Tangled, hire a front-end accessibility expert
29 points by diktomat
29 points by diktomat
A response to https://lobste.rs/s/ukj8mm/federated_code_forge
This seems surprisingly meanspirited for a blog post about a single issue - doesn't Tangled have a repo somewhere where this could be posted as an issue/bug, rather than as a whole rant?
It's not a rant at all. Maybe my frustration is showing because accessibility is not taken seriously on projects where it really should be. My criticism is proportional to the size of their investment, if it was a personal project I wouldn't make such a post.
I only highlight a single issue, there are many, and quite a few obvious issues at a glance if the right expertise had reviewed it. Why I didn't report a repo issue is covered in my post. They should be paying an expert for that work.
Agreed, once you take millions of dollars to turn a community project into a VC backed "grow at all costs" one, the amount of grace afforded is not the same.
And by “accessibility” in this case you just mean “usable by people over 40”. I saw a similar situation arise in a well-funded mobile app targeting an older audience — literally the older you are, the more you likely need to do in the app. The designers made the whole thing use tiny dark grey text on light grey. (With tons of whitespace, of course, to make it more “readable”.) And similarly, I think it got scrambled when you increased the text size in the accessibility settings.
well in my case I do mean everyone, including people under 40 :) eyesight deteriorates with age but not everyone starts from the same place. Conditions can be non-permanent and situational too. Same applies for all factors affecting accessibility.
A base font size of 12px in this decade truly is beyond the pale. It doesn’t so much call into question their competence as much as utterly disprove it.
(I think I probably last saw such a preposterous base size on a new site about ten years ago, and HN is the only commercial site I can think of off the top of my head still around.)
Sure, you can patch it, but if they got something so foundational wrong, I’m not going to waste my time looking for the further severe and probably more insidious issues that are certain to be there. I trust they’ll have got more major things wrong.
If you see a builder making doors and window frames with unseasoned timber, you don’t ask them to stop being idiots, you find someone else.
Please note the correction. The issue is still there but I pointed to the wrong cause initially.