I have been using a $100 temporary Android phone while waiting for my fancy phone to get replaced under warranty and the experience with the stock OS is just so so bad. Like barely usable most of the time. Even the GPS and wifi don't work well.
Most people worldwide use cheap Android phones on old versions of the OS and this was a good reminder that just because my mobile app/site works well on my fancy phone, it might work hardly at all for most people.
@darius I think about the NHS digital. design standards all the time, where the standard is functionally "your target audience is a fifteen-year-old for whom english is a second language. They're using a 6 year old android phone that's been handed down twice, and they are sitting in an hospital emergency waiting room trying to look up information in the middle of the most terrifying night they have ever had. Your site must work for that person, at that moment."
@darius "If you do use Javascript to improve the user experience for users without accessibility needs, users must be able to perform exactly the same tasks with Javascript turned off."
I wish I could find the reference, where that team talked about testing the NHS site on early PS Vitas and janky old handhelds with some contraption approximating a web browser built in because sometimes that's all people had, and the site had to work for them.
Not sure how old that quote is but pretty much every accessibility tech can handle JavaScript just fine. It's normally the shitty js code that's the issue.
@mhoye@darius@notting can confirm, I almost punched my laptop 2 months ago while doing something in an app that was annoying me while also trying to deal with the outfall of a medical emergency. Using IT while stressed sucks. I feel like we should make devs use their app while someone pelts them with oranges.
@kurtseifried@darius@notting Being made to diagnose and fix technical problems to fix some unconsidered roadbump you're in the middle of some vastly more important, vastly more stressful thing is what has given me the handful of "I will never forget this, I will never forgive this" moments I've enjoyed in my career.
@darius@kurtseifried@notting@mhoye Most of my city has been w/o power since Sunday; internet connections have been spotty. It took >5 minutes to load the BACKGROUND IMAGE behind the login fields on my employer’s SSO modal so I could check my email on my phone. It’s a high-res photo of a pretty building. 🙄 We have rural students for whom I’m sure this is just the normal login experience.
@dalias heheh touche, sites should work on < 3G too!
#NodeBB has issues with uber slow connections, something I don't like, but would love to fix. It's that initial 400kb js payload, sometimes that's enough when combined with a flaky connection, to stop the page from loading properly.
@devnull@darius I love how they pulled the plug on reliable, obstruction-penetrating, perfectly usable speed service to free up resources for theoretically fast service that's flaky, short range, and always cutting out and dropping to 2G.
@darius I did this with a $100 ZTE phone (illegal to sell in America!) and… the experience was really nice, actually! I was sorely tempted to just not get a "better" phone. Part of that though was I managed to get Android Go, which was a special version of Android where all the stock apps are carefully trimmed to work on very low-end, low-RAM devices. Google has since killed Android Go.
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