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Welcome to my world. This explains the lighted magnifier on my desk.
Software Zen: delete this;
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Don't get me going with legibility issues introduced by programming ignorance. Low contrast. Artsy but Grrr.
"A little time, a little trouble, your better day"
Badfinger
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We developed a sales forecasting tool for use by our salesmen.
The sleaze — sorry, sales — manager took the software home on his laptop to test over the weekend.
He came back and reported that he couldn’t enter any data in any of the fields. He swore that he had done nothing to the software.
It took us a couple of days of wasted time to figure out that the sleaze ball — who didn’t want to forecast sales at all — had changed the input characters, which were white on a blue background, to blue on a blue background.
Maybe I should have tried to convince a jury of my peers, that is programmers, that this is a case of justifiable homicide,
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Justifiable exile from software.
"A little time, a little trouble, your better day"
Badfinger
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One of my hobbies is writing and recording music, mostly using MIDI software instruments. It seems that the programmers who create DAWs (Digital Audio Workstations) like Cubase and Logic Pro, and software instruments from Native Instruments, Steinburg, Apple, etc., are very young folks with excellent eyesight who are able to read 4pt fonts, use scrollbars that are 1 pixel wide, 1 pixel away from their borderless windows. Apparently they think everyone can see that well, too, and don't need a way to change the font sizes. Bastmmmpff.
And that goes for you too, Microsoft.
If you think 'goto' is evil, try writing an Assembly program without JMP.
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It's the low contrast that starts the problem. This artsy design fad has made it's way into numerous medical software interfaces. One day, someone will die because of it. Then, hello, standards. There is, in fact, a user interface standard which is human factored based (the official name escapes me) designed to avoid such habits. Sorry for rant. It's the artsy-ness aspect that gets to me. It's not professional software. MIDI's and DAW's software habits are bad ones for young programmers.
"A little time, a little trouble, your better day"
Badfinger
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The GOV.UK website is a past master at this kind of stuff. To renew your car road licence you are sent a form with a 16 digit number in four groups of four - just like a credit card number. The online form you have to type this into accepts a maximum of 16 characters including spaces. It doesn't ask you to leave the spaces out, accept or silently drop them, it just truncates whatever you type to 16 characters without warning.
If you don't notice this, when you get to the end of the page, having filled the rest of the form and clicked continue, it says there is something wrong with the data you entered, but without telling you what. (After many complaints it now seems to tell you which entry is wrong, but still won't accept the number in the format it is given to you!)
When you get to the next page you are required to pay - if you want to use a credit card, it will accept the card number (4 groups of 4 digits) in any valid format - with or without spaces etc and doesn't truncate after 16 characters.
I think this little example, present now for years, demonstrates the mindset of the Government Digital Service beautifully - they claim to be agile, to undertake extensive real life user testing etc etc, and yet this basic noob error in web page design persists despite complaints. As with so many other similar issues on GOV.UK, if you complain to the GDS team, they will say that the pages are looked after by another department and its not their responsibility...
A great shame because the work GDS has done in forcing UK government departments to standardise their IT infrastructure and site UIs getting disparate systems to work together is genuinely staggering, but - as with all things government around the world - the actual users themselves (and especially those without IT skills or unable to use computers well or even at all) are an irritating afterthought in the whole process.
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I agree with you and with the OP and others who complained about lack of contrast and other egregious problems.
However, I found that the GOV.UK site for reporting Covid test results was a model of accessible design. Text and data entry controls were adequately large and readable, even on tiny screens, and contrast was always good. Previous entries were remembered where relevant and entering the test number was a piece of cake by pointing the phone camera at the data matrix on the test. They deserve some kudos for all that.
Phil
The opinions expressed in this post are not necessarily those of the author, especially if you find them impolite, inaccurate or inflammatory.
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//www.w3.org/WAI/WCAG21/Understanding/contrast-minimum.html
A contrast ratio of 3:1 is the minimum level recommended by [[ISO-9241-3]] and [[ANSI-HFES-100-1988]] for standard text and vision. The 4.5:1 ratio is used in this provision to account for the loss in contrast that results from moderately low visual acuity, congenital or acquired color deficiencies, or the loss of contrast sensitivity that typically accompanies aging.
"A little time, a little trouble, your better day"
Badfinger
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It's not you. We're misanthropes - we hate everybody. 
"These people looked deep within my soul and assigned me a number based on the order in which I joined."
- Homer
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In today's world, you shall not blame on programmers, this is the UX/UI job. Programmers simply implement what they have been asked to do.
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I feel your pain.
"It is easy to decipher extraterrestrial signals after deciphering Javascript and VB6 themselves.", ISanti[ ^]
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This makes me think of the excellent book, The Design of Everyday Things. That book should be required reading for engineers of all stripes, but none so much as developers.
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I just read that book for the first time last year & it is fantastic. 
It's great too, because the author exposes the fact that a lot of these items make the user feel stupid, but it really is the engineer who is dumb.
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It was recommended to me by a retired software engineer. I own a copy because it bears re-reading and keeps me humble 
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The idiots designing the Windows UI need to read this book.
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Does copy/paste not work?
do they include QR codes you can scan on the phone?
And finally... you can store much of that in your password manager, so it is handy.
Of course, if you are dealing with unique systems each time, it gets harder. But then I pay THOSE bills with paper checks. And if they contain a barcode for only them... I damage it, so they feel my pain.
And I write QR Code Plz on the check and the bill. Since most companies are forced to MANUALLY process the payment and review why...
Ie, make THEIR problem a problem for them.
FWIW, Discover has a note to NEVER give me a card again b/c they pissed me off! LOL
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Show me how to copy from a paper bill I got in the mail to their web page on my computer and I'm golden.
I get a bill from a doctor or medical provider I'll hopefully never see again, so I don't set up an account.
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Yep, those people get paid with PAPER Checks, via Snail Mail!
Don't worry, eventually they will come around. STOP paying them online!
That will LEARN THEM!
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*stares with a grudge at bit.ly links*
That's a fun one. You copy by hand to send the link by SMS and instead of a newspaper article, the recipient gets anything from pornography to instructions about caring for an exotic plant.
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Better than pornography with an exotic plant. 
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Oh, don't worry, after you expend all of your energy typing that all in, we will force you to verify you are really you by retrieving your phone and typing another 6-digit code. 2FA is coming!!!! argh!!!!
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It's the UX designers, not the programmers! 
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I agree that you shouldn't have to deal with it, but you can hold CTRL and use your mouse scroll wheel, or CTRL and the +/= and -/_ keys (the ones on the top row of the keyboard, not the numeric keypad) to zoom in and out in some apps (including most web browsers that I know of). Windows also comes with a Magnifier tool to zoom in on apps that don't support a zoom function.
I say this because of experience. My eyes aren't what they used to be (which may be a result of years of staring at 4pt fonts on screen).....
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I use Ctrl+Mouse Wheel and Ctrl+0 all the time. My problem is when I get a bill in the mail from a provider and go to their website to "Pay My Bill" I have to enter an account number and an invoice number from the paper bill into their webpage. The numbers on the paper bill are hard to see and parse, and entering them on the website is pass fail. Get the wrong number of 0s in a long string of digits.
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