Ask HN: Why does no one use google docs for presentations? - <AUTHOR>

Large meetings with lots of presentations get done two ways (in my experience):
You email your slides ahead of time (or bring them on a USB stick) and share a computer and pray to god that it works.
Or everyone brings a laptop and has to bring their DVI/VGA convertor (just in case) and pray that the resolution thing works right when you plug it in, etc, etc.
It occurred to me that the web should have solved this problem a long time ago. A browser gives us a trivial way to both upload our slides to a place and to preview them exactly as they will be seen on site. It cuts out so much of the praying.
Then I realized, google docs already has this. It even lets you upload ppt files for conversion. And no one uses it? Am I crazy to think that such a service would be a good idea? Or is something wrong with google docs? <comment><USER2> And the web can't fail? It sure can. Just as much as the other cases.

<comment><USER3> That's why I keep presentations on my phone. If there's a laptop, I can send it over via Bluetooth. If not, I can connect my TV-out to a projector and control with a Bluetooth keyboard. Trusting a hosting site and a web connection leaves too much up to chance.

<comment><USER4> What phone do you have that has a TV out?

<comment><USER3> N95 8GB. All I need to carry is a cable and my iGo Stowaway.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> Even Google does not seem to use/promote it extensively. Refer to a recent blog post in GAE, except for the one session, all others have their slides as PDF (no embedded or "View as slideshow" option) !! [http://googleappengine.blogspot.com/2008/06/google-io- sessio...](http://googleappengine.blogspot.com/2008/06/google-io-session- videos-posted-with.html)

Also try searching for filetype:ppt in Google. Though there is a "View as HTML" link, there is no "View as slideshow". They do have it available in Gmail, though.

Not sure whether Google uses it inside for its own meetings or in its developer conferences. HN users who have attended such conferences may add details.

When normal users are trained to use such online services, it will be adopted in a better way. That will probably happen when a player like Google removes its "View as HTML" from its services (or hides it below) and promotes "View as Slideshow" alone.

<comment><USER4> Momentum is strong in any major corporation. Google still has Exchange running for their people who refuse to use GMail (and for BlackBerry users). It's not just presentations...even at Google, a lot of people are afraid of new technology and continue to use whatever it is that they're accustomed to. And that makes sense, in many cases...if it takes a day to understand a new product well enough to use it to the same level you used the old product, you've just lost a day of productivity. Everybody does the math on the additional value that product provides them differently. Maybe for some, data portability is not a big enough benefit to overcome the lack of flashy slideshows, existing PPT templates they may have been refining for years, and the time it takes to figure things out.

</comment></comment><comment><USER6> Part of the problem is that, for better or for worse, Microsoft Office is the standard in corporations. Everybody in the company knows how to create, open, and display PowerPoint presentations. Replacing PowerPoint would require a massive retraining effort and expense. I'm not sure that the benefits of a browser-based solution can compensate.

To make matters worse, it's not just a training problem. I've worked places where document management systems were designed to work with MS Office documents and PDFs -- and that's it. Everything else had to be converted to one of the supported formats before it could be stored in the system and routed for approval. A broken system? Perhaps. My point is that IS system limitations can also be reasons for the workforce at a company to stick with MS Office.

</comment><comment><USER7> I've seen slideshare used for making presentations but certainly not routinely.

Dave McClure used slideshare to give his presentation at BarcampScotland2008. If I remember correctly there was just one incident when he moved backwards in the slide stack rather than forwards due to some issue with the interface. Overall though it went as smoothly as any presentation from powerpoint.

Personally I wouldn't rely on a web service. I usually have a couple of backups of my presentation with me for anything important though and I would consider a web service as one of those additional backups.

The presentation is at [http://www.slideshare.net/dmc500hats/startup-metrics- for-sco...](http://www.slideshare.net/dmc500hats/startup-metrics-for-scottish- pirates-aarrr)

</comment><comment><USER8> PowerPoint and Keynote also offer much higher fidelity and quality than Google Docs. Also, in many corporations it's against policy to upload confidential information to external servers, which rules out most web services. I've heard that Google actually uses PowerPoint and Keynote internally.

<comment><USER9> Actually from what I've seen Google uses Google Docs extensively internally including for presentations within groups. Sharing docs is so much easier that way. I think most people use ppt for outside / important presentations though.

</comment></comment><comment><USER10> because almost everyone has powerpoint installed from when they installed office. + Most people have been using it from when they were in high school

</comment><comment><USER11> Also see <http://slideshare.net/>

</comment><comment><USER12> you need to have google account to view slides. which world are they living in. google is so 2006.</comment>


Ask HN: Where to find used office furniture? - <AUTHOR>

We're looking specifically for lots of big whiteboards, but we don't want to break the bank.<p>Does anyone know of any treasure troves in the valley housing motherloads of used office furniture? <comment><USER2> I've been looking too, but haven't been able to source big whiteboards locally (and shipping costs on the big items limits any savings you'd get).

I went to ikea, in the "as is" section and grabbed a huge panel of lamenated something ($6). Now, i've just got to get some whiteboard paint [http://www.rockler.com/product.cfm?page=17835&utm_source...](http://www.rockler.com/product.cfm?page=17835&utm_source=nextag&utm_medium=se&utm_campaign=V9124&cookietest=1)

The whiteboard will end up twice as big as anything I found at office depot, and cost should be less than $40.

</comment><comment><USER3> craigslist is usually a dearth of used office furniture. You can also often find used office furniture dealers in your area via a Google search for the same.

For whiteboards you can also use a large piece of glass (mounted on a standing frame, or against a wall).

FYI, I bought a roll of "whiteboard vinyl" a few years back at another startup with the intention of covering the walls in a conference room with it to make huge whiteboard areas. It sucked, don't waste your money. If the walls are not glass-smooth all the little bumps come through and make it a bitch to write on or erase.

<comment><USER4> The white board vinyl works best if you use it to repair some old whiteboards. You get the old ones for free, that are scratched and suffering from the can't-quite-erase-completely problem, and then cover them. You can also convert a chalkboard into a whiteboard this way.

If you start from scratch, you have to get something extremely smooth I guess -- maybe formica countertop material would work.

In answer to the general question, the best place to get used office furniture is in the dumpsters and loading docks of office buildings.

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> Don't post at 0300 EST if you want answers. I know you're not asking for answers on the eastern seaboard, but there clearly aren't many more people online.

I'm only here because I'm a night-time Linux admin.</comment>


BSD vs. Linux - <AUTHOR> http://aboutthebsds.wordpress.com/2013/03/31/bsd-vs-linux/

<comment><USER2> The article is about as worthwhile as the comments:

 _God doesn't want BSDs because BSDs don't respect the freedom of Humans. BSD developers will burn in hell because the the license doesn't follow the 10 commandments like GPL does. Richard Stallman is a messiah sent to us by God himself, let him show us the path to righteousness, let him drive us to heaven! Let us be purged of this evil my brothers!_

 _FreeBSD even uses a demon as their mascot, what blasphemy is this!? The BSDs have strayed too far from the path of righteousness but thank God for sending us the prophet Linus Torvalds for he and Richard Stallman are our only salvation. As long as these 2 brave souls are by our side there will be hope._

 _Do not worry my brethren, God will punish all who make and use BSD and BSD will be wiped out of the face of the earth._

 _God bless GNU /Linux._

<comment><USER3> That one at least sounds like it's ridiculing the readership of the blog.

<comment><USER4> The whole blog is sort of Poe's law territory. I suspect the author is a nutjob rather than a troll, but a lot of the comments I have no idea if they're agreeing with him or making fun of him.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> _Please avoid introducing classic flamewar topics unless you have something genuinely new to say about them._

I know this guideline is meant for comments, but I would consider it equal for submitted articles. The only thing a discussion around this article can create is a classic flamewar over bsd vs linux, or bsd vs gpl. Neither would bring genuinely new and interesting comments, but simply a "I will uppvote anyone posting positive things about my sport team, and I will downvote anyone who posts positives things about the opposing team".

<comment><AUTHOR> That's not why I submitted it though. The point of this article was to show that misleading things about BSD are all over the internet. I apologize if that didn't somehow manifest itself. The original title was actually "The truth about BSD (apparently)," but of course, it got changed under the classic HN scapegoat of "editorialization."

<comment><USER5> The article begins by complaining that all over the Internet people write misleading things about their sport team, and thus goes and write why their team is great and the opposing team is wrong.

You then submit it here to "show" that misleading things about your sport team (the opposing team to the article) are all over the Internet.

Exactly how do you expect this will bring genuinely new and interesting comments about either team?

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> " _It also protects user and developers from ... any malicious persons or companies who try to sue them over the software._ "

How could a software license (a contract between the user and the providers of the software) possibly protect a Linux user from being sued by a third party? The third party didn't agree to the contract, so it's not bound by it in any way.

</comment><comment><USER7> The "BSDs" are vastly different systems with different designs, goals, and cultures. Making blanket statements, without any specific examples is worrthless. This is trash meant to appeal to the biases of readers too poorly informed to know their ignorance.

</comment><comment><USER8> There's some guy (with multiple aliases) who trolls the Phoronix forums whenever there's a BSD-related topic. I'm pretty sure this is his blog.

</comment><comment><USER9> > Lol, BSD is for losers, switched from FreeBSD to Ubuntu 10 years ago and > never looked back..

This comment made my day

</comment><comment><USER10> Article sounds biased. I'd like to read a riposte from a BSD follower.

</comment><comment><USER11> Very good article, thank you. I'm so glad I'm using Arch Linux (GNU/Linux)

<comment><AUTHOR> It seems you misunderstood the point of this submission.

BSD is absolutely not what it says in this article, hence the editorialized "apparently" in this article. (Hope the HN mods don't ban me for it :P)

Don't take everything on HN at face value. Sometimes things are meant to be analyzed, like that "What 4chan thinks of HN" post.

<comment><USER11> Actually, what is said in the article is truth. Because I tried OpenBSD and FreeBSD before and many of the points are valid. ^_^ I just haven't had time to test them all.

<comment><USER12> Care to comment on _which_ of those points you found valid?

<comment><USER11> Sure :-) #1 "Installing Software" I absolutely agree linux is much better with this. I had issues installing even the simplest of applications that just work on linux. #2 "Security" using "PF" was horrible in comparison to iptables when I tried it. But all this VS posts is useless in the end. Use what works for you personally and don't listen to anyone else.

<comment><USER13> I can't believe that you had any issues installing packages on OpenBSD. I've had a much harder time installing software on some Linux systems. From my personal experience in OpenBSD, if there is a package for the software it more or less works, if there is not you better move on. Porting software to OpenBSD is not an easy task if you don't know what your doing (I don't).

Even though I like BSD systems I must admit I think Linux is a better choice on the Desktop, I would't know about servers. The most annoying thing that happens to me constantly in Linux and even as I type this is that from one release to the other hardware that used to work stops working. But this is not a show stopper as most issues can be easily worked around. Since virtualization became a viable choice to most consumers I don't see an excuse not to use Linux.

<comment><USER11> Yeah well try comparing BSD package manager and pacman :-) You'll see what I mean. Especially AUR ^_^</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment>


The Next Big Thing? Responsive Icons - <AUTHOR> http://designmodo.com/responsive-icons/

<comment><USER2> The Haiku Vector Icon Format[1] does this. See LOD info here[2]. 1) [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Haiku_Vector_Icon_Format](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Haiku_Vector_Icon_Format) 2) [http://www.haiku- os.org/docs/userguide/sv_SE/applications/ic...](http://www.haiku- os.org/docs/userguide/sv_SE/applications/icon-o-matic.html)</comment>


Why America should pay attention to Greece - <AUTHOR> http://www.nationaljournal.com/njmagazine/wealthofnations.php

<comment><USER2> Upvoted because the author has the balls to call Fannie and Freddie "off balance sheet vehicles" and mentions underfunded pension and health care liabilities as well. Not sure that _A gradual depreciation is one thing -- and much to be desired_ for the dollar.

<comment><USER3> Agreed with the former although it was mostly in passing, but I suspect a lot of the latter will be abrogated. How long with the public sector unions be able to get people making e.g. 40K to keep sacrificing to keep people making e.g. 80K fat and happy? SS and Medicare are bigger problems, but are in part amenable to adjustments at the edges (e.g. raising the retirement age).

I give this higher marks for the emphasis on including state and local governments when scoring the US deficits.

At a macro level this is important ... although as a resident of a state and local governments that are in fairly good fiscal shape, have balanced tax policies (i.e. not too much from the extremely variable incomes of "the rich" or from any one tax source), etc., it's not clear how much e.g. California's Greece like behavior will affect me.</comment></comment>


Too Much Quality.. - <AUTHOR> http://scruffylookingcatherder.com/archive/2008/07/10/too-much-quality.aspx

<comment><USER2> at a quick glance, I thought the domain name was "Scruffy looking catheder"...

 _shudder_</comment>


AP Computer Science: Principles to Launch in Academic Year 2016–17 - <AUTHOR> http://www.collegeboard.com/html/computerscience/

<comment><USER2> What do professional programmers think about APCS? Having taken the class as a senior, I found the curriculum to be way too focused on Java and OOP principles. A good high schopl CS class should be more focused on the principles of CS than the oddities of Java. Hopefully they're fixing this with CS Principles.</comment>


Apple Has Nothing To Say - <AUTHOR> http://adcontrarian.blogspot.com/2013/06/apple-has-nothing-to-say.html <comment><USER3> The Apple ad reminded me a lot of the Google Dear Sophie ad. Both were trying to tell the viewer "Hey, we are a part of your life and making it better." Except the Apple ad had to say it, while the Google ad showed it.

Show v Tell; show wins.

[http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=R4vkVHijdQk](http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=R4vkVHijdQk)

<comment><USER4> "Dear Sophie" legitimately makes me cry. The linked Apple ad makes me yawn.

It's an extremely odd reversal, because a few years ago I would have unquestionably told you that Apple was the king of technology advertising. They got "Hey, what's important is how this makes your life better". The iPod ads, with the dancing silouhettes, were a perfect example of this - it wasn't about the gigabytes or the interface or the price - it was about this product that was great because it made you want to _dance_. It facilitated your happiness.

Now, we have an ad from Google which absolutely _nails_ "this is how our product will make your life better", while we have an ad from Apple that says "We think a lot of ourselves and think you should too."

I wouldn't have expected that, at all.

<comment><USER5> Apple's Designed in California is a BRAND ad. Google's Dear Sophie is a PRODUCT ad.

They have different goals, different approaches and different audiences. Apple has had product ads recently as well you know, maybe compare like with like ?

<comment><USER4> Dear Sophie is ostensibly a product ad for Chrome (in that the logo and name appear at the end), but it doesn't actually talk about Chrome. The ad would work just as well in Internet Explorer - it's about how Google The Company is making your life better (through email, Youtube, picture storage and sharing, etc). It's a very brand-flavored product ad.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> This peice, and the comments there, seem really out there to me.

        "[apple] haven't produced anything of major interest to consumers in a long time."
        "Apple has been taking a beating from Samsung who have come at them aggressively."

Weird. Does "taking a beating" refer to market share? Certainly not mobile net-profits.

 _head scratching_

<comment><USER7> Yes, that's why Amazon had no effect on the retail market before disappearing. Because fat margins are the only important thing.

<comment><USER6>
        > Yes, that's why Amazon had no effect on the retail market before disappearing. Because fat margins are the only important thing.

Fat margins implies you have room to bring your price down and pick up additional market _if desired_. Your example of retail vs e-store is also odd, because retail space has its own costs (floor space/power/personnel/supply- chain/shipping/stock costs/etc), and thus margins are usually thinner.

Also, someone selling 100 widgets for $1 each, has to support customers/returns/fix for 100 customers. Someone selling 5 widgets at $20 each only has to support 5 customers. It would generally cost less to do so (fewer customers).

So.. Not sure what point you are trying to make, but maybe it was lost in the snark?

<comment><USER8> The other poster was trying to say "mobile net-profits" don't really mean anything. He used amazon because they are perfectly happy with little to none net profits.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> I saw at least eight products being used in as many different settings. Seems to be a product ad to me.

Here's a better example of a "Brand" ad.

[http://www.apple.com/designed-by-apple/](http://www.apple.com/designed-by- apple/)

(though some pundits have suggested that what we're really seeing are "mission" ads targeted to Apple employees, and being shared with the general populace)

For a truly strange approach to advertising, we need to look at the Samsung Goat/Ninja/Crunk/Windows-Surface Homage ad.

[http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uhM- DuM2WgE](http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uhM-DuM2WgE)

I really don't know what the message there was.

<comment><USER10> The brand ad is again, in my opinion, terrible. It reminds me of when MTV jumped the shark, it has become totally self referential. It feels to me like an internal communication, a mission statement, or a guidance video for people who work at Apple. It doesn't seem to address what actual people thinking about buying and using stuff would actually respond to or care about.

Or possibly I am really, really, out of touch.

<comment><USER5> Brand ads are supposed to be mission statements and the whole point of them is not to talk about product selling points.

And you are out of touch in the sense that people are influenced by a brand and what it says about them. After all many items including clothing and shoes roughly cost the same to make regardless of the brand yet the prices and demand vary wildly.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> IMHO, the copy is terrible. For example "The experience of a product" would be more effective if it were just "the experience" ... people don't think of the word PRODUCT, they don't buy a PRODUCT, that is a word you use internally. People buy things, iPads, iPhones ... not ... PRODUCTS.

"Until every idea we touch, enhances each life it touches." is an awkward sentence to hear spoken. It is stupid because you don't touch ideas, but aside from that, would probably be more effective as "Until every idea we touch, enhances our lives" ... I'm sorry but it makes me think that this company is really suffering without an obsessive dictator micromanaging the product/marketing message.

</comment><comment><USER11> I tend to agree with most of the comments in this thread. What I think will be most interesting is seeing the next iPhone iteration, and the one after that. If the ads are still spending a lot of time talking about brand, then I think the problem will be more apparent.

</comment><comment><USER12> This post is simply factually incorrect.

The Apple brand was built by products, but the "Designed by Apple" ad is just another version of "Think Different." Apple continues to make products, and product ads. This is in addition to it.

So "brandism" hasn't crept in, anymore so than when Steve Jobs was there.

The OP's entire point is complete bullshit and a silly, juvenile metric of the companies health.

<comment><USER13> if you read more of the OP's blog posts, he continually points to "Think Different" as a notable exception in Apple's history of avoiding brandism in its advertising during the Jobs era

<comment><USER12> So, Jobs gets a free pass, but Cook doesn't?

Double standards and ridiculousness.

If they KEEP doing it, he has a point. Until then, he doesn't.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> There are a lot of pointless contrarian comments on the post, and I don't agree with everything in the actual article, but I do see the point being raised and the shift in Apple's ads.

Layered on top of the details of the product that used to make up 100% of their advertising are more explicit points about the company, their philosophies, and their process. I don't think that's necessarily wrong - <USER2> certainly isn't out of the ordinary in advertising - but its a tactile shift. That being said, they are still a long way from "jumping the shark" with this strategy, and I'd disagree with the writer's point of view that this indicates they have nothing on the product front to talk about.

</comment><comment><USER15> This is going through the ceremony of a Jobs era ad (emotional connection, experience etc.) without understanding why those ads worked.

</comment><comment><USER16> It's funny how people seem to want Apple to both stand still and invent the future at the same time.

</comment><comment><USER17> I didn't want to believe that Jobs was the only thing holding that company together. Apple's soul died with him.</comment>


BSD Now 103: Interview with Bryan Cantrill - glass- http://www.jupiterbroadcasting.com/86662/ubuntu-slaughters-kittens-bsd-now-103/

<comment><AUTHOR> Shouldn't the link be the podcast's website? [http://www.bsdnow.tv/episodes/2015_08_19-ubuntu_slaughters_k...](http://www.bsdnow.tv/episodes/2015_08_19-ubuntu_slaughters_kittens)</comment>


Ask HN: Is there a benefit to linking your LinkedIn profile to HackerRank? - <AUTHOR> Or is it only used for sign in credentials? <comment><USER2> No benefit by and large. I would advice you not to give real name in hacker rank and other such sites. These programming tests pit you against others in non realistic scenarios and you don't know which companies rejected you based on hacker rank score.</comment>


Turn any subreddit into a virtual reality space - <AUTHOR> http://docs.scenevr.com/subreddit.html

<comment><USER2> really nice. sadly no self post are shown.</comment>


Build an 8-bit computer from scratch - <AUTHOR> https://eater.net/8bit/ <comment><USER2> I've been following Ben's videos on YouTube ever since he started this project and have been totally transfixed. His approach to building an 8-bit computer on a breadboard has also spawned a bunch of interest from the community.

Just search "my ben eater" on YouTube and you'll find many other people following his steps and making their own computers; some even going as far as to improve upon the original. It's really quite awesome to see.

Hats off to Ben. His succinct videos have done much more for my understanding of low level computing than any computer science professor I've had -- and all through only video.

</comment><comment><USER3> This is really neat! Also if you want to learn to build a computer from scratch without hardware, just to learn how computers work, The Elements of Computing Systems is a great book to check out. It's used as a text in some CS programs but it is very readable and easy to follow and the software is free and online.

[https://www.amazon.com/Elements-Computing-Systems- Building-P...](https://www.amazon.com/Elements-Computing-Systems-Building- Principles/dp/0262640686/)

[http://www.nand2tetris.org/](http://www.nand2tetris.org/) is the website for it.

<comment><USER4> I'd recommend Petzold's [https://www.amazon.com/Code-Language-Computer- Hardware-Softw...](https://www.amazon.com/Code-Language-Computer-Hardware- Software/dp/0735611319) too.

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> Watching Ben's inspired me to finish my Brainfuck-based CPU designed a few years ago: [https://hackaday.io/project/4237-mental-1-a-brainfuck- cpu](https://hackaday.io/project/4237-mental-1-a-brainfuck-cpu)

Right now it has PS/2 keyboard input, and a 40x2 character display output.

The biggest help was his sensible clock design. I modified it a bit in my design, but the techniques he demonstrates in his videos are incredibly helpful and provide a good base to build off of.

<comment><USER6> You are insane.

I mean that as a compliment of the highest order. That project is brilliant.

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> Always love to see these projects because if I had made a clone of myself to to the other work, I'd be doing things like this.

Somewhat surprised that you can still buy LS TTL. I'd have thought it'd be replaced by some 1.5V supply ultraBiCMOSwhatever by now. Or a single die that you program to be whatever last-century TTL function you want, via its WiFi interface...

Time was I has the entire 74xxx series memorized. Long since paged out to make way for more important stuff in my brain.

<comment><USER8> You can still get pre-LS TTL as well! Gets a bit warm that stuff.

<comment><USER7> Wow. There wasn't much reason to use that in the 80s once LS and F appeared. Perhaps for Iout(max), which I seem to remember is higher for the non-LS?

<comment><USER8> Yes fan out is ~25 as opposed to ~10.

Early TTL is still used for building oscillators, timing circuits and monostables because lots of long run products were designed with those in and the LS/HC parts aren't equivalent due to bias current etc.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> [http://www.brielcomputers.com/wordpress/?cat=17](http://www.brielcomputers.com/wordpress/?cat=17)

A Replica 1 is an Apple 1 clone made with permission from Steve Wozniak that people can build from a kit. It is an 8 bit microcomputer with Apple Integer BASIC and optional casette tape interface.

</comment><comment><USER10> I enjoyed building this computer a lot. But Ben has not yet done a schematic set. so I made my own in kicad and published them [https://github.com/kyllikki/eda-designs/tree/master/SAP- BE](https://github.com/kyllikki/eda-designs/tree/master/SAP-BE)

The PDF is also there if you do not want to install kicad

</comment><comment><USER11> I highly recommend Ben Eater's YouTube channel; great video tutorials. He manages to cover a lot in short videos. (Also, consider supporting him on Patreon :)

</comment><comment><USER12> This would have been so cool as a book! (Any recommendations?) I lack the patience to watch YouTube videos though...

<comment><USER13> There's the From Nand to Tetris [1] course which has a book. It skips a few steps though. I love Ben Eater's series because it is so thorough. Whenever I'm like "how did x work again" he explains it in detail. If you know most of it by heart it will be slow since it's meant to be able to follow with fairly little prior knowledge of digital electronics.

[1] [http://nand2tetris.org](http://nand2tetris.org)

<comment><USER14> With fairly little, or even with none?

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> This is a great step for trusted computing for individuals.

</comment><comment><USER16> two months ago on HN:

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14450945](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14450945)

</comment><comment><USER17> When I saw he wrote his own Assembly language for it...I was then all chips in!

</comment><comment><USER18> i'd love to see a real "from scratch", that is building your own electronical components ( or something that substitutes, such as the lamp or anything else they used back in the time).

<comment><USER19> Not sure about home-made integrated circuits or even transistors, but one can definitely make an electronic tube, as shown in this cool video: [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EzyXMEpq4qw](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EzyXMEpq4qw).

</comment></comment><comment><USER20> I love what you have done here, I cant wait to get some time to try out your "instructions"

</comment><comment><USER21> I built something like this with the 74 series IC chips when I was in college. It was really fun!

</comment><comment><USER22> Ah.. this brings back memories. 7400 nand TTL chip with Low power schotky transistors.

</comment><comment><USER23> Earlier today I looked up that the fastest 74-series are the TI 74AUC line.

Add some nixie tubes, and you have a steampunk wet dream.

Find ye parts:

[http://octopart.com](http://octopart.com) [http://findchips.com](http://findchips.com)</comment>


This Is What Happens When You Let Developers Create UI (2006) - <AUTHOR> https://blog.codinghorror.com/this-is-what-happens-when-you-let-developers-create-ui/ <comment><USER2> What I find worse than the UI is that this has resulted in people harrassing the developer.

Quote from the wGetGUI page at [http://www.jensroesner.de/wgetgui/](http://www.jensroesner.de/wgetgui/)

<comment><comment><comment><comment><comment>~~

For the Haters

At the end of 2006, one GUI expert used wGetGUI as an example for a bad GUI. Of course I felt honoured. Not. I think it was kinda suboptimal to do this without telling me, without giving me a chance to improve the GUI and without #whoa here's a thought# helping me. Well, he posted the GUI without saying which it is, but that was soon found out and I got some love mail. Not. The amount of bashing wGetGUI and me have received is a testament to the state of the internet "culture". There certainly were a few people who either liked the GUI or gave constructive criticism. But the rest was insultive bashing in mob mentality. And all this about a piece of free software that I have spent my time on - to bring it beyond what I need. To those who have supported me: Thanks, I really appreciate it. For the haters: Hate yourself, don't spread the hate. I like to hear what non-haters think of wGetGUI, so send in comments, wishes, critique. <comment><comment><comment><comment><comment><comment>

<comment><USER3> Moreover, the article doesn't even propose a "good GUI".

The GUI seems to basically expose all the command line arguments in a simple UI, which is great for a developer tool, it would be nice to also see the corresponding command line generated by the tool.

"This Is What Happens When You Let Developers Write Blog With Clickbait Titles"

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> I know it was a younger time back in 2006, but there is always something disingenuous about referring to the entire class of software developers being unable to do good frontend UI/UX development. It's a different discipline to be sure, but it's not a lot different to me than saying knowing statistics to be a good data software developer or any other application development. Software doesn't get written for its own sake.

</comment><comment><USER5> This is not a terrible design. I have seen designs, some by professionals (or at least by people who were paid), that are too clever by half. Some of the common errors are a) the visual representation does not match information structure or the workflow - e.g. common tasks are complicated to perform; b) it is not obvious whether an operation has succeeded and what the current state is; c) 'elegance' and cleverness displace clarity so the interface becomes a cryptic puzzle; d) the interface design implicitly assumes that the user has information and knowledge that he may well not have.

</comment><comment><USER6> Best Comment: "If you've got UI problems, I feel bad for you son. I've got 99 problems, but design ain't one."

</comment><comment><USER7> Better than a GUI which has no options like just about everything created by a designer today.

</comment><comment><USER8> I used software where every page looked like those designs. Apparently the developers would get a request for feature 'X' and would just add a button for it. There was one screen with a button added for one very particular process unique to us that probably caused head scratching for every other user.</comment>


Patreon was hacked - <AUTHOR> https://www.patreon.com/posts/3457485 <comment><USER2> See also: [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10309079](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10309079)

</comment><comment><USER3> Interesting how this company does not explain on their site "how it works" and along with not providing a direct global and standard way to contact them.

<comment><USER4> Hey there! Would love to update copy to make sure it's clear for you. Current home-page says "Recurring funding for artists and creators. Creators receive millions of dollars each month in support from their patrons." with a link to [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wH- IDF809fQ](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wH-IDF809fQ) and a link to help center ( [https://patreon.zendesk.com/hc/en- us/requests/new](https://patreon.zendesk.com/hc/en-us/requests/new) ) in the footer. What would you like to see changed?

<comment><USER5> You could start by adding what you do, what your website does, and how it works to the ABOUT page.

The cutesy pictures on the ABOUT page say thousands of words of nothing.

<comment><USER6> If I want to know what a company does, I go to their home page. If I want to learn more about where they are located, their size, their history, who works there, etc., I go to the About page.

Maybe they are missing a "how it works" page. I know the video explains it, but many people don't have time for it.

<comment><USER5> Their site is infected with "Let's Make Big Fat Pages" syndrome with overlarge graphics and little text.

A few paragraphs work faster. I don't have time to watch a video on every throwaway site I visit from a link.

EDIT: [http://www.noteslate.com/](http://www.noteslate.com/) is a perfect example.</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment>


Ask HN: Best way to test accessibility of a website? - <AUTHOR> Is there a bot/crawler akin to Google's Webmaster Tools that will test, score, and identify accessibility issues on a website?<p>If not, what are some best practices people use to maintain accessibility? Does anyone write tests for this functionality? Would love to learn more, top resources, checklists people use, etc. <comment><USER2> Pay me to do it...

But in all seriousness, I use aXe-Coconut[1], headingsMaper[2]. Then tab through the page and make sure you can get from top left to bottom right. The cursor[focus state /ouline] should be visible the whole time and you should never lose your place.

When you are done that, if you have a Mac turn on voiceover with Command+F5 and use Safari or Chrome (more aria-support). On Windows, download NVDA[3] and FireFox. Again use the keyboard to go through the page, but listen to the screen reader and make sure everything is spoken like it looks. So a button should say, "Submit Form Button" etc. Anything that doesn't say anything, ie, " button" or say something different from what you see needs work.

The general consense of the community is that automated testing only finds 30% of issues, so you've got to test manually.

[1] [https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/axe- coconut/iobddm...](https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/axe- coconut/iobddmbdndbbbfjopjdgadphaoihpojp?hl=en) [2] [https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/headingsmap/flbjom...](https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/headingsmap/flbjommegcjonpdmenkdiocclhjacmbi?hl=en) [3] [https://www.nvaccess.org/](https://www.nvaccess.org/)

<comment><USER3> Check the WCAG success criteria that your jurisdiction requires. One less obvious, and commonly required, criteria (WCAG 2.4.1[1]) is that the site has some mechanism by which a screen reader user can jump from the beginning of the document to the main content, without having to browse through the preceding navigational links and similar.

[1] [https://www.w3.org/TR/UNDERSTANDING-WCAG20/navigation- mechan...](https://www.w3.org/TR/UNDERSTANDING-WCAG20/navigation-mechanisms- skip.html)

<comment><USER4> Skip-links should also be accessible for keyboard users.

<comment><USER2> Good point, I'm not a fan of FaceBook but they do an amazing job of this.

If you tab out of the URL bar of your browser, Facebook has a huge accessibility skip links menu.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> Microsoft recently open sourced[1] one of the main tools they use for web accessibility testing.

Accessibility Insights for Web ([https://accessibilityinsights.io](https://accessibilityinsights.io)) is a Chrome extension that guides you through doing an accessibility assessment of a website. It includes a combination of automated checks (using aXe[2]) and assisted/guided manual checks. Its rules are based on the W3C Web Content Accessibility Guidelines[3]; passing a full assessment in the tool amounts to meeting all the "A" and "AA" WCAG 2.0 requirements.

Like other commenters have mentioned, automated checks (like aXe) are a great start, but aren't really sufficient on their own. Accessibility Insights will lead you through how to test different aspects of screen reader usage (and other types of accessibility issues, too!). It will also help you track issues as you go, and produce a pretty report at the end that you can attach to a bug.

As with most types of UI testing, no matter what tools you're using, there's really no substitute for watching a real user try to use your product.

Disclaimer: I am an engineer that works for Microsoft on the Accessibilty Insights team.

[1] [https://cloudblogs.microsoft.com/opensource/2019/03/12/micro...](https://cloudblogs.microsoft.com/opensource/2019/03/12/microsoft- open-sources-accessibility-insights/) [2] [https://www.deque.com/axe/](https://www.deque.com/axe/) [3] [https://www.w3.org/WAI/WCAG21/quickref/](https://www.w3.org/WAI/WCAG21/quickref/)

<comment><USER6> Hey I just tried this out, it's pretty awesome. Hadn't heard of it at all before. Love the tab-index mapping. Have you folks talked to the Lighthouse team to get your work integrated there; or at least possibly referenced there? I know lighthouse has a couple of accessibility recommendations, would be nice to have visibility on it.

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> \- Use blind accessibility tools with your website. If you're on iOS/macOS enable VoiceOver, figure out how it works, close your eyes and use your website.

\- Disable JavaScript and use your website. This may not be relevant for web apps, but regular websites should work normally.

\- Try to use your website with only the keyboard.

\- Try to use your website with extreme zoom levels and font size overrides.

\- Monitor your resource sizes. Anyone with a limited connection (a LOT of people) will abandon your website because it loads slowly, or are paying actual money for the wasted bandwidth.

I'm not aware of automated methods that give better results than using your website with the actual accessibility tools yourself.

<comment><USER8> > "Use blind accessibility tools with your website. If you're on iOS/macOS > enable VoiceOver, figure out how it works, close your eyes and use your > website."

I doubt this is going to be very effective. Sure, it's better than nothing at all, but this is akin to sighted person with zero blindness experience testing the effectiveness of a newly designed white cane, only a website is much more complicated.

You should always find someone with personal experience to test it themselves and provide feedback if you want a clear understanding of how it will actually work for that community.

<comment><USER9> Even if someone with personal experience is better I would still highly recommend testing these tools as it's not always clear how they work if you haven never used them.

I was really surprised the first time I tested one of these tools and now I know a few dos and don'ts when developing web apps.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> In your test environment send HTML as type _application /xhtml+xml_, block all CSS and images, and add JavaScript that locks the mouse cursor to the first pixel on the screen. Then test the site for content and usability as you normally would.

Vision impaired persons do not benefit from CSS or images. All images should have proper corresponding alternate text. Changing the media type of the HTML does require a bit more strict syntax, but it also is a cheap trick to ensure the HTML tags and structure are arranged in a valid way.

I do not recommend disabling JavaScript. JavaScript is for interaction and blind persons need JavaScript just the same as the rest of us to navigate through content on complex sites. Inserting code that locks the mouse cursor to a single location forces QA to navigate the site/content using a keyboard.

Doing these things is the cheapest way to test for very basic compliance. In order to achieve AA WCAG 2.0 conformance you actually have to understand accessibility and classes of disabilities. You might be able to get some quick wins with tool automation, but manual testing is much better. There is one exception, color contrast. You absolutely need to use a tool to perform color contrast validation, because people eyes aren't good at accounting for both luminescence and contrast at the same time.

EDIT:

In FireFox (Windows) you can turn off CSS by clicking the ALT keyboard key to bring up the main menu then View -> Page Style -> No Style

<comment><USER11> > _Vision impaired persons do not benefit from CSS or images_

They might. You probably mean blind people.

<comment><USER10> No, I mean vision impaired. There are all kinds of different vision disabilities besides blindness and color blindness.

<comment><USER11> Yes, exactly. And many such impairments will not prevent you benefitting from layout, colors, typography, images, and sundry other kinds of graphical trickery.

<comment><USER10> Sounds like you are confusing non-blindness for normal functionality. Fortunately, Wikipedia has a page for this: [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Visual_impairment](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Visual_impairment)

The idea of accessibility is that a product/service is available to a wide audience regardless of their physical/cognitive impairment. It is still discriminatory if some user might be capable of enjoying visual eye candy if they must struggle to do so due to an impairment and are denied access to that content otherwise.

<comment><USER12> I don't think you are understanding the parent correctly. They are saying a person with a partial visual impairment can still benefit from a well-designed visual page layout, because a person with partial visual impairment might still use vision in some ways. So well-designed CSS and images DO benefit those individuals. You seem to be implying that anyone with a visual impairment, even a partial one, would prefer to browse with CSS and images off. But that's not necessarily the case.

<comment><USER10> What does that have to do with accessibility?

> You seem to be implying that anyone with a visual impairment, even a partial > one

I am not. Well written CSS, a subset of usability, is irrelevant to accessibility.

<comment><USER12> > Well written CSS, a subset of usability, is irrelevant to accessibility.

Says who?

[https://www.w3.org/WAI/fundamentals/accessibility- usability-...](https://www.w3.org/WAI/fundamentals/accessibility-usability- inclusion/#accessible-usable)

> There is a significant overlap between accessibility and usability. ISO > 9241-11, defines usability as: The "extent to which a product can be used by > specified users to achieve specified goals effectively, efficiently and with > satisfaction in a specified context of use". This could address > accessibility when: "specified users" includes people with a range of > disabilities, and "specified context of use" includes accessibility > considerations such as assistive technologies.

Let me give an example: If I put icons on my buttons to improve the usability of my app, but the icons break at high zoom levels, then is that accessible? No, but you'd never know unless you do accessibility testing with CSS and images turned on.

<comment><USER10> > but the icons break at high zoom levels, then is that accessible?

Yes, it is still accessible, but usability is decreased. There are multiple ways to activate a button. Accessibility and usability are not contested or mutually exclusive qualities. You can have both great CSS and great accessibility at the same time.

<comment><USER12> Bad usability precludes good accessibility. You seem to be implying that accessibility is just about being able to access the content. That's wrong, accessibility is about _ease of access_ to the content. If what you were saying were true, then semantically correct HTML wouldn't be a WCAG requirement. But semantically correct HTML improves usability for people using assistive technologies, thus it is an important part of designing accessible content. Accessibility IS dependent on usability.

If just the ability to access the content was the only factor in designing accessible content, then you could just tell your blind clients to view the page source and read it character by character. But obviously that would not be acceptable because it creates a significant barrier for usability that sighted clients would not face. Designing accessible content is about _removing barriers_ that make it harder for people with disabilities to access the content, and bad usability is one of those barriers.

<comment><USER10> > That's wrong, accessibility is about ease of access to the content.

That doesn't account for cognitive disabilities.

Ease of access is up to the user-agent software. Accessibility is more than just that. As front end developers we have to provide that content in a meaningful and understandable form without getting in the browser's or screen reader's way. Sometimes that isn't enough and you need to use ARIA to clarify things more precisely.

> then you could just tell your blind clients to view the page source and read > it character by character.

Screen readers provide a variety of navigational tools for drilling into page content. They don't just read text.

I am not really sure what you are arguing. You can have great CSS and great accessibility at the same time.

<comment><USER12> > Screen readers provide a variety of navigational tools for drilling into > page content. They don't just read text.

And CSS is also used to provide navigational tools for drilling into page content. For example, putting navigation panels on a sidebar rather than in between the header and the content. That's not just done for aesthetics, it's done to make the information on the page easier to understand. But if your brilliantly-designed page layout breaks when zoomed in, then that is a barrier which disabled people will face that abled people will not. By doing accessibility testing with CSS disabled you will not be able to test the accessibility of such navigational features.

Sure, they could use a screen reader instead, but maybe they don't want to use a screen reader. Maybe page zoom is enough for them normally and that's what they prefer. By not taking accessibility into consideration when creating the visual design of the page, you are basically saying that the visual design of your page is crafted just for the needs of abled people, and disabled people should have to use special tools to access your content. That's inaccessible.

> I am not really sure what you are arguing. You can have great CSS and great > accessibility at the same time.

You have my point backwards. I am arguing that you can't have great accessibility with bad CSS. Thus you need to do your accessibility testing with CSS enabled (just like how your clients who have disabilities will be using it).

<comment><USER10> You are deliberately confusing presentation for semantics, which is discriminatory. The WCAG directly mentions not doing this. You cannot achieve AA conformance when you attempt to force this on your users.

For example red means stop and green means go to many people. When color is the primary means of status description that is discriminatory, because blind people cannot perceive color in any way. The status must be described in some other way equally for all users, but it can be colored red/green by CSS for increased usability. The same goes for page structures like menu bars. The standards even provide examples with ARIA.

CSS is only a factor for people with motor control limitations when interactive controls are too close together to be accessed uniquely with a mouse click. If this is a concern for you have somebody with advanced Parkinson's usability test your site, otherwise turn CSS off for all other accessibility testing.

<comment><USER12> > When color is the primary means of status description that is > discriminatory, because blind people cannot perceive color in any way. The > status must be described in some other way equally for all users

Yes, agreed. That's why you should provide a non-colour-based indicator of the status, AND ALSO make sure the colours work for partially vision impaired people (or colourblind, etc).

If the information is _technically_ accessible, but in an awkward and hard-to- use format compared to the sighted version of that information, then it's not really accessible. Making colourblind people read awkward labels when you could just as easily use colourblind-compatible colours is inaccessible. I am not confusing presentation and semantics, I am just saying that both are involved in creating accessible content.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> As an additional comment for people coming across this thread in future and anyone else it may help. Please make sure that your accessibility tools are high quality, as you would when assessing any other dependency or service used in the development of your product. In particular, they should always assess the rendered DOM of any page, rather than a string of HTML. And if they make bold claims about the increased accessibility of your website once their recommendations are followed, or try to sell you some ridiculously cheap consultancy services, stay away. Whether you buy their consulting services or not, if they're too cheap, their tools probably are too. And if they tell you that automated testing is a route to complete usability for people with special needs, they're deluded.

</comment><comment><USER14> For automated testing, try pa11y[0] or Lighthouse (intergrated in Chrome, using web.dev or as a standalone NPM package - (it uses axe-core under the hood)).

Tools will only get you so far, though. To make your site fully accessible, you will need to actually test it yourself. Luckily, most issues can be solved/prevented by following some simple guidelines [1].

Recently, I've reviewed the accessibility of 21 popular CSS UI frameworks [2], so this might be also helpful to you.

[0] - [http://pa11y.org/](http://pa11y.org/)

[1] - [https://moritzgiessmann.de/accessibility- cheatsheet/](https://moritzgiessmann.de/accessibility-cheatsheet/)

[2] - [https://darekkay.com/blog/accessible-ui- frameworks/](https://darekkay.com/blog/accessible-ui-frameworks/)

</comment><comment><USER13> There is a great Chrome extension called aXe[1], as well as tools like Tenon[2] which also has a rest API so you can potentially set it up as part of a CI workflow.

It's worth remembering that "accessibility" is a broad term. If you want a tool which can identify some common antipatterns and the WCAG guideline(s) they violate, the tools I've mentioned are a good place to start. But if you want to create a truly accessible website which is also usable by people with special needs, you'll need experts to come in to carry out audits and specialised user testing.

Please feel free to drop me an email using the address in my HN profile. I'm a usability and accessibility professional, and disabled to boot. Happy to answer any questions you might have and connect you with other great resources, tools and people.

[1] [https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/axe/lhdoppojpmngad...](https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/axe/lhdoppojpmngadmnindnejefpokejbdd)

[2] [https://tenon.io/](https://tenon.io/)

</comment><comment><USER15> Not seen anyone mention it yet, but the Accessibility feature in Firefox (might only be available in Nightly/developer edition, not sure) built into the developer tools are pretty good. You need to go into the dev tools settings to enable it from memory.

It gives you access to what is essentially an "accessibility DOM" that shows you how the page's structure will look to a screen reader, and you can also check the contrast of an elements text against its background.

It might not help you score any better on things like the webmaster tools tests directly, but it might help you identify things to change/fix.

<comment><USER16> Just checked in Firefox dev tools: there's a top-level menu for Accessibility, but the panel displays a grayed-out message, "Turn On Accessibility Features" which can't be clicked.

Thanks for pointing out this (future) feature, it sounds very useful. I'll keep an eye out for when it's available.

<comment><USER15> Just had a quick read, looks like it's available since Firefox v63, [https://developer.mozilla.org/en- US/docs/Tools/Accessibility...](https://developer.mozilla.org/en- US/docs/Tools/Accessibility_inspector#Accessing_the_Accessibility_Inspector)

It should work though once you click on that button, weird that it doesn't seem to be working for you.

Edit: Just read through more of that link, it's got quite a good breakdown of the features on it.

<comment><USER16> Thank you for the link, I bookmarked it to read more in detail. You're right, that's a nice overview of the features. I've always felt the need to learn more about accessibility (and regularly apply it to what I build). This looks great for the purpose.

I found in the browser preferences that I'd checked "Prevent accessibility services from accessing your browser". I had to uncheck it to be able to enable the Accessibility Inspector. Will be exploring it more.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> Also, please don't forget people with hearing impairment. You don't need a special tool, just remember to include text captions or similar if your page includes spoken content.

I'm partially deaf so sensitive to this issue. With hearing aids my hearing is 'fine'. But I recently completed some online training (that had spoken information) with the sound turned completely down to see how bad it would be for a profoundly deaf person. There were two questions where a correct answer required having heard a spoken (but not captioned!) statement.

</comment><comment><USER18> \- If you have little time and money, use any of the automated tools mentioned in the other comments

\- If you want the best results, do extensive user testing

\- If you are somewhere in the middle, do manual testing yourself. Simply turning on a screen reader and covering the screen with a sheet of paper does wonders.

\- Think about accessibility from the start, even before you write the first line of code (just like with security). It is very hard to fix it after the fact.

</comment><comment><USER19> You can use chrome dev tools. Right click the window and click 'inspect'. In the 'Audits' tab, you can run an audit for accessibility. It runs your website and checks it against common accessibility criteria, giving you a score out of 100.

On a side note, running this page through the accessibility audit, gives a score of 33. Perhaps HN has some work to do on accessibility.

<comment><USER20> HN it's very obviously bad for accessibility, small click/touch targets, grey- on-grey text with v. low contrast in some situations (by design), poor indent- level visibility. Using 'shade of grey' to convey information is never going to be great.

Table-based layout can screw up screen-readers, I assume it's still 'tabulated but non-tabular'. Way back screen-readers used to assume the first tr contained th even if it wasn't marked up that way.

It would be interesting to hear from people who use assistive tech for HN how much of a problem it causes them in practice.

<comment><USER13> > It would be interesting to hear from people who use assistive tech for HN > how much of a problem it causes them in practice.

I use a screen reader and am a frequent reader of HN. Obviously, much of the site's content is textual - you can't include images in comments AFAIK and it's extremely rare for people to link to graphical content as people often do on Reddit. So from that point of view, the site is an oasis away from the often visual nature of the modern web. On the other hand, there is absolutely no way for my screen reader to gauge whether a comment is a child of another, quickly jump past a child thread that I'm not interested in, quickly move up to the parent or grandparent of the current comment, etc.

TL;DR: the content is accessible because it's text, but accessible navigation is non-existent.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER21> Use aXe for automated tests and test everything manually with JAWS + Firefox (most popular screen reader Desktop combination) and iOS VoiceOver (most troubling mobile issues in my experience).

If you can afford in your project, use a external service that tests with people with different disabilities.

<comment><USER2> JAWS + IE is the most popular combination [1]

[1] [https://webaim.org/projects/screenreadersurvey7/#browsercomb...](https://webaim.org/projects/screenreadersurvey7/#browsercombos)

<comment><USER13> > JAWS + IE is the most popular combination

It's worth keeping a few points in mind when reading these results:

1\. The survey was carried out in October 2017. Things can and do move quite rapidly in this area, especially given the increased number of users who will be running Windows 10 now who may not have been back then.

2\. IE won't be around forever, and once the accessibility of Microsoft Edge improves (which is likely to happen pretty soon when they adopt Chromium), IE will become less and less relevant.

3\. NVDA with Firefox is a much more common combination than JAWS with Firefox, primarily because the NVDA developers recommend it. Freedom Scientific (makers of JAWS) have historically pushed IE perhaps more than other browsers, so it will be interesting to see how that changes as Edge becomes more usable.

<comment><USER2> My only comments to that would be WebAim is the highest authority on accessibility.

I'm well aware that these combinations will change over time.

The biggest thing is that JAWS costs a lot of money, so people buy, get used to it, and stick with their setup.

I tend to say, 'The only people who still use IE have no choice" or something like that.

<comment><USER13> > WebAim is the highest authority on accessibility.

I'm not sure that's strictly true nor measurable, or really matters in this case when we're discussing a survey filled out by users.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER22> Hire an engineer who needs accommodation. I mean that in jest of course, but only sort of. For a while I had an engineer on my team who was dyslexic and while not color blind themselves, were very in tune with the color blind community. They made huge improvements on not only our front end UX, but also on our codebase.

For example, apparently camelCase is really bad for dyslexics, and interstitial underscores are always_preferred.

<comment><USER23> There are multiple forms of dyslexia. For instance, I have one form and I have a daughter with a completely different variety. I have no problems with camelCase, but I am very particular about my fonts (Consolas for life).

I don't like _ because of the keyboard placement. I don't trust my pinkies at those angles.

<comment><USER22> My understanding from my coworker was that while some forms of dyslexics can process camelCase no problem, the underscore will never be worse than camelCase and will sometimes be better, so it's better to just use underscore. I'm certainly no expert though.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER24> Pay Knowbility or another specialist ([https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19475842](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19475842)) - no affiliation with either - to do it for you.

It's a much deeper domain than you think it is and people have real expertise worth paying for, particularly if you need section 508 compliance for a contract and money is on the line.

</comment><comment><USER25> We had to do this a few years ago for a major bank. Automated tools like a11y will only get you a certain amount of the way. Your tests will say 100% but your app may still be completely useless to blind people especially if you're using an SPA as all screen readers perform differently.

Having a partially sighted consultant come in and point out the deficiencies and how they use devices was extremely helpful. A lot of sight impaired people use Apple devices as their voiceover support is excellent, Android is getting better but you will find a lot of differences between their implementations in versions which is extremely frustrating. For desktop on windows JAWS seems to be the most used which again has its own way of parsing.

I don't know if it's changed but my advice would be plenty of manual testing, there's really not much else than actually using the devices with voiceover enabled to test if things actually work properly. And it's also a case of compromise and picking what devices to support as fixing something on one reader will inevitably break another.

Hope that helps :)

</comment><comment><USER26> Lighthouse, available in Chrome devtools, includes an a11y audit although how thorough it is I can't say.

</comment><comment><USER27> WCAG has historically focused mostly on accessibility for people with physically-manifesting needs (blindness, deafness), but has recently begun working on addressing usability for neurodiverse populations (dyslexia, ADHD, autism).

IMO, this is long overdue, especially considering how large these populations are. Things to consider here relate to text presentation and overall site layout. Think about text sizing/contrast, line spacing, column width, and paragraph height, for example. And consider how each of these things changes when the user is on mobile (paragraphs are now much taller, creating the "wall of text" that many people dread).

</comment><comment><USER28> There is a new tool from Microsoft/Axe partnership. Microsoft is one of the leaders in Accessibility. Partnering with Axe (Deque), the tool not only has a fast checker, it shows both on the site and in the report where the problems are, links to exact WCAG rules and has guidelines how to fix. All Open Source. Chrome extension: [https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/accessibility- insi...](https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/accessibility-insights- fo/pbjjkligggfmakdaogkfomddhfmpjeni?hl=en)

</comment><comment><USER29> You've received a lot of recommendations for software, but one of the most important things to bear in mind is that software _cannot_ ensure accessibility. It can discover _some_ problems with accessibility, but it has a lot of blind spots. If you care about accessibility, you need to incorporate manual human testing. This is a highly specialised field. The best thing for you to do is to fix the low-hanging fruit by plugging automated tools into your CI system, then get an expert to do a manual test so that you're aware of what other issues there are.

</comment><comment><USER4> I can think of only one tool that will test, score and identify accessibility issues, as well as track progression/regression over time. A testing tool provided by User1st. uTester

That said, automated testing can test anywhere from 30-40% of WCAG, leaving the rest to be found by a manual review. If you are not familiar with JAWS, NVDA, VoiceOver or TalkBack then a large portion of WCAG on your site(s) will go un-tested.

[http://www.user1st.com/services/](http://www.user1st.com/services/)

</comment><comment><USER30> Don't forget to check your website with a colorblindness simulator. This is a manual process unfortunately

Also with things like high contrast, high zoom level or increased font size, etc

</comment><comment><USER31> [https://www.compliancesheriff.com/](https://www.compliancesheriff.com/)

Compliance Sheriff helps identify compliance issues with WCAG and Section 508 standards, and their scan will give output with visual indicators of the non- compliant areas. Haven't seen that in any other tool.

They have a free test for up to 10 publicly facing URLs too.

</comment><comment><USER32> 1\. Install NVDA 2\. Read part 4 from user guide [https://www.nvaccess.org/files/nvda/documentation/userGuide....](https://www.nvaccess.org/files/nvda/documentation/userGuide.html?#GettingStartedWithNVDA) 3\. turn off your monitors 4\. try to do simple smock test

</comment><comment><USER33> One tool, not mentioned so far, is tota11y: [http://khan.github.io/tota11y/](http://khan.github.io/tota11y/)

It gives a bunch of inline annotations for accessibility problems and points of concern. Not sure how it compares with the others suggested, but might be useful to try.

</comment><comment><USER34> Here's one: [https://achecker.ca](https://achecker.ca)

<comment><USER35> I used your checker on [https://news.ycombinator.com/newcomments](https://news.ycombinator.com/newcomments) and it gives 38 known problems and 384 potential problems.

</comment></comment><comment><USER36> Ask me to look at it: 39 days ago, on this very site, I learned that I am what is called by cognoscenti a "breaker": [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19153810](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19153810)

<comment><USER37> I have this, but with typos. Give me a page full of text with a single typo, and somehow, against all odds, I'll immediately spot it.

<comment><USER36> Too bad copyreaders are a dying profession 'cause you'd be a natural.

<comment><USER37> Eh, it's not like I crave copyreading. So I don't mind being automated away by spell checkers in that department.

<comment><USER36> FWIW,since the Washington Post effectively fired all its copyreaders, there have been significantly more errors, as noticed by this close reader/subscriber.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER38> A lot of good suggestions here already, but in terms of screenreaders, JAWS has a majority stake in the market. They make a tool call JAWS Inspect which gives you reports (and by extension, version control) over your screenreader presentation. It's not free though.

</comment><comment><USER39> Switch the language option if one exists and try using the website in a language you don't understand. Has helped immensely for my side projects in improving UI clarity and ease of navigation.

</comment><comment><USER40> I'm also looking for something similar: you give it a list of routes and it will score each of them.

Doing this manually with Chrome's Audit tool for each route is time consuming.

</comment><comment><USER41> I've used the Wave extension for Chrome.

Also, being able to use the website with a screen reader (with your eyes closed) is a good metric.

<comment><USER42> Wave also has firefox extension [http://wave.webaim.org/extension/](http://wave.webaim.org/extension/) and webapp [http://wave.webaim.org/](http://wave.webaim.org/)

</comment></comment><comment><USER43> Try viewing it in lynx and navigating with keyboard commands only in lynx, to see how it will work for a screen reader tool.

</comment><comment><USER44> Firefox recently added an accessibility inspector in the dev tools which may be of use.

</comment><comment><AUTHOR> Just wanted to say thanks to everyone for all the super helpful responses in here!

</comment><comment><USER45> Try to browse it with NetSurf!

</comment><comment><USER46> Check out [http://www.sitespeed.io](http://www.sitespeed.io)

</comment><comment><USER47> There are maybe 10 well known tools for doing such things, easily Google-able, including Google's tools, that web developers everywhere have been using for ages but I'm on my phone at an airport so I'll try and post them tonight.

</comment><comment><USER48> Pa11y

</comment><comment><USER49> Disable javascript and see if it still works.</comment>


Intro to Hidden Markov Models (2010) [pdf] - <AUTHOR> http://ocw.mit.edu/courses/aeronautics-and-astronautics/16-410-principles-of-autonomy-and-decision-making-fall-2010/lecture-notes/MIT16_410F10_lec20.pdf <comment><USER2> \-- vs kalman filters:

"In both models, there's an unobserved state that changes over time according to relatively simple rules, and you get indirect information about that state every so often. In Kalman filters, you assume the unobserved state is Gaussian-ish and it moves continuously according to linear-ish dynamics (depending on which flavor of Kalman filter is being used). In HMMs, you assume the hidden state is one of a few classes, and the movement among these states uses a discrete Markov chain. In my experience, the algorithms are often pretty different for these two cases, but the underlying idea is very similar." \- THISISDAVE

\-- vs LSTM/RNN:

"Some state-of-the-art industrial speech recognition [0] is transitioning from HMM-DNN systems to "CTC" (connectionist temporal classification), i.e., basically LSTMs. Kaldi is working on "nnet3" which moves to CTC, as well. Speech was one of the places where HMMs were _huge_, so that's kind of a big deal." -PRACCU

"HMMs are only a small subset of generative models that offers quite little expressiveness in exchange for efficient learning and inference." \- NEXTOS

"IMO, anything that be done with an HMM can now be done with an RNN. The only advantage that an HMM might have is that training it might be faster using cheaper computational resources. But if you have the $$$ to get yourself a GPU or two, this computational advantage disappears for HMMs." \- SHERJILOZAIR

<comment><USER3> An RNN can be trained to a) Simulate the random output behavior of the sequence b) Predict the categorial hidden states at any given sequence location from supervised training data. A HMM is able to carry out both a and b. It also has the capacity to do: c) Predict the categorical hidden states any sequence location with reliance on supervised training data. Effectively, an HMM can identify/reveal hidden categorical states directly from unsupervised learning. To my knowledge, unsupervised labeling of hidden states is not a trivial task for RNNs.

<comment><USER4> HMMs are a good model if you know what the categorical states are before you start modeling. If you let the HMM learn the hidden states (e.g. with expectation maximization), there is no good reason to believe they will have obvious semantic value to you.

For RNNs, you can get very similar info. If you do have meaningful hidden state, you can treat a few labeled examples as training data for a supervised learning procedure. The RNN winds up predicting the state variable along with the future of the sequence. If you want something exploratory, you can use the RNN's hidden state activation over the course of a sequence as a general real valued vector that is amenable to cluster analysis. If the RNN state vectors segment well, it's likely these segmentations will have at least as much meaning as learned HMM states.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> Markov Chains Explained Visually

[http://setosa.io/ev/markov-chains/](http://setosa.io/ev/markov-chains/)

<comment><USER6> The interactive nature of those visualisations do a great job of increasing ones' grasp of the concept.

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> A coworker of mine used to ask job candidates (usually folks with PhDs) with HMMs on their CV "what's hidden in a hidden markov model". Lots of people couldn't answer that question.

</comment><comment><USER8> Are there an open tools for solving HMMs for large datasets? i.e. if I have millions of observations from millions of users and want to learn a HMM from the data, what are my options?

<comment><USER9> mlpack ([http://www.mlpack.org/](http://www.mlpack.org/)) has a nice implementation of HMMs. The library provides a few command-line programs you can use to work with HMMs:

[http://mlpack.org/docs/mlpack-2.0.1/man/mlpack_hmm_generate....](http://mlpack.org/docs/mlpack-2.0.1/man/mlpack_hmm_generate.html)

[http://mlpack.org/docs/mlpack-2.0.1/man/mlpack_hmm_train.htm...](http://mlpack.org/docs/mlpack-2.0.1/man/mlpack_hmm_train.html)

[http://mlpack.org/docs/mlpack-2.0.1/man/mlpack_hmm_loglik.ht...](http://mlpack.org/docs/mlpack-2.0.1/man/mlpack_hmm_loglik.html)

[http://mlpack.org/docs/mlpack-2.0.1/man/mlpack_hmm_viterbi.h...](http://mlpack.org/docs/mlpack-2.0.1/man/mlpack_hmm_viterbi.html)

There is also the HTK toolkit, but last I used that, years ago, I was pretty disappointed; it did not compile on a 64-bit system. Both of these are single- machine toolkits, so there is a limit to how much you can scale, but I think you may be able to deal with a million or so points with mlpack. There's also MATLAB's implementation, but that is not very fast.

</comment></comment><comment><USER10> > A Markov chain is a sequence of random variables X1, X2, X3, . . . , Xt , . > . . , such that the probability distribution of Xt+1 depends only on t and > xt (Markov property), in other words:

No. In a Markov process, the future does depend on the past, even all of the past. But what is special is that the past and the future are conditionally independent given the present. If we are not given the present, then all of the past can be relevant in predicting the future.

<comment><USER11> Markov chains are much simpler than Markov models. The lecture starts off with the simpler idea to motivate the more complex one that you're describing.

<comment><USER10> Sorry. The statement I quoted is just flatly wrong. Okay?

<comment><USER12> It's more reasonable to parse "depends only on" as expressing conditional independence than unconditional, and that parsing has the added bonus of making the original statement correct.

<comment><USER10> No. Again, once again, over again, one more time, in a Markov process, including a discrete time Markov chain, even one with a finite state space, the past can, and in practice usually does, provide a lot of powerful information to predict the future. The future really can depend on the past. Typically the past and the future are not independent -- not even close.

But, the Markov assumption (property) says that _GIVEN_ (excuse my emphasis -- it is just crucial here) the present, the past does not contribute more information for predicting the future. That is the past and the future may not be independent at all, but the past and the future are _conditionally independent_ given the present.

To discuss the Markov property, desperately need the concept of conditional independence -- there is no substitute, no easier terminology or description.

Alas, conditional independence is not so easy to discuss, even in the simplest cases. And in the grown up cases, need the Radon-Nikodym theorem of measure theory and the associated machinery of conditional expectation.

Tellingly, the part I quoted never mentioned conditional independence or even conditioning.

Sorry, again, the quote was wrong. I tried to correct the quote and, thus, keep readers trying to learn from being misled.

My sympathies are with the readers trying to learn. Early in my career, I read lots of such elementary, easy to understand introductions to lots of topics in applied math. The biggie problem was, as here, the content was from not very good down to actually wrong. Later I got a first class, rock solid foundation in grad school. In particular my background in Markov processes was from a star student of E. Cinlar, a world class expert long at Princeton. And my Ph.D. dissertation was in stochastic optimal control where the Markov assumption is just crucial -- indeed, stochastic optimal control is also commonly called Markov decision processes. In addition I've applied Markov processes in some serious work in US national security.

What I'm saying here is on the center of the target. What I quoted no one should try to learn from -- it's wrong.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER2> link to MIT course:

[http://ocw.mit.edu/courses/aeronautics-and- astronautics/16-4...](http://ocw.mit.edu/courses/aeronautics-and- astronautics/16-410-principles-of-autonomy-and-decision-making-fall-2010/)</comment>


Don't let the door hit your comments on the ass on their way out (2015) - <AUTHOR> https://jasonlefkowitz.net/2015/09/our-new-comments-policy-dont-let-the-door-hit-your-comments-in-the-ass-on-their-way-out/ <comment><USER2> Making the personal choice to eschew comments is absolutely fine, but the vestigial thing is just silly. SlateStarCodex for example thrives on comments. They're not working for you, ok, but don't kid yourself about the reasons why that is, or generalize to the whole net. It may just be that someone who wears their attitude on their sleeve attracts a disproportionate percentage of unproductive assholes after all.</comment>


Fake Physics (2017) - <AUTHOR> http://www.math.columbia.edu/~woit/wordpress/?p=9053 <comment><USER2> I find it hard to believe that there are wealthy people backing an organized propaganda campaign to promote the multiverse idea, in order to cover up the failure of string theory. Or for any other reason, really.

<comment><USER3> Toss String Theory onto the garbage heap already.

Maybe what is worst than having steered your career in the wrong direction for decades is that there is nothing better than String Theory to instead invest in.

I'm an armchair physicist, never bought into String Theory due to the growing mathematical kludginess of the thing. But what else is there?

<comment><USER4> Rejecting strings on aesthetic grounds is no better than accepting it on aesthetic grounds.

<comment><USER5> The problem is not asthetics the problem is overfitting the data. Add enough knobs and you can approximate anything, but your simply encoding data not finding anything new.

<comment><USER4> There is an infinite amount of complexity in a randomly selected real number. A famous example of packing lots of behavior in to a small number of parameters is [0]. A physical constant that will change everything drastically if it is changed even a little bit carries just as much information as one hundred constants to which the universe is less sensitive. That's the argument behind why the fine-tuning in the standard model is an indication that it is not sufficient.

[0][https://fermatslibrary.com/s/drawing-an-elephant-with- four-c...](https://fermatslibrary.com/s/drawing-an-elephant-with-four-complex- parameters)

<comment><USER5> That argument falls flat in two ways, first we are dealing with 12-13 digits so taking about infinity is silly.

Second, the standard model is simply the most ifnomation dense way of describing ~all known observations. Nobody thinks it's truth just accurate. So, saying it overfits the data is fine, that's how it's constructed. Supplanting it needs to reduce the amount of information required to describe the model or similar amounts while being more elegant to call it progress.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> I avoid nautilus, and find it sad to see them on the front of hn so often. They are really bending the definition of scientific journalism out of shape. I try to avoid metaphysics in my information intake thank you.

</comment><comment><USER7> If we travel far enough superluminally into the light cone of a causally separate region where inflation has ended, presumably it might not be fake physics.

Or maybe physics _is_ fake physics, otherwise physicists could then all put their feet up and call it a day.

Read our new article exploring these questions and also why the multiverse will speed up your computer, in this month's issue of 'Vague Scientist' \- [https://www.wired.com/images_blogs/beyond_the_beyond/2009/07...](https://www.wired.com/images_blogs/beyond_the_beyond/2009/07/020709.jpg)

The idea that people talking bollocks is some kind of a new phenomena, is a bewildering kind of meta-bollocks that has resulted from the meme of people shouting fake news.

I know otherwise intelligent people in their mid fifties, who have suddenly started insisting that you could trust the press before the internet started all this fake news.

</comment><comment><USER8> Funny, the linked article itself links back to HN when this was previously discussed (Jan 2017):

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13451310](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13451310)

</comment><comment><USER9> I'm not seeing what is fake physics regarding the Nautilus article. Seems the points are legitimate. A single universe implies Boltzmann brains. The multiverse makes statistical prediction unworkable. Easy to see this from a machine learning perspective. So, we need something else.

Fortunately, here is such an alternative theory!

[https://www.am-nat.org/site/law-of-information-non-growth/](https://www.am- nat.org/site/law-of-information-non-growth/)

<comment><USER10> Do you mind explaining why

1\. a single universe implies Boltzmann brains, and

2\. a multiverse makes statistical prediction unworkable?

The link you provided is taking a while to load for me, but if it's easier to just throw another link at me I'm fine reading that instead. I mainly want to understand why what you're saying is true.

<comment><USER9> The big problem is the principle of maximum entropy, which posits that all order we see is accidental. This manifests itself in various ways with current cosmological models.

[http://cosmos.nautil.us/feature/120/the-crisis-of-the- multiv...](http://cosmos.nautil.us/feature/120/the-crisis-of-the-multiverse)

My solution is to posit the universe was created by a halting oracle, and this allows us to assume perceived order is real order.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> Well, of course, scientific research is big business today, and marketing, including advertisement (of varying quality), is a major part of it.

<comment><USER12> I partially agree with your point. It's not "big business" in the sense of involving lots of people and large sums of money (a few inventions do end up being big, say blue lasers, but the research end of that work is rarely big on any business scale). The actual sums of any grant are typically shockingly low and even the sum of all government research grants is a pretty small number world wide.

However what has materially changed is that general publicity of research objectives and even some goals has been found valuable by the various research institutes (for helping get grants and donations) so that has really become important. Which, as a onetime scientist, I find a bummer.

(I felt it worth responding because the meme "research is big business" has itself been used as fake news fodder for attacking results (e.g. climate change) that some people don't like. I didn't interpret your comment that way, BTW, but still felt it needed pointing out).

<comment><USER13> I think people have trouble telling the difference between tobacco, sugar, pesticides, plastics, and other "research" and the climate change research.

Part of science certainly is covering for big business, and is itself in business doing so.

But it would be stupid for people to keep trusting "science" blindly when it's been used repeatedly over the span of decades to cover up deadly or otherwise dangerous things.

<comment><USER14> Just call something "science" and have people with PhDs do it in universities, and people will trust it.

Who cares about the process or the quality or the funding?

Humans with PhDs would never print BS en masse to promote their individual careers, and placate their colleagues, would they?

<comment><USER13> That was precisely my point, yes.

But also that scientists are more concerned with fussing at the public how they need to "trust science", despite that doing so historically has been questionable at times.

Perhaps people would be more willing to listen on climate change if there were more institutional credibility.

Edit: You can downvote all you want, but in the middle of a replication crisis and sinking faith in science as an institution, maybe you should think about it.

<comment><USER15> It is still better to trust in misleading science than it is to do any of the alternatives. And just because some science is misleading doesn't mean the institution itself doesn't work.

<comment><USER13> But the institution itself doesn't work outside of a few narrow fields: the results aren't replicable and they're dangerous to trust.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> Isn't this kind of fake physics called "Woo"?

[https://rationalwiki.org/wiki/Science_woo](https://rationalwiki.org/wiki/Science_woo)

<comment><USER17> I think woo usually involves claims about how some pseudoscience nonsense can impact an average person's life. The multiverse isn't used in this way, from what I've seen.

<comment><USER18> There is a bit, for example: [https://www.consciouslifestylemag.com/quantum- jumping-shift-...](https://www.consciouslifestylemag.com/quantum-jumping- shift-reality/)

But it's definitely not very common.

<comment><USER17> Oh yeah, there is tons of various "quantum" woo. Deepak Chopra comes to mind as one of the well-known worst offenders. But I think that is separate from the OP, which seemed to mostly be about the multiverse (and actual physicists).</comment></comment></comment></comment>