chimerror

I'm Kitty (and so can you!)

  • she/her

Just a leopard from Seattle who sometimes makes games when she remembers to.


NireBryce
@NireBryce

I'm kind of worried that people think changing a date format is the same amount of work as changing themes (which rely on someone having the time to be/learn an artist, check colorblind/contrast/etc, work with all 9 browsers or whatever) or accessability features (which would need to work with every implementation of the accessability frameworks of each OS)

Twitter not having it is inexcusable, same with tumblr, bluesky, Facebook. but like, even mastodon can't be expected to implement them on a timeline thats nearly instant. they aren't places with teams that know the tools, that come in just to work on that. There's still the day to day, there's still the need to drive growth until a critical mass is reached, and then the pile gets chipped away at with what isn't going towards those. And cohost's update pace and feature pace is way less glacial than Twitter's, we just see them one at a time instead of ten every nine months.

especially if you hate electron, which is the way many smaller companies impliment the general suite of accessability features.

Software is often built in a spiral, with you needing to do things to make it easier to do the rest in a way that's able to be maintained instead of a liability. Working with one thing, getting blocked on it, doing things completely different to think, coming back, moving on and coming back later when insight hits. If you try to direct the work, often it's way less productive than bouncing around unless someone is working on something they've managed to line up all the right resources for.

I've been around volunteer and small employee count organizations for 20 years and the only thing I can promise you is tearing them down will make it harder to impliment features you want even ignoring the sour taste. criticize, sure. But try not to come at it from a place of ignorance or you'll undermine your point on your quest to make someone miserable on behalf of not having implemented the thing they should have.

I shouldn't need to say this. Put down the guns and talk. (edit: that goes for all sides.)

this isn't fucking Twitter. both stop acting like it, and stop expecting the same feature speed -- 7500 people means you can work on features in parallel, and VC and ad money means you can float on the features that get you revenue neutral and up. 3/7500 = 0.04%


kukkurovaca
@kukkurovaca

Put down the guns and talk.

What are the "guns"? Complaining angrily is not a gun. People debating whether or not they should continue Cohost Plus is also not a gun.

Also, it's worth noting that when there's a flare up / increase in the volume of complaint, that's not coming from out of nowhere. Folks have been exercising patience and lower-velocity talking already.

The point that a tiny site doesn't have endless resources to throw at problems is well taken, but I would guess that everyone involved is aware of it and agrees. I think a little more transparency on how @staff is prioritizing planned accessibility features / what the roadmap is would go a long way toward making people feel less strung along about this stuff, but maybe that's me naive of me.

If making accessibility into a discourse is the what gets the broader cohost community to actually notice it, and makes it harder for staff to ignore -- and the official channels don't produce a visible response -- then people will be incentivized to start more discourse.


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in reply to @NireBryce's post:

there was a post going around recently about a11y how, if you follow the letter of the spec, you actually end up with a lot of situations that are worse for screen reader users than not following it

shit with color schemes and a11y is a fucking mess at the best of times. it just takes missing one thing (unless your scheme is all rotated variables like solarize) and entire portions of your app are completely unreadable. exports aren't actually trivial if you want them to be usable -- have you looked at a google takeout or twitter export or tumblr lately? they're fucking garbage.

hell, most of those major sites have been dragged kicking and screaming towards something vaguely resembling gdpr compliance, and notably, it does not seem that twitter is in it anymore either

meanwhile silly labels and time conversions take like. i dunno. an hour. they're a fun mind break between working on bigger features or things that like. need you to carefully process shit.

a lot of screen readers cannot scrub through alt text in general yeah.

and, yeah. I wish it was easier to get people to see how much software can't just be work on one feature, even if it's your top priority, even if it's your top priority for years and can't be touched because a website is a process of rebuilding 2 of your 4 engines in flight, over and over, and hoping at most one more fails while your arms are in the other two

People also don't realise how much of a maintenance burden things like dark mode put on a team. You need to design everything twice and you need to test everything. On personal project I design dark mode first because I'm designing for me and the light mode definitely feels like an afterthought. It's not polished, the colours aren't always right, I miss contrast issues, it doesn't look right.

If the staff punted out a dark mode tomorrow then 2 weeks from now missed something in a new feature that made it impossible to use with dark or light mode how would people reach? The last time people pressed staff to act quickly it resulted in them being called paedophiles so I can understand why they don't react to this stuff anymore.

in reply to @kukkurovaca's post:

lol "guns". my sympathies will basically never lie with the (bizarrely huge and ironically outspoken) set of people who act like Complaining In A Public Space is a violent action that needs to be shut down and defended against.