I'm having a conversation with a designer about icons. Making a screenreader read "camera" or "microphone" when an icon is shown is trivial with aria-label. But screenreader users are massively outnumbered by sighted users who might be confused by the meaning of a tiny image/ icon. The mighty Paul Annett explains more:
@brucelawson Yes! Some years back I gave a talk called, "Why You Should Do Support" advocating for every person in tech to take the occasional support shift. A key part was a call I did circa 1990 with someone who had gotten their first Mac and was struggling to figure out how to plug in the monitor. I had her describe the ports she could find, and one was "dinner plate" or "place setting". It blew my mind; it was a place setting!
@eyrea@paul@brucelawson was discussing this my wife earlier this week who rightfully said that even people of 60 and even 70 plus were 30 and 40 when the pc and internet became mainstream so why would they not be able to use these things
@maarteuh@paul@brucelawson Yup. I have a relative who is in their late 70s, and his favourite operating system is UNIX, the OS he worked in before he retired. (He runs Windows at home, but he'd never claim to like it 😊.)
Tbf, garbage cans have many designs. Pictured are some that are common in my location. Further, garbage cans aren't really something that have been common in pop culture since 1980s Turtles-animation was a thing.
I've sometimes wondered those Google's "identify a fire hydrant to prove you're human". The only reason why I know hydrants is that I've read Carl Barks' duck-comics from 1950s. Surely not part of the global basic curriculum (pictures of local hydrants included).
@brucelawson I miss when icons used to be detailed and colorful before the whole corporate "minimalist" design spread like a virus. Now logos are so minimalist that you can hardly tell what anyone means any more and they all look the same.
@brucelawson Next to the various UX fails I think we failed educating a lot of elder people: When talking to my parents about computers their whole belief (and thus usage) of computers is centered around them being magical and everything about them arbitrary. We fail to tell a story about how a lot of things in computing are analogies to the real life: folders & files, trash can, register tabs, etc.
They go around the world thinking "yeah, I press the hot water bottle to deactivate the camera" and memorizing it (which takes a lot of mental capacity because it's so arbitrary). The thought that the icon could actually make sense doesn't come to their mind. And I think it's our fault.
And only partly can this be solved with "realistic" iconography. We had simple icons in traffic signs all the time, but people knew that they'd supposed to make sense and thus deduced the intended meaning.
@brucelawson still kinda digging the 90s/early 2000s UI when icons were still new enough to many people that there was often a visible text label with each one, unless the user turned it off
of course, we also had fewer icons 'cos we'd not found all the ones that could have been needed
Damn. So that "Send e-mail" icon is a paper airplane. I thought it was a pair of parallel rails going to a vanishing point. I've always enjoyed using a railgun to communicate. Until now...
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