Sven Slootweg @joepie91@pixie.town

She's not daft, my mate. UI designers just behave as though they live in a vacuum. They think that when someone looks at their menu, it's the first menu that user has ever seen, and they haven't seen a hundred menus a day with a massive button saying "Yeah make everything worse lol" and a tiny text link that says "Just let me get on with it for a minute."

This is the new normal, UI designers. Your users expect hot garbage, and they expect it so hard that they'll treat your Very Important Question the same way they'd treat any other spyware cookie crap that every website insists is a Very Important Question, and they'll just give whatever answer will let them continue while being mildly annoyed.

Helping out a mate set up her #gameDad recently. She got to a page asking a question and prodded the buttons without reading. I went "Wait hang on what did that say," we never found out but it was Probably something about updating a list of ports? Who knows! Anyway it started up fine, but... like, twenty years ago I would've gone, like, "Mate what are you doing," but these days...

When every website you visit thrusts a thing in your face as you're scrolling and you know it's spam so you just hit the heck-off button without looking, never mind reading

When every game you play starts with a bunch of logo videos that you have to mash buttons to skip

When a new game throws some bollocks up about an EULA that nobody expects anyone to ever read

When every three days your computer goes "Hey can I just -" and you read it once and understand that it's asking you to install spyware and then every other time you hit the Remind Me In 3 Days button without thinking or even pausing

When every day you get an email that says "Important information about your account" and it's never important information

When 80% of your physical mail goes straight into the recycling bin without even being opened because, well, it's just recycling

...yeah. It's absolutely no surprise that our default first interaction with a machine is to mash buttons randomly until it stops banging on about whatever and gets on with doing what we bought it to do.

Back in 1999 when you'd go to join a new forum there'd be a rules page, and at the bottom would be a big bright eye-catching "AGREE AND CONTINUE" button, and a little way above it, in the rules themselves, would be something like "To prove that you've read the rules, click on the period at the end of this sentence."

Clicking on "AGREE AND CONTINUE" would issue a two hour IP ban so you could Actually Read The Rules, and also think about what you'd done.

1999 was a hell of a year

I just want you to know that I don’t know a single #trans person who isn’t suffering mental health concerns over the sheer volume of hate being sent our way.

Many of us might be putting on a brave face, but those same folks are much closer to not being here any more than many of those folks would admit. Including me.

And I can understand it, questioning authority is a good thing, and I guess most of us have so little control over our lives nowadays that people want to push back where they can - if you have no control over how much rent you pay, can be no-fault evicted with little notice, your bus service no longer runs, your job gets made redundant and your benefits get sanctioned for no discernible reason I guess any attempt to restrict where you can drive your car feels like something you can resist

So, question for #Blind Masto users:

So, I'm doing a comic. I care about accessibility. For alt text on a whole comic page, with maybe six to eight panels a page and lots of text, what is best of the alt text.

NOTE: I have access to the full range of search engines. Please only comment from lived experience as a comic artist or blind user.

I'd like to get off Kagi. What search engine should I pay for?

Reported to the landlord a while ago that there seemed to be birds nesting on the roof, under the solar panels. Contractor just showed up, and determined that I do not, in fact, have birds under the panels.

But every other house in the block does

#NoResponsesPlease

This toot is testing the above hashtag.

Please boost.

I'm seeing how many people will respond to it. Zero would of course be the ideal number.

@foone It always frustrates me that the modern design mantra of modern hardware/software appears to be “we’ll streamline it all and tell you what the experience is that you want” rather than “here are some parts and a good first guess at a good interface, have fun!”

Especially when folks making the locked down/vertically integrated pieces of tech all cut their teeth on open ecosystems that enabled or even encouraged mucking about in internals.

My attitude to hacking proprietary software/protocols/hardware has always been:

this should be open/documented and it should be easy to produce software/hardware that interacts with it with no problem.
But it's not, so you can't blame me for getting out the crowbar and breaking in.

@joepie91 it's like that thing where bands go on a 'world tour' and the world tour in question is just america, canada, a handful of european cities, and australia