User Inconvenience / User eXaspsration Design

When you can’t use pains, and you’re trying to use the accessibility contact, and get an access denied warning, with a pain number to contact them.

“But accessibility is hard!”

Which is largely BS. There’s great tools that can automate validating your desktop application or web site for Section 502.3 compliance. It’s a far cry from the olden days where I’d have to walk through everything manually with a screen reader and contrast ratio checker, and cross my fingers that I didn’t miss anything.

It’s not even hard these days to write accessible software, just tedious - especially you wait until the last minute to fix everything versus thinking about it from the start (see also: internationalization). It’s just the kind of stuff any competent developer writing software should think about.

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Still, almost every tutorial, demo, etc. skips all that. So everyone’s being trained not to do it. Only now are we beginning to see it included from the start in the boilerplate templates, so that new people learn it as standard operating procedure. It’ll probably take a generation until it’s ingrained. For now, it’s still treated as an add-on, after all the functionality is done, after all the tests are done, nice-to-have but low priority.

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I just noticed that Google Images, Duck Duck Go images, and Swiss Cow Images ALL give only a small version of the image. You can’t see a bigger one unless you go to the original website (which may not have it either unless you pay for it–and may be full of malware).

I know this is because big companies feel the old version allows copyright infringement . Getty Images sued Google, so they came to some agreement. I imaged they also sued the other two search images as well.

Does anyone know a place where you can still search images and see the originals at full size? I use them for modeling purposes, which seems to me to be fair use (especially since I don’t publish them anywhere, except maybe here on the Whatcha Working On thread).

Fuck Getty and all the other image “sources,” who all likely scour the 'net for anything they can steal.

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I regularly purchase stock photos for clients.

Yeah, fuck getty, I’m with you there, but maybe you can get them to work for you? istockphoto.com will let you download watermarked photos that are decent size. Their image search gives you pretty big examples. Depending on what you’re looking for pictures of, and if watermarks won’t interfere with what you’re doing, they might have something for you.

You might have to set up an account, but that doesn’t cost anything. And neither does it cost to download comp images.

Here is an example of a search I did recently, the results are pretty big and you can set up a lightbox to keep sort out the ones you like.

EDIT: I wasn’t sure if by modeling purposes, you mean to use as examples for models or if you wanted something to print out to use in your models, so I may be off base. Sorry if I’m blithering nonsense.

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Thank you! I’ll give istockphoto a try.

Actually both. Especially ones from the first 1/3 of the 20th century. Maybe the Library of Congress would be a good source.

Maybe someone will come up with a Firefox add-on that will do what Google used to do – go to the website, get the image and display it.

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This may or may not be helpful, not so much for the actual search but finding larger versions on sites that show small versions: https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/image-max-url/

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Grr, whenever I read google news, some site called cointelegraph is always visible.

They remind me of

For instance, I don’t need to read this shittake.

Screen Shot 351

For some sources, you can mute using the three dots – is that a thin “hamburger menu”?

Screen Shot 353

For others, not so much.

Screen Shot 354

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I use “Personal Blocklist (not by Google)”, mainly to filter out spam, and filter out comp sci departments’ word frequency lists. I don’t know if there’s a Safari version or equivalent.

Interesting. I’ll look into it. Thanks.

an unfortunate intersection of ad and content.

a crisp view indeed.

https://www.universetoday.com/146960/ai-upscales-apollo-lunar-footage-to-60-fps/ if you like that sort of thing.

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That crisp view is colorized too. So there is water on the moon?

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I just want to search my files. Sigh.

I can find results which contain the words I’m searching for or longer words with that letter combination inside, but can’t just separate out the ones which contain the words I’m looking for without the longer ones. So many search systems are optimized to deliver more results, more, more, more, instead of relevant results. Or to deliver one best result, which need not relate to the search.

I guess if that’s the most common use case, somreone could create “find every file” which delivers every file on the computer regardless of the search, or “find BEST file” which yields the “SINGLE RESULT” randomly selected from all files regardless of the search.

P.S. Remember when some devs were arguing that folders were obsolete, because users could just search instead? Yeah, that’s not an option if users can’t search anymore.

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I know a lot of people who use Excel as their life/work development environment who would lose their shit if Excel went away… but it really has to go.

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They haven’t been using some sort of central database like Oracle? Or copies of it? Gad.

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Biologists in particular are reluctant to invest time in learning programming skills.

Consulting the first edition from my library, neither “Excel” nor “Spreadsheet” appear in the index.

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Another paper from 2016 in BMC Genome Biology discovered that approximately 20 per cent of more than 3,500 papers published in 18 journals contained Excel files riddled with gene name errors.

Excel is a top-of-the-line data-corruption system. But try telling that to people. They really balk at using anything else for some reason. Luckily the people at my company who handle the data caught on after countless hours of manually tracking down and fixing bad data.

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The god-damned auto date change is the worst, most egrarious “feature” that doesn’t have a way to disable (tmk)

Yes, this column of 3000 IDs composed of three alpha and four numeric characters obviously has hidden dates I want Excel to find and change.

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Part numbers. Operation locations. The use of “may” as a word.

Yeah. I could handle the rest of its nonsense if it weren’t for the date thing. I wouldn’t like it but at least the rest of it has gotten a bit more consistent in the last few revs.

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How is this supposed to protect anyone’s safety?

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