I once sat on a zoom call with a vision impaired user to do some accessibility testing on our site.
First, it was enlightening for me to see how she navigated through our site using her screen reader.
Second when she landed on our booking page we got so embarrassed because she couldn’t use our date picker. A basic HTML version would have done the job. But a few weeks back we had debated over which fancy jquery date picker plugin we should use without considering the impact. It was fancy alright, yet it wasn’t usable at all for this user.
I learned and felt many things that day as an engineer. Thinking in depth, across many different personas is a difficult thing to do, let alone building a tool that works well.
At my job we worked with an accessibility agency to train our devs and designers on web accessibility. It's really enlightening to see someone navigating smoothly with just sound or with 800% zoom. And very embarrassing when your menus just repeat the same "list item" label 5 times because of poor use of semantic HTML.
The devs of a site (or an application) are in a video call, with screen sharing or whatever is useful, with a user who has accessibility needs and is using their site/program. A bunch of other devs sit in on it, muted, just learning. Then the devs throw some money in the pot and the user who did the testing gets paid for their time. Everybody wins.
Oh, and if all participants agree, the stream is made available for subscribers, and then the user gets royalties off that, too.
You just described what is known as "user testing". They can happen in person, like a focus group, or remotely. Companies reach out to the public for "random" users that fit the given criteria and are paid for their time. You can also use a 3rd party service who will pair you with random testers, for example https://www.usertesting.com/
It's been a while, but I'm not convinced there is a truly accessible date picker out there. Allowing manual typing of the date seems like the best and only viable option.
Also just typing the date manually is almost always faster than using a date picker. Or at least that's how I perceive it, which is all that matters. I hate apps that force me to take my hands off the keyboard and use the mouse.
As soon as we solve the whole US-using-a-different-date-format-to-the-rest-of-the-world problem, absolutely.
Having it automatically display the day of the week as you type the date would be a big help though.
The problem is that "just typing the date manually" actually has quite complex i18n issues. It can be done well, but that generally means you make the user explicitly confirm the date they just typed.
As input, any permutation of full year, full month name, and day of the month is unambiguous wrt any date on or after January 1, 100 CE* and therefore sensible, no matter how unusual/obscure. (The issue of handling multiple languages isn't a rejoinder to this, because that's just localization, which is an umbrella that should already exist so treating it like a new requirement would just be double counting.) This is how every browser-native datepicker should already work, although regretfully they do not.
Noone would expect that so you'd need to explain it and get people to spell correctly. Not convinced it is a good UX.
"Just localization" isn't "just". Many people have the wrong localization on their computers. Partly because they don't always communicate in their native language. But also because google et. al. are doing such a piss poor job of it.
It is also always weird if your are on an international site. Enter everything in English and then suddenly is expected to enter some fields in your native language.
> "Just localization" isn't "just". Many people have the wrong localization on their computers.
Think about this for a minute longer. Do you have an example or scenario for the use of a Web site where the author can fall into a pit of success (despite having the user's wrong localization) on all things except for dates and that would be broken by allowing* this date input method?
Even ignoring that:
What I said was that "any permutation of full year, full month name, and day of the month is unambiguous". There are a finite number of months and a finite number of localized tokens for representing those months. Do you have an example of two different locales that use the same token (or token sequence) to denote different months on the calendar?
> As input, any permutation of full year, full month name, and day of the month is unambiguous wrt any date on or after January 1, 100 CE* and therefore sensible, no matter how unusual/obscure
If you are using a proleptic Gregorian (or Julian, but why on earth would you do that) calendar, sure.
If its not one of those (but its still the Roman-derived Christian calendar in some form), there are ambiguities, and if its any other calendar, it may have ambiguities and/or the elements needed to specify a date may be different, and the CE/AD year is likely not an element and not relevant to whethe or not their are ambiguities.
The comment I replied to specified ISO 8601. The Gregorian constraint is a given.
I put in a whole clause in my original comment to preempt this flavor of pedantic sniping that involves applying double standards. And yet here we are.
Only if you use a proleptic calendar. If you are entering dates from historic documents, you need to know which calendar the author of the document was using
That makes me think, how does one learn to use a screen reader? (Or alternatives for other handicaps)
It seems fairly technical and challenging to learn, but I feel it would make sense for abled engineers to practice using those.
I personally wouldn’t even know where to start, I only enabled the screen reader a few times by mistakes and have no idea how I could learn to be effective with it if I need to at some point in my life.
I've been learning screen readers in my spare time because it seems like a nice screen off way to browse content in bed. It's servicable and maybe even viable way to work if more of the web was tailored for it.
Surprised it isn’t more common, I would expect nerdy abled people to show off to their friends their cool screen reading skills, just because it’s such a niche, technical, and weird thing to do.
You can also learn Linux by just uninstalling Windows. 15 minutes of good starting material will save you untold amounts of unnecessary headache though.
I don't want to overdo it with high-falutin' theorizing, but I think your firm's definition of "fancy" might be missing some crucial aspects, or maybe "fancy" isn't the right term. Maybe it was "flashy," or "gaudy," or "decorative"? Maybe it was "branded"? Or did it actually offer sighted users a more effective UX?
Well, maybe not throw away everything, but I understand the principle. There are also other areas where this could help - and one of them is "naming". Sometimes when you start a project, you don't really know what the best names are for things. Project name, repo name, service name etc. So you choose something that you think it's ok and you go ahead. As the project progresses, you realise you've named things wrong, but renaming is so annoying and tedious. Often we ignore the bad names because it doesn't seem significant. But names are how people burden their cognitive load (an example, we named our repo after planets rather than describing what the repo does - "acme-customer-module-frontend" but we named it "pluto" - now everyone has to remember what pluto is and make sure pluto is not neptune).
Is there anything equivalent for Vue? I know there was VueNative and NativeScript and there is even Ionic in Vue, but haven't really seen any framework that is either dedicated to Vue or has a strong support for Vue.
Quasar+Vue (uses Capacitor as well) has worked very well for me. I used Ionic with Angular years ago and I know they support Vue now but their support wasn’t great last I looked (it’s been years, this might have changed). Quasar is Vue-only and benefits from that focus.
The title made me think they were trying to rebrand as not being limited to React Native. I think they are instead trying to market to a wider audience by not mentioning React in their tagline, though.
I'm genuinely looking for a "calm" company. Is there such a thing? I have a few anecdotal stories of companies being absolutely chaotic (my current one included). I don't know where to point fingers to. I could start at pointing myself. Customers demanding custom features. Execs and sales people asking for unreasonable estimates. Engineers not feeling safe enough to say "no" but have to make something work, introducing tech debts. Engineers picking technology tools without much research, because there is no time, which increases complexity. People leaving, and then new people can't understand everything holistically. All of these factors combined into one gigantic bowl of mess.
Go find a well established company where you can work on an existing product. I work on a legacy point of sale product that started life in the 80’s and is still powering a good chunk of commerce around the world. I work on a small yet efficient team who customize the product for retailers. It is all about the team you’re on though. My company is also releasing all kinds of new products and services. I doubt anyone would describe working on those teams as calm.
I'm contracted to the IT branch of a certain pharma company and it's been calm the whole time.
Projects are either about regulatory compliance (boring, but not challenging) or supporting research - the big brains do the thinking, while you just klaka klaka klaka away at the implementation.
A visible chunk of the latter goes nowhere and eventually gets cancelled, but everyone is fine with that.
The more insulated you are from sales / overhead cost reduction pressure, the calmer things will be. Just make sure you're insulated, not so far that you're seen as a cost center as opposed to a revenue generator
Both companies I've worked for rely on government contracts, and in general feel pretty calm. It's hard to feel super rushed when the software isn't delivered for a few years. I don't think I make anywhere near industry salary though.
I had calmness when I was individual contributor working alone on difficult long-term projects, involving both research and development.
Bi-monthly or weekly meeting with the CTO, and that was it.
Delivery was on time simply because I adjusted the work and constraints to match the expected deadline. If something wasn't possible or required compromises, I would just let the CTO know. It was often fine.
The problem for me starts when you have chaotic product people in-between business owners and you.
I work as a developer for a company that sell a somewhat niche B2B software that integrates with a lot of customer systems. However we got several large, well-known companies that rely on our products for their daily operation (and a ton of smaller ones).
We got a lot of stuff to do, between new customers pouring in and gov't changing their systems with little warning[1] and such.
However we also don't have most of the other stuff you talk about. Sales ask for estimates, but if our provided estimates don't work for the client, say because the contract with our competitor is due in a month, then they'll work with us to try to find some way of making it work rather than force it through.
There's a lot of freedom with responsibility, so sure for low-impact stuff a developer might try some new tech to learn. However for larger shifts it'll have to be discussed in the dev group, especially if it impacts support. We do have a mature codebase so some tech dept is inevitable, but we have it as a goal to try to improve those things if we need to work on a particularly bad area of the code.
As for people leaving, in the years I've been here there's been a very stable group. So stable our customers ask us how their systems work that we integrate with, as they have much higher churn.
I don't think we're particularly unique though. But we're a relatively small company with a name that you can't flash on a CV, and at first glance our niche might sound boring.
[1]: "yea we redesigned our API, we will be doing a hard cut-over in a couple of months"
That might be unrealistic in some cases but one way to deal with this is to take control over the situation. If you have a recipe to fix a particular problem whether it’s about unrealistic expectations or people not feeling safe - propose it, take full responsibility for the implementation and push it through. It takes a long while though.
Yes, that's absolutely possible. My company is making a b2b product. We have challenges and sometimes the scope of the new features can be huge. But I never felt big pressure.
An oncologist in my family anecdotally told me how her patients are getting younger and younger - speculates (with research) that lots of food chemicals might be contributing.
Since the beginning of this year, our family has been much more conscious of the ingredients in the food labels. Lots of additives with many different numbers. We've been trying to get back to more natural things with less numbers. We bought breadmaker and started making our own bread (fun and messy). Bought a second hand ice cream maker (fun, tedious, but yum). Never knew how simple popcorn making was! Lots of colours of vegetables, home-grown spring onions. Our grocery bills on vegetables and fruits went up sharply. But it went down on crackers, chocolates and other things sharply.
I don't feel anything - but it helps me to think that I'm eating less numbers.
The numbers are not bad, and in many cases they might even be totally natural (eg. e330 citric acid, the acid present on citrus fruits).
I worry more about what's not in the labels (like pesticides used, antibiotics in meats, packaging etc). Your approach seems to be directionally correct tho, if you source your ingredients right.
I believe a lot of this is leached from packaging, not even put directly in the food. How about we stop using plastic foil, foil laminated paper and plastic trays for everything? Glass was fine, plain paper was fine, waxed paper was fine, even non-laminated cans are fine.
That's why I'm so happy Yuka exists. It's an app that scans barcodes of foodstuffs or cosmetics, and gives you an easy and clear scoring of the stuff inside them based on how good are they for you and for the planet (e.g. too much sugar, lots of protein, high impact on the environment, local or not, additives, etc.).
Of course it doesn't work on stuff without barcodes like vegetables and fruit, meat bought fresh, etc. but still it's extremely helpful and useful.
Less ironically the nonstick surfaces do not leach much of those after an initial bake cycle, unless you scrape them.
Much less than, say, a plastic bottle.
But if you're really bothered by this, you can actually get a non-stick ceramic coated insert instead.
Or do it the classic way with steel or glass and fat, just like cake.
I thought at first that the existing patients are getting better and looking younger thanks to the chemicals, rather than the new patients being younger than the previous ones.
My great grandmother was a housewife in the 50s so that would include things like a "salad" made of mayo and nuts on a banana or a jello dish full of tuna.
I was rummaging through my junk and came across Sony Clie PDA - I'm going to boot it up and write a post about it soon - I do have a font memory of buying this expensive toy thinking I was so busy that I needed an electronic fancy to-do list only to find out later that I was just playing games on it.
I read a lot on my Clie, and I recall it having a Scheme (?) implementation I played with in my CS classes. At least until its battery crapped out and by then I had a laptop which was much more pleasant to use. I think mine got tossed in a purge 6 or 7 years back.
