SLJ7

I suppose it depends on what you think a power user is. Personally, I think it's someone who is interested in solving their own problems and thinking critically or outside the box. Someone who understands not only how to do something, but also why you do it that way.

In a Bash terminal, if something goes wrong, it's probably my fault and there's a clear path forward to troubleshooting and fixing it. That feels way more palatable than a bloated website that throws an "Oops, something went wrong" error. For us, that's hitting a wall, but for people who aren't living in a Linux terminal, needing to open one at all is hitting a wall.

LAN gameplay disappeared because it was the power user way. Steam is a complex centralized proprietary software stack that abstracts all the hard parts of online gaming away so anyone can do it. You can't just intuit the existence of Steam using knowledge of computer and networking fundamentals. That's a knowledge gap, not a lack of skill.

That's a wide spectrum. Not understanding that gmail isn't email is well into "How do you not know this?" territory. Whereas only very specific users know about Bash and Emacs. I do often have that experience of needing to climb 47 levels upward to successfully explain something to someone. Right now I'm just intrigued by the fact that I can go out into my neighbourhood and nobody will know what 90% of these things are, yet I'm probably far from the only person on this forum who recognizes and has experience with the vast majority of that list.

Right, and people do vote with their wallets. They vote for the iPhone. We don't have iPhones because they exist; they exist because we keep buying them. This isn't a chicken and egg situation. Apple offered people a deliciously simplified computer in their pocket and people wanted that more than they wanted control. Their app store model hasn't meaningfully changed in almost two decades (except for whatever malicious compliance they're currently deploying in the EU). so to really examine the scope of the problem we need to acknowledge that almost everyone had a hand in creating it. I researched and ordered a new router that runs on open-source software today, and started setting up a Linux server. And now I'm in bed, scrolling HN on my iPhone.

You should really take the few minutes to email them and let them know that's happening. It's not their fault Cloudflare is awful.

It's not worthwhile for Netflix. They already have people signing up through the website because that's the only way you can sign up now. So they're not giving a cut to Apple at all. If anyone looks up "why can't you sign up for Netflix on the iPhone", they'll find out about Apple's policies. If Netflix pulled their app, they'd be hurting users more than anything, and they'd look like the greedy company who tried to bully Apple. This issue already isn't one-sided; just look at the Reddit or MacRumors comments on any article about sideloading or alternative payment methods. There are a whole lot of Apple apologists who completely support what Apple is doing. So ultimately, the only way this will be fixed is if the government cracks down on them, and even then, it might need to be every individual government.

I would like to understand enough about law, governments and the postal service to assign blame here, but I'll just say that it's really fucking sad that this is still in any way ongoing after being known about for so many years. This shouldn't have needed to be publicised in such a way before the wheels of justice started turning. I remember hearing about this several years ago and thinking "Jesus, that's rough. Technology sure ruins lives." And now I'm hearing about the (still ongoing) situation in 2024 and I no longer blame the tech. It's all people. People are awful.

Apple specifically forbids developers from mentioning the 30% cut in their apps. That means either the users pay more, the developers lose money, or they do what Netflix did and just force the user to figure out how to sign up (because you can't direct people to the site either). Apple has completely draconian rules that very specifically leave users in the dark about how app store revenue works. They are in no way transparent with 99% of their customers.

No, 3% is just Apple accounting for credit card processing fees. It will end up costing developers roughly the same whether they use alternative payment methods or not, which is obviously Apple's plan.

but should have

Not really, as the entire reason the API helps us is because Reddit has done such an appallingly bad job at accessibility. There were great third-party Twitter apps and I used them, but when they all shut down, I wasn't left with nothing; the Twitter app (and even the website) are usable. (Although Twitter fired their entire accessibility team so time will tell if it stays that way.)

I'm sure the mechanism for configuring this bypass is documented. But does your documentation specifically call out the accessibility limitation of your product, the need for this workaround, and the recommended additional safeguards for these employees' machines?

This is super important. Remember that while a bunch of us are nerds who know how computers work, some blind people might just know enough to use the web and do their job--as most people in the world do. They won't understand why the product doesn't work, let alone know how to fix it. The problem with a solution this transparent is that a request will have to go way up the chain before someone will actually know enough to address it and determine the problem. Of course it's not the job of Cloudflare to fix corporate ignorance, but a note like this one in the documentation might be a good start.

In an ideal world where products are all accessible, I would say we could be just as efficient at most daily tasks. Obviously this is not an ideal world, but if we give ut screen-reader support equal weight compared to visual design, it probably comes closer than you think. But if we look at this in terms of the web as we know it, there are going to be a ton of websites where sighted people can navigate efficiently because the website was built for sighted people to navigate efficiently.

After all, if it was of equivalent convenience then loads of people would be using it, no?

It's hard to approach this with a sufficient lack of bias because I don't have any sight, but wouldn't you say that for most people, sight is sort of a "lazy sense" in that people will resort to doing things in a visually-intuitive way long before they'll learn an alternative method? That's the whole reason computer interfaces were designed the way they were. It's the most efficient way, but part of that is because our brains are wired for it to be the most efficient way. If you take away that possibility, sure I'll be less functional with one of my senses missing, but between the frustration of being less efficient and the removal of the remote possibility that I could learn to do things using sight, I have a lot of bandwidth for learning and discovering other ways. Of course, I'll never know whether I would be more efficient with sight if I had grown up with it, and there's a possibility I may never know in general. I suspect a power user who has mastered keyboard shortcuts could probably navigate most interfaces more quickly. The bottom line is that the average blind person has more incentive to learn the inner workings of technology, so many people will be able to navigate at a speed approaching that of the average sighted person or possibly faster.

It's possible to run a screen-reader on Linux, but I wouldn't rely on it as a testing mechanism. You'd be better off with Windows or Mac, which both have built-in screen-readers now. I am aware of blind people who use Linux as their primary OS, but the community is much smaller and unfortunately it just isn't as polished, nor does every desktop environment and app offer the same level of accessibility.

Interestingly, iOS screen recognition also allows exploration of screenshots and remote desktop screens. I've heard of people using it to remotely install Windows as well. It would surprise me if Apple didn't have plans to put the same feature into its M1 mac.

The National Federation of the Blind (NFB) recently held its annual convention virtually. One of their sponsorships was a company that provides a supposed drop-in solution for screen-reader accessibility. The solution is being widely adopted and does a very poor job fixing all but the most basic and predictable accessibility fails--and it discourages big companies from doing real work to make their products better and promote accessibility as part of their culture. There have been attempts by various accessibility professionals to engage the company, but their concerns were all dismissed and the company continues to make claims that simply are not true. The NFB investigated the company and its product, decided both it and its marketing were harmful to blind people and revoked the sponsorship.

My point--and I may be spitballing a bit here, but I think it's valid--is that CSUN made the choice to take money from a company that didn't do any real accessibility work. That reflects badly on CSUN just as much as it does anyone else, and from what I know of CSUN, a company like the one you're describing shouldn't have ever been represented.

But they will harass your visitors with captchas for no good reason.

The other fun part about those captchas is they also gatekeep blind people in a way. They're using a service called HCaptcha which doesn't offer an audio alternative like ReCaptcha does. Instead they give you an "accessibility cookie" delivered to your e-mail address, which you can then use to automatically pass the captcha. (Very useful for everyone btw; give it a try.) The problem is that this cookie--and the e-mail address it's attached to--allow CF and potentially HCaptcha to track you around the internet. There's no way to anonymously browse the net through TOR or a VPN unless you create a throwaway e-mail address for that session.

HCaptcha recently expressed interest in creating a text-based alternative, but I wonder how this will stack up against modern AI. For now, it doens't bother me because I don't encounter it often and I have throwaway e-mail addresses, but it's just one more step I have to go through to remain anonymous where any sighted person could just click the traffic lights.