> And I realized that when I asked Claude for a bunch of ideas and then I selected the best one based on my experience, I was exercising that exact skill. I wasn't exercising the skill of coming up with the solution from scratch.
Makes me think of Japan, where young people learn to recognize kanji. They type the sound of a word into a computer, then choose the appropriate one.
When they have to write by hand, they often draw a blank (not only children, I had a university professor I knew temporarily forget the character for "police").
An article from 2012 said that 66% of Japanese surveyed believed that they were losing the ability to write kanji.
I have probably watched this movie a dozen times, and I delight in all the tiny, barely-acknowledged references throughout.
The Italian and French soldiers walking into the bar, and the Italian not able to get a word in edgewise.
The German couple saying, "Leibchen, what watch is it?" "Six watch" "Such watch" because that is the literal translation into English of the German "uhr".
The singing of "La Marseillaise" by extras who were mostly themselves refugees from Nazi-occupied Europe -- the emotion was real.
I've heard a lot of stories in my time. They went along with the sound of a tinny piano playing in the parlor downstairs. "Mister, I met a man once when I was a kid," it always began. (Rick is calling Ilsa a whore.)
I started with the VIC-20, and I'm now 62. After years of resisting the draw to turn my hobby into a career, I started working as a software developer almost 30 years ago. I feared that I might lose the joy, but (for the most part) it's still there.
I had to keep accessibility in mind a lot in my previous job (web development for a university). The thing that I consistently found was that, the more accessible a website was, the better the experience for everyone, not just people with disabilities.
This is true in other fields too. Wheel-chair ramps are used by people with baby strollers. Subtitles work for deaf people, those who can't understand the spoken language, or simple folks in situations where someone is sleeping next to them. Pretty much every accessibility-oriented feature ends up helping out people beyond the original audience.
3. Contextual (eg, holding something with one hand, loud environment)
When people think about accessibility, they often think about 1. But the long-tails for 2 and 3 are huge, and ultimately affect everyone at some point.
And to keep the loop going, stroller-accessible spaces are also walker-accessible spaces and cart-accessible spaces. Worked at a computer store in the early 00s. Our rented retail space had a wheelchair ramp and there were a few elderly regulars who would show up with a desktop PC in the basket of their rolling walkers for repairs. More than once they thanked us for having the ramp because the computer itself was way too heavy for them to carry from the parking lot.
In fact, in a way, basically everyone will use a baby stroller at some point in their life (at least as a passenger).
I personally never noticed this before becoming a parent, but there's a lot of spaces that are "almost" stroller friendly, but for some reason there is a small obstacle that would not be expensive to remove (if accounted for during planning). For example, a few steps that could easily be a ramp, blocks of flats with a lift that is accessible after ascending a few steps, even high shop entrances.
For me it's not a problem, because I can easily carry stroller with a baby inside up, but for most mothers I know this is usually a huge or unsurmountable obstacle.
Not to mention luggage. I find it hard to believe that it’s a coincidence that rolling luggage became common shortly after curb cuts and wheelchair ramps did.
The rolling luggage is primarily useful in the vicinity of airports. Inside airports there were no curbs. And I don't think people are going on long journeys through downtown areas with their luggage. I think you have a better argument asserting that rolling bags were facilitated by cheap polyurethane skate wheels.
There were fewer ramps and more stairs in airports and their parking garages prior to the 90s, due to the ACA.
And people drag luggage around on city streets all the time. Many tourist destinations are pedestrian cities even outside their most central downtown areas. And luggage also needs to be dragged around hotels — and in suburban areas their absurdly large parking lots.
The skate wheels are a plausible argument, though.
While this is often true, sometimes accessibility features can be distracting to those who don't need them so should be implemented in a way that they are optional. For example, closed captions intended those who can't hear at all contain much more than spoken lines and are not appropriate for learning the (spoken) language and even less so when watching something in your native language with a good audio environment. Which is why subtitles are not on by default and you have different tracks for closed captions and regular subtitles.
Another way to think of this is that everybody occasionally needs to do something unusual. But some people, due to their life circumstances, always need to do something unusual. And making things better for the always-odd folk is also a positive to the occasionally-odd folk.
Which like, we're all eventually gonna be odd folk! That's what age does to us. But we should understand these accommodations as being a net positive, not a cost, to society.
Yep. In accessibility research, they call these "situational disabilities". When you need to open a door with your arms full of groceries, you aren't so different from someone who is never able to open a door. Accommodations that help people with permanent disabilities also help other people in the right situations, too.
My touchpad broke and I couldnt download the touchpad driver to fix it on the spot because there was no way to get to the download button with tab and enter, you had to click it.
That's a funny example, reminds me of how often fresh Windows 7 or older installs were missing the ethernet driver so you had to move stuff over on a flash drive to get started really setting stuff up.
In your situation, a couple possible solutions come to mind. 1) turn on "mouse keys" which lets you use the numpad to move the mouse and click, 2) a vim addon for the browser (e.g. vimperator or tridactyl) likely could've clicked the button via the hints mode.
It's in the past now so maybe these wouldn't have worked or you didn't know, of course, just fun to think of what I would've done.
Yup. Or people with temporary disabilities — who have simply broken limb or had a surgery. Most places are hellish to navigate on crutches. Heavy doors alone make so many places nearly inaccessible, and that’s before you even get to stairs.
Additionally, I found, that simply sticking to web standards, instead of reimplementing everything in JavaScript, goes a long way towards accessibility.
Exactly; consider that only a percentage of users will actually be sitting at a desktop system using your application. Most people will visit your website on a mobile device, and a percentage of that will be in weird lighting conditions trying to operate the thing with just one hand. As just an example, and that's the people considered abled - anything that isn't the hip startup of the week aimed at 15-25 year olds will need to consider e.g. eyesight issues on top of everything else.
Anyway, it's not even an option anymore, under the European Accessibility Act, government and (since last year) public services (websites, apps, appliances, etc) all need to be accessible; for websites this means implementing WCAG 2.something to level AA, which includes things like minimum contrast requirements, captioned videos, and increasing font size without losing information.
And it's often considered an afterthought because by and large, designers and developers are relatively young, 20-40 some year olds working on Macbooks with 4K displays. Some may be wearing glasses but broadly speaking that's the extent of their disabilities.
- accessibility is just usability. all it is is making sure your product is as usable by as many people as possible.
- it's a myth that "people with disabilities" are some other that excludes you, and 'accessibility' or assistive technologies only benefits other people. Everyone is only temporarily 'abled'. You need to use prescription glasses to comfortable read a computer screen? You're a parent trying to watch some TV while getting your child to sleep? All benefit from assistive technologies.
> accessibility is just usability. all it is is making sure your product is as usable by as many people as possible.
Not always. There are things that increase usability for fully abled people but decrease it for disabled people. Color-coding is a common one. Another is using smaller font size to make more info visible at once, or advanced touch gestures that can be accidentally triggered by shaky hands.
Then there are accessibility features that actively harm fully abled users, like sticky keys or screen readers that automatically follow focused UI elements.
Color coding doesn't decrease usability for disabled people (and I say that as a screen reader user). You just need to ensure that color is not the only way the relevant information is conveyed.
Certain types of colorblindness combined with certain colors makes text much harder to read than black-on-white. If you limit yourself to just universally readable colors, you're heavily limiting the number of different categories you can highlight. There's also the matter of screen real estate - duplicating info isn't helpful for people who can deal with colors just fine. I'm not saying it's a srong thing to do, just pointing out accessibility and usability are different things.
Colors should be an OS feature. On iOS and macOS you can remap colors globally and it works in all native apps. There are presets fire the common cases: red/green issues, color blindness etc and you can make your own. This has its limitations though eg if you are not able to distinguish at least 5 or so colors… any colors.
and, as is being increasingly forgotten, SOUND QUES. Seriously, I get they can be annoying but they make navigating and interacting with things so much easier if you can't see them. Sure, TTS exists but is far more inefficient and objectively less helpful in these kinds of circumstances
But you can — or should be able to — independently toggle all of those features. For example, the app should work in high-contrast mode with disabled color coding, it should work with touch gestures disabled, etc.
A good common framework helps here. Then, it's up to each user to set their settings properly.
Riddle me this - why would you want to disable something that increases usability of an application? (Yes, this is a loaded question - I never said these features are bad, just that usability and accessibility are sometimes at odds with each other.)
unsure this is quite the same thing, but I often swap my phone to gray scale to reduce brightness overall (and 'reduce whitepoint' sometimes) because at night colors are too stimulating.
For example, opting to not enable high-contrast mode is a question of aesthetics. Arguably reading text would become easier for the user, but they prefer to sacrifice a little of the readability in favor of looks.
In fact, for some people high contrast is headache-inducing.
I’ve installed a utility on my laptop that supports “sub-zero” display dimming for nighttime use because monitors are now over-optimized for max brightness, with min brightness being retina-searing for eyes adjusted to a dim room.
I am a little confused about your response. Do you disagree with me that accessibility features often reduce usability, or do you agree with me and just feel like nitpicking? I'm all for nitpicking, but I'd rather keep it separate from the real debate.
You might be the kind of person who does benefit from accessibility features such as larger font size. On the other hand, I'm not; I can read 10pt font on 100 DPI display just fine, without glasses. I'd rather have an extra column in table view visible without scrolling than larger letters, but for you the tradeoff might be different. That's why it's accessibility and not usability. Usability would be if the bigger font didn't push anything off screen, then of course it's better to make it bigger.
Yes and unfortunately font size is usually one of those things where everyone is subjected to the "improvement". Accessibility guidelines should not be specifying minimum font sizes but rather require websites to respect the browser settings.
Everybody has some minimum text size they're comfortable with. If you make the text bigger than that, they're forced to scroll unnecessarily, which is less usable. But the size differs from person to person, so it should be configurable. You get this automatically with web browsers and most GUI frameworks if you don't go out of your way to break it (just stick with the default font).
I 100% agree. I've been working on a component library rebuild at work and accessibility is a key focus, granted I don't think that would be the case if some of our contracts didn't mandate it but it's fiiiiiine
I'm someone who enjoys this kind of work, especially when the target is a stylized drop down - I got to spend a week with the MDN page for the ARIA combobox open, trudging through all of the ins and outs of keyboard accessibility and I know I'm still missing a couple things (typing when the control is focused but not open, for example), and having clearly defined specs is something we don't seem to get a lot in webdev
My go to when implementing custom controls that can't be achieved in native HTML is the ARIA Patterns (https://www.w3.org/WAI/ARIA/apg/patterns/) site. That has clear documentation on the roles, states, and keyboard interactions for common UI controls. I've used it for things like a search bar with an autocomplete dropdown to get the keyboard interaction right.
Some of the things we take for granted in UI/UX originated that way, like automatic hamburger menu hide/show (for very large zoom) and "scroll to content/top" buttons for screenreaders, which, if you've ever tried to read a recipe online are pretty critical. Captions on videos are also like that, although there you might share blame to them for enabling the poor sound mastering on things like, legendarily, Tenet, perhaps.
What are the advantage of “scroll to content/top” buttons over <main> for screen readers? I think that the use of those buttons is for when the CSS fails to load.
It's essentially the same thing, but a lot of the time people will add a sr-only button at the very top that just goes straight there, and one at the bottom if the screen reader gets stuck in the footer nav, as well. Depending on which screenreader people use they sometimes only work on the actual hydrated markup, so <main> isn't always visible the way you'd expect. It's been a while since I did a11y tho so I'm probably hopelessly out of date.
Such buttons are more visible to (screen reader) users who navigate the web exclusively with arrow keys.
Landmarks are important, but to navigate by landmark, you need to be experienced enough to know the right quicknav keys. Some beginner users might not be.
"Scroll to content" doesn't mean what you think it means.
It doesn't scroll to the "useful" part of an article. It doesn't skip past the introduction / filler / two pages of "this is how my grandma used to make it." The only thing it does is getting you past the top navbar and such, and moving focus straight to the beginning of the article.
Here (in Canada), we are paying about USD$65/month for 500Mbps down and 500Mbps up. Our only choice is Xplornet (the provincial government sold monopoly rights to each area of the province) but I think their prices are regulated.
You have more problems than just the monopoly. Like the FCC, among other federal agencies, being completely captured by big business.
The Quebec Starlink subsidy program was terminated in early 2026, AFAICT. I'm not sure if it was for explicitly political reasons like the termination of the similar Ontario program was.
`high-speed internet` is not necessary a fiber though.
As recent as 2025 Videotron had been receiving subsidies to build cable network in a newly constructed neighborhood.
> cable can get up to 1Gbps, and probably higher, so it's a distinction without a difference.
Heavily disagree.
There is a distinction with a big difference. Currently deployed by Videotron cable solution is 940Mbps down and only 50Mbps up.
That's an abysmal upload speed.
Of course Videotron is aware that cable is dead end. (even though they still building it on subsidies).
That's why Videotron is offering to switch to Bell's fiber in some locations.
Recently there has been a push to farm "dry-land" salmon. In other words, the salmon live in large tanks on land, rather than in pens in the sea.
At the moment a company is trying to start one of these close to me. Some local people are opposed, some are supportive, but most just want more objective study and information (i.e. not performed/paid for by the company itself).
The devil may be in the implementation, but it certainly has some big advantages over the coastal pens.
I'm no expert but that seems like it could be very energy intensive. All the systems to maintain water quality, temperature. Not to mention the problems that arise having fish in such high density.
There are other places in the world that farm salmon at a much lower density which helps in terms of disease and bioload on the environment. There's a company in New Zealand attempting to build open ocean fish pens, they might already have a prototype out already can't remember. Different species of salmon though.
Energy may not be so much of an issue here in Quebec, where electricity is USD$0.05/kWh (residential rate) and 99%+ of it comes from hydroelectric power.
Nagano, Japan does land farming of salmon. It's a landlocked state far from any coast so the farming is done in inland rivers and lakes. It's a crossbreed of rainbow trout and brown trout that produces a sterile hybrid called Shinshu Salmon so I don't know if it's actually real salmon, but it tastes like the same thing.
Makes me think of Japan, where young people learn to recognize kanji. They type the sound of a word into a computer, then choose the appropriate one.
When they have to write by hand, they often draw a blank (not only children, I had a university professor I knew temporarily forget the character for "police").
An article from 2012 said that 66% of Japanese surveyed believed that they were losing the ability to write kanji.
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