use.

- Most of them pack enormous amounts of stuff in with tiny fonts. Probably to stop the viewer from getting distracted trying to read stuff. But there seems to be an ambient assumption that 'futuristic' stuff is way more info-packed than today's UIs are - where does that come from?

- Most of them over-use transparency to absurd degrees. For holograms where you want to see the actor's face it makes sense but it appears even in shots where no actors are visible, e.g. https://www.hudsandguis.com/home/2018/florida-hospital-ui

- A typical film FUI has a lot of animated data visualizations, but real UI almost never does. Is this because such visualizations are useless clutter or because film makers have better tools for creating them than actual programmers do?

The difference between "actual" FUI and film FUI is best illustrated by the concept videos produced by engineering/tech firms:

- https://www.hudsandguis.com/home/2018/surface-hub2

- https://www.hudsandguis.com/home/2017/3/21/bmw-inside-future...

- https://www.hudsandguis.com/home/2015/10/18/lg-oled

We see way less detail and much more light-mode stuff.

I guess I'm curious how much of the gap we see between real UI and stylized/imagined UI is to do with lack of tooling, different design fashions and the different needs of film UI.

playpause · 3 years ago

> Is this because such visualizations are useless clutter or because film makers have better tools for creating them than actual programmers do?

Another reason is that real visualisations are hard. You have to faithfully represent some actual data, and make it ‘usable’ in the sense of well designed keys/labelling etc, and choose a chart type that is appropriate for the data and the point you are making, plus you somehow have to make it pretty and not overwhelming. These constraints all fight each other, you go round and round in circles and eventually you have something passable. It’s a professional field at the intersection of data science and design, it’s not like there is some magic ‘tooling’ that solves it for you.

Fake visualisations are very easy to make pretty - you can just generate data that looks nice, the design doesn’t have to have any real utility or even make sense, etc. It just has to look like a data visualisation.