I just reevaluated. I moved to another supplier (hello cloudflare). I suspect I have been a customer for more than 15 years. Possibly even longer. Way longer. 2 decades? I was a VIP member too - whatever "cred" that holds. Account now closed.
The prefers-contrast media query is even better for accessibility [1]. It allows checking if the OS is in high contrast mode and adjust the colors appropriately.
I think the idea is to replace the Microsoft's proprietary -ms-high-contrast media query [2]. It means that prefers-contrast will work in Mac and Windows. Unfortunately, Safari Technology Preview 68 doesn't seem to implement it.
That doesn’t always work though. Some people need to adjust their colours for lower contrast, for example: https://accessibility.blog.gov.uk/2016/05/26/accessibility-a... . Ideally sites would also work properly if the user changes the foreground and background colours to suit their needs.
That's just one tool to avoid strain and it's not for everyone.
The important thing is to remember that strain creeps up on you slowly, then hits hard. You can get away with bad habits for years, but left unchecked one day you'll find you can't do anything, it all hurts too much.
Don't push yourself. If you find yourself aching a little, address the problem rather than pushing through it. I know several people that were knocked out of commission for the better part of a year after a few decades of casual neglect.
The historical significance of looking up and seeing light patterns slowly move across the dark sky is enormous: it was where the first human civilizations made their first discoveries.
The night sky is the origin of mankind's first concepts of time, cosmology and theology (Egyptians associated the afterlife with the night sky). The very earliest known long-form writings such as the Pyramid Texts [1] are fundamentally rooted in astronomical observations.
I remember a mostly deaf person I knew for a while. It was pretty amazing-- she could mostly understand what I said through reading my lips and what little hearing she had. She could also speak pretty well.
She told me that she could feel the beat of music -- literally the vibrations. When I asked her about bird songs, she said she had never heard them. I was momentarily dumbstruck. Day-to-day, I take bird songs for granted, but when I stop and think about it, they are some of the most beautiful, mysterious, transcendent things I've ever heard. And she'll never know...
Makes you wonder what other sensory experiences we humans are missing out on.
That is a bummer. I also have RP but I'm only down to about 10% of night vision (i remember being able to see much better at night). How's your day vision?
Can you see them on a bright TV? Maybe some night vision apparatus will do the trick or the next generation of cameras + an oculus. Or maybe even hololens nightvision.
The inaccessible comment is somewhat ironic. If the display of the ASCII craft is in a terminal at least I have some control over the font size and, in particular, the background colour.
Sorry, I meant cruft - autocorrect didn't recognize the word and corrected it to 'craft'.
And the same control extends to users on the Web at the very least. Userstyles/scripts and extensions can modify websites, giving users the ultimate control over website content.
My point was in response to the grandparent's statement that most modern apps get in the way of the user - those exact same things are also crucial to, for instance support screen readers and mobile users.
I use this on my computers at work. Its wego and the ONE frustrating thing is you can't change the colors so that they work well with a light background.
Sadly, the web is an accessibility nightmare. If that changes, then sure, I could move too. But there's a lot that modern versions of iOS get right regarding accessibility, stuff that I wish google/android would do too.
I am not a professional web developer, but I used LAMP to make a decent size website using standards conformant XHTML/CSS without table hacks with PHP and MySQL for forms when I was in high school. I wrote the markup by hand, so I made certain to place content first so that 56k modems would load it quickly and web browsers for the the blind would not read navigation bars before the actual content. At the time, I assumed that JavaScript was not always available because people eithet either turned it off to eliminate the Javascript engine as an an exploit vector or were using browsers that did not support it because they were blind.
Consequently, I considered requiring JavaScript for a webpage to load properly to be bad practice. Even if I assume JavaScript is everywhere, I have yet to hear of how one would make things dependent on it accessible to the blind. I know that people will make webpages that require it regardless of whether the blind can view them or not, but I still feel that is bad practice.
Modern screen reader software looks at the output of the DOM. It isn't manually parsing raw HTML straight from the server (it's possible 10 or 15 years ago this was the case). So however the browser got that particular text on the screen (directly from a server, or rendered on the client via XHR requests) this is an abstraction most screen reading software doesn't involve itself in.
with the latest webdev trends it is extremely unlikely this will improve any time soon. There was a time (~10-15) years ago when separation of concenrs and accessibility did matter, now it is just a js frameworks bloodbath.
Some "frameworks" put a ton of work into accessibility.
The Polymer team's entire element catalog is accessible with ARIA integration done with assistance from Chrome's dedicated accessibility engineers. We even provide reusable abstractions that make writing your own accessible elements easier, like iron-a11y-announcer and iron-a11y-keys.
Thanks for the link - was really interesting, particularly the introduction which explains why accessibility is so important and the number of people that it touches.
