Calling NSPopover.show(relativeTo:of:preferredEdge:) with a NSTextView as the positioning view will slow down your app the more links your text view contains. I discovered this with auto-completion popovers in my note-taking app The Archive and hunted down the issue. In notes with ~100 links (hashtags, web links, wiki links, …) displaying the popover with completion candidates was much slower than in short/empty notes. The slowness scales linearly with the amount of links, and is related to accessibility children iteration.
The Braille Institute released an update to their Atkinson Hyperlegible font. My late grandmother approved of its shapes, so check it out if you want to maximize legibility of all letters and numbers in your life. (And when do you not want to be able to read what you type?)
I avoided hamburger menus for the better part of the past decade. This time, I had no better idea. The result is the new mobile navigaton for zettelkasten.de. Also, it seems like the UI component sticks with people, and is not just a weird fad anymore. It’s too old for being trendy.
If you’re using hashtags on Twitter, Instagram, or in your Zettelkasten – consider CamelCasing the hashtags if there’s more than one word involved. That acually seems to help screen-readers with pronunciation. Not that many Instagram photo hashtag lists are worthy of being read aloud. But it’s nice to know that this can help for actual textual content down the line. (Examples from trending tags I pulled on German Instagram and web comics include, but are not limited, to #sundayBumDay, #towardsMoreRealityOnInstagram, and wherever the word boundaries in #inspoforallgirls and #turtleneckfashionstatementaboutthefragilityofspacetime and #whoagonetoofarnow are hidden.)
My grandmother is 91 years old and, for about 2 years now, her sight degraded to almost-blindness. She barely sees milky shapes in her central field of vision. It’s supposedly better in the corners of her eyes, but I couldn’t get any reliable confirmation out of her regarding that. So using a telephone is a problem.
“Not So Super Mario” was brought to my awareness on Twitter today. This is a very geeky and fun take on accessibility, and it concerns our work of the digital world, too, as you know. Color contrast and larger fonts isn’t for the disabled, only. It benefits everyone. And your app design will be better.
