If we've concluded that's it's okay to have elements that change/morph, as we seem to with the introduction of things like details, a native tab-like element feels like a glaring omission. Tabs have been a long-standing UI pattern and forcing every site to implement their own is a nightmare for accessibility. (The page you're reading is maybe already in a browser tab.)
I wouldn't be surprised if it turned out less than half of the custom tab interfaces on the web failed from an accessibility standpoint. When considering ARIA guidance, I don't even think it's possible to build an accessible version in HTML alone.
Other people have recognized it's missing. Open UI has a draft spec for it[0] and CSS Tricks has an article from 2001 about Open UI's experiments with sections for tabs[1]. I have no idea what happened on this front, though.
Why don't you go ahead and share the "donate to Firefox" page?
Last I knew, it doesn't exist. You can donate to Mozilla Corporation, the group that has been agitating it's own users and donors for years now.
People who want to support the Firefox team/product and have them focus on improving things like the development tools (or whatever else) literally cannot. Mozilla doesn't make that an option.
The general public was often using Times New Roman or whatever their system's default sans serif font was.
But, designers have cared about things like this for a very long time (ages, as you said.) Arial is joined at the hip with Helvetica, which got a movie[1] because of it's massive cultural impact and it's praise within design circles.
Among professional designers, there were very strong opinions on Helvetica and Arial--almost fever pitch at times. iirc, Arial exists do to the popularity of Helvetica and the background of this goes back to the 1950s. It wasn't just where it was placed in the font selection menu, it was given top billing in that menu deliberately (in Windows.) If you're interested, I think the Wikipedia page for Helvetica (Font)[2] covers it fairly deeply.
That all said, I haven't heard it hotly debated for some time now. The explosion of freely available fonts; popularity of new font families like Open Sans, Noto Sans, etc; and the ability to add custom fonts on the web seems to have slowly killed off the discourse in the last decade or so. I'm not in those design circles as often anymore, though.
Ah yeah I had totally forgotten about Helvetica having such a history. Though I wonder what you mean by putting Arial in that position deliberately - if it was alphabetical (which I remember it being) do you mean that Arial was named as such that it started with A?
I don't mean that it was literally named for the dropdown, just that generally Helvetica was the cause and Arial was the effect. From what I know, it goes back earlier to when Monotype was providing fonts for IBM printers.
From what I know, Monotype was responsible for the name Arial (although IBM called the family Sonoran Sans Serif.) But, even at that point, the intent was to create something that would stand in for Helvetica.
I don't know that the name was selected deliberately to be ahead of Helvetica. But, it's not unheard of in branding to put your product ahead of or near the competition alphabetically. (It was especially important then because people were manually looking up things in phone books and libraries.) I wouldn't be surprised to hear that aspect was considered during naming.
I don't know anything about Adguard, but good on the team for doing the extra digging instead of just going along with the claim. Even better that they're sharing what they've found with everyone else.
I tried not to share too much details while we were still in process of figuring out the details.
The legal advice we got was basically “block asap or risk jail time”. Moreover, the risk would still be there even if the complainant is shady or hiding their identity.
So it took us some time to do the digging and make sure that illegal content was removed which was the prerequisite to unblocking.
The digging is not finished btw, we’ll later post a proper analysis of our reaction and the results of the research.
I would advise against using unbound on the client side as this way all your DNS queries will be unencrypted and visible to your ISP. Besides that, the DNS responses can be modified, this kind of censorship is very popular and used in many countries.
IMO it is safer to use a big popular DNS recursor (google, cloudflare, adguard, quad9, etc), use DoT/DoH/DoQ and maybe add some additional filtering on top of it.
You can also install AdGuard home as a home-assistant add-on, and then configure your router to hand that IP out as the network DNS server -- so all of your network traffic is ad blocking as soon as it hits your wifi. (like a pihole).
It's pretty slick, highly recommend.
(Also super useful to see what devices are reaching out to where and how frequently, custom block lists, custom local DNS entries, etc).
As a satisfied customer, I just recommended their adblockimg DNS on here a few days ago but am happy to do it again. If you really don't want to install anything, at least adblock at the DNS level. https://adguard-dns.io/en/welcome.html
> doing the extra digging instead of just going along with the claim.
That's the intention of intermediary liability laws - to make meritless censorship be the easy, no-risk way out. To deputize corporations to act as police under a guilty-until-proven-innocent framework.
I think that if you want to follow WAI-ARIA practices, the aria-selected, tabindex and aria-controls need to be updated via JS when the active tab changes? I'd love to be wrong about that.
Accessibility is often an afterthought. And, sometimes there's an assumption that by working with HTML/CSS directly, accessibility comes built in. Just Something to keep in mind when choosing an approach.
I am aware that people who read the blog might base parts of their websites on my examples, so I definitely want to make sure they're accessible as to not cause a negative ripple effect on the web.
I don't have a background in accessibility, but I try to do the best I can. I try out what I make with various accessibility tools (e.g. keyboard navigation, screenreaders), and also read up on how things should be handled.
For the radio tabs specifically - they are keyboard navigable, work with screenreaders, and follow the tabbing to content practice mentioned in the WAI-ARIA example[0].
Thanks! Sorry if I came off as brash, time has been tight recently. You've already put a lot of work into a very informative article, and it's appreciated. The outlook is solid. I'd like to find an opportunity to revisit some of my own code with your writing in mind.
Part of the reason for mentioning the radio-tabs is because I was working on my own implementation for a personal project a few weeks ago. My goal was specifically using the role="tab"/role="tabpanel" pattern, but my read of the guidance left me feeling like I was trapped with using JS to set those. Since it was timeboxed, I bailed out to augmenting it with JS for and moved on.
My hope was maybe somebody on HN with more of a background on accessibility could interject some thoughts here.
I don't know about those radio tabs specifically, but your intuition is correct. Many of the ARIA APG (component)patterns require JavaScript to update tab index and ARIA properties for full implementation. Focus management and key-control are two problem spaces that are common across many patterns and require JavaScript.
Focus management:
Focus scopes and restoring focus requires JavaScript. Complex UI components like combo box, grids, and trees require dynamically adjusting tab index and focus. Combo Box requires managing accessibility tree focus separately from DOM focus. Modals implementing focus scopes and restoring focus scopes requires JavaScript.
Key controls:
The ARIA APG patterns call for differences in tab and arrow key control from what the browser would supply. Patterns that involve list of groups use tab to navigate between groups and arrows to navigate within groups.
Thanks for the input. The keyboard control piece is a good call-out.
Personally, I don't have my access to my normal computer/environment at the moment, so I've just been trying to go by the spec when necessary and hope for the best until I do.
Did you read the article? The author specifically addresses accessibility in multiple places, including taking extra steps to work around browser bugs [0].
Given how un-accesible this blog post is (the contrast is quite a crime against humanity, as someone who does web dev for a dsiability charity (well communcity interest company but similar)), I wouldn't go to this for a source on this.
could you give any examples of how the page's accessibility could be improved - apart from your dislike of the background color
you're calling the post un-accessible and telling people to not use it as a source - i'd like to know why you think that, and if there's any way to improve the accessibility
This is not my dislike of the background colour (blue is actually my favourite colour, well teal), nothing in that comment was an opinion. The WCAG (Web Content Accessibility Guidelines) have standards for colour contrast [1]. If you turn on developer tools in your browser and go to accesbility you will see how many elements do not conform to these standards. The site falls astray of this in the most common way, which is blue links on a blue background, making link text very hard to read.
i am aware that the link color specifically is not ideal and i have been playing around with designs that feel similar while having better contrast - but your comment seemed to call the entire site un-accessible, so i was wondering if there's anything else that stood out and that could be improved
Looking at what's been going on in the E.U. vs. the U.S., it seems pretty clear that one of the only things companies this big, with this much control over the markets fear is regulation.
Maybe people live in a country where adding new regulations is difficult at the moment. In that case, push at for it at the state or province level. Push for it wherever you can. Suddenly these companies have to figure out how to work around 50 different state level laws? Painful. Good. Make it hurt to be evil.
People need to come together and push for regulatory roadblocks to things like this at every level. I think that's part of how you keep control of your own property and stand up against it.
My understanding from folks outside the U.S. is that they desire U.S. products because they trust the safety more. I'm not sure everyone quite understands that by gutting [regulations], they trash part of their international advantage.
I'm no expert, but even if they somehow managed to get manufacturing back, slashing your competitive advantages and just taking the market position of "China 2: This time it's more expensive" doesn't strike me as a winner for exports.
> A few days ago, I was prompted to verify my phone number by Google. Immediately after completing the verification, I received an email notifying me that Google had overwritten all my personal information. It turns out that because my mom is the one paying the phone bill, they automatically "verified" the name on my account to be hers and updated everything on my account without my consent.
It sounds like someone at Google (not necessarily a programmer) needs to read "Falsehoods Programmers Believe About Phone Numbers:"
> 4. A phone number uniquely identifies an individual
- Projects under the `google` GitHub organization is from Google itself (Google for some reason force projects from Google employees to be umbrellaed under their own organization for some reason, even if it's a personal project)
- Google follows their own rules (applies to any "Big Tech" company)
- Google actually cares about correcting mistakes unless they hit the news/social media
- YouTube and Google tries to make the experience for you, the consumer (on YouTube: consumer = creators + viewers), as good as they can
I think they mean that just because code is under github.com/google, it doesn't make it an "official" Google thing.
For example, yapf[0] is under the Google Github org but has the disclaimer:
>Note YAPF is not an official Google product (experimental or otherwise), it is just code that happens to be owned by Google.
libphonenumber doesn't have any similar disclaimer and does seem to be an "official" Google product, but it's hard to tell what Google considers official or not.
Google does not offer (m)any developer facing "official" products. Google offers "official" products for consumers or enterprises (e.g., Gmail, Cloud Platform), but all of their FOSS code, of which there are many, are all "unofficial"; they are FOSS projects that happen to be developed by Google employees but come with a normal zero liability FOSS license (as opposed to their "official" products, which do come with some liability user agreements/contracts).
> Google for some reason force projects from Google employees to be umbrellaed under their own organization for some reason, even if it's a personal project
I don't think that is true. Google employees can have regular personal projects. If you have a "personal" project that is done under the scope of your employment (e.g., you work on YouTube and you wrote a tool to, I dunno, manage Makefiles to help yourself and/or other coworkers, then that would be a "Google project" housed under `google` even though it's not an "official" product).
These decisions haven't been made by programmers in over 10 years.
These lists made sense in 2000-2010 when programmers had the autonomy ( in most corporations ) to decide on what feature to develop and how it should behave.
This hasn't been the case since the industry introduced roles such as product owner.
I've had to implement my fair share of anti patterns that I was fully aware would degrade the experience for the user. At the end of the day, the programmers have been reduced to essentially blue color workers that just do whatever the MBAs decide on.
Is anyone old enough to remember when Google was an aspirational place to work? They had the best engineers and were doing the best stuff, and people spoke their name with awe. Now it's just Microsoft with a salad bar.
> These lists made sense in 2000-2010 when programmers had the autonomy ( in most corporations ) to decide on what feature to develop and how it should behave.
Programmers are some of the most in-demand workers in the world. You wield significant influence. And any even-slightly-functional workplace will at least try to listen to the word of their experts.
Perhaps it’s possible you didn’t do enough to explain why you didn’t believe it was the right work to do, or if you did, perhaps there were other factors in play than “user experience.”
Also, uh, “I have to do what my boss says” doesn’t make you a blue collar worker.
If programmers are some of the most in-demand workers in the world, why do they have to send out over 1000 job applications and are still treated like trash by hiring processes? Hacker News is one of the few places on Earth where this belief that programmers are in control of everything still exists. Pretty much everywhere else has adapted to the reality where programmers are in great surplus, but the investor class won't be happy until it's a minimum wage job, or even better, an unpaid internship. No wonder HN has a reputation for being a bunch of out of touch Bay Area investors with little concept of the real world.
Programmers have control over things product owners and management don't care about. Frankly, those are things nobody but programmers cares about. When it comes to meaningful decisions that would either improve or harm the user experience, I have only ever seen programmers treated as advisors at best and obedient little foot soldiers at worst. And why wouldn't they be treated this way by MBA types? Programmers are a necessary evil that management would rather not exist at all. Just because there are startups founded by programmers doesn't mean that's the reality of the vast majority of the software industry, or that said startups won't soon replace their leadership with MBA bozos whose only goal is making it to the next quarter.
I know, I was exaggerating. I thought it was clear from my usage of the word "essentially".
> perhaps there were other factors in play than “user experience.”
Of course there were. There always are - chief among them the profitability, because selling the customer on stuff they didn't need is profitable. Especially if you frame it "right".
But that example is completely unrelated to this case, to very little value in getting deeper into it.
> Also, uh, “I have to do what my boss says” doesn’t make you a blue collar worker.
No, but it does make you a non-professional. The distinction between professionals and non-professionals is that members of professions have ethical obligations above and beyond their obligation to their employer.
You will not find lawyers willing to perjure themselves, accountants to cook your books, or civil engineers happy to sign off on deadly designs.
In contrast, software "engineers" are not professionals, we are hired goons and you can easily find a software monkey ready to build whatever atrocity you want for the right price.
You made 3 claims, all of them easily disproven. When someone else pushed the claim further, immediately disproven. All you have left to your comment is namecalling.
You're being intentionally obtuse and I suspect you understand full well the difference between professionals like accountants, doctors and lawyers (who, yes, on isolated occasions fail to uphold the standards of their profession) and software developers who are not professionals and operate as solo hired guns, absent any widely agreed ethical standards from a community of peers. It's not name-calling, it's a fact of life: If I refuse an instruction from my bosses, I get fired.
I'm going to stop here because this is just an exercise in silly faux ignorance on your part.
That wasn't part of the parent comment, but okay, here: Tesco finance chiefs accused of cooking the books and bullying the finance employees below them to misconduct themselves:
“The three defendants who are on trial in this case are not the foot soldiers who misconducted themselves. The defendants in this case are the generals – those who are in positions of trust, and who were paid huge compensation packages in order to safeguard the financial health of Tesco.
“These defendants encouraged the manipulation of profits and indeed pressurised others working under their control to misconduct themselves in such a way that the stock market was ultimately misled.”"
It was at least implied, I thought it was the whole point, because obviously there are malpractising professionals full stop:
> [...] ethical obligations above and beyond their obligation to their employer. You will not find lawyers willing [on behalf of their employer] to perjure themselves [...]
but based on their response to your the examples, :shrug:.
My point is that [ethical] professionals [who are not committing malpractice] have an obligation to their peers, as embodied in a professional code of ethics that is independent from and supersedes their obligation to their employers.
[Many/most ethical] accountants [who are not committing malpractice] will tell their employer, "no, I can't sign off on those fraudulent financial statements," but software developers [as a community, I'm sure someone will pop up with one colorful example] will not tell their employer, "No, I won't run fake bots on the site to inflate our user numbers," or "No, I won't implement this browser fingerprinting to violate our users' privacy."
The sibling commenter seems to be willfully misreading this as "all lawyers are ethical"
im sure it will be deleted/modified/adjusted/enhanced; though #1 is subjective, "unless it is essential" -> and right there, it is essential for google to do lookups of phone numbers to correct account ownership information based on another-companies paid services. "whenever possible try to provide" ... nope, it is never possible; phone validation or bust.
edit: i gotta change my first guess that it will be modified soon. google does not set the goal to not be evil, so they'll likely just leave the repo as-is, unattended.
quote:
1. An individual has a phone number
Some people do not own phones, or do not wish to provide you with their telephone number when asked. Do not require a user to provide a phone number unless it is essential, and whenever possible try to provide a fallback to accommodate these users.
An previous consumer of Android teams work, across NDK, Studio, Gradle, and userspace libraries, I think it does, and am quite happy that Android development is no longer something I have to care about.
Look it’s not perfect but then I hear you sing praises about like Oracle® CORBA™ with Accenture® Access II™ and I’m not entirely sure we have the same standards for code quality.
They are institutionally incapable of fixing it. Companies like Google are too big for that.
Individual workers and even entire teams don't matter. They are just another cog in a massive machine. Customer service representatives are forced to follow a script, and they are technically unable to deviate from it. After all, if there's an override button, it just takes one of your tens of thousands of minimum-wage workers to go rogue to end up with a massive compromise.
To fix it you need your manager's manager's manager to file a change request, which will be put on an endless backlog to be potentially looked at by two dozen teams a few years from now. And if it's not a frequently-occurring issue, it's not worth the effort. Google isn't going to fix it because as an organization they aren't even aware you exist. You are collateral damage, and they are totally fine with that.
The only way around this is to shortcut the entire process. Post on HN and hope some manager high enough in the policy/tech chain can be bothered to personally agenda the issue.
I wonder if there's any sort of quiet constraint outside of organizational inertia at work here. Telephone numbers were (are?) one of PRISM/XKeyScore's favorite "strong selectors," and Google, like all major players in communications, does things to make its services play well with the current iteration of surveillance tools. I wonder if the current, seemingly boneheaded approach to applying phone company data to account data via phone numbers, including overwriting names, is some new requirement of the surveillance system.
Or, change the country to Sweden and anyone can still look it up, even online :) Checkout hitta.se, ratsit.se or similar services.
Which reminds me that someone claimed that the income/amount of tax paid is the most private data American citizens have (the context was the DOGE/payments stuff), meanwhile every Swedish residents income is very public information.
Negotiating your salary is a whole other ballgame when you know your colleagues salary and your boss knows that you know :)
There were "reverse directories" for phone->name, though you didn't get one delivered to your house with your phone subscription. You could also call directory assistance.
Yeah but I also remember that when I signed up for phone service, I could opt out of being in the phonebook at all if I wanted to. And you'd have to wait up to a year before the new phone books came out with updated information.
> It sounds like someone at Google (not necessarily a programmer) needs to read "Falsehoods Programmers Believe About Phone Numbers:"
>> 4. A phone number uniquely identifies an individual
But that has nothing to do with this. The idea here is that whoever is paying the phone bill is the same person who uses the phone. Nobody believes that.
I have an Indian colleague whose dad was in some kind of coma for few months after an accident. He had a real crazy time keeping the house running. His dad's number was attached to all kinds of bills - electricity, gas, milk, water, internet, cable, newspapers etc. Most of the services would send a verification sms to his dad's phone for any kind of interaction. No one knew the password. And it turned into a major nightmare. It wasn't just a question of paying the bills. Lot of these services had to be shutdown or have settings changed temporarily. And each one had a different set of documents/processes required to prove he was a relative.
The only place where the phone number really matters in India is when dealing with banks, AADHAR and the phone company.
Phone/Gas/Electricity/Internet/Cable etc bills can be paid through any of the hundred-odd mobile wallet apps. Other than some exceptional cases, none of them require access to the linked phone number.
It is related. The belief that a phone number maps to a single person, the one paying the the phone bill, is a form of belief that a phone number uniquely identifies an individual. The reality is that the number identifies two individuals: the mom paying the bill and the user of the phone.
According to the bizarre anecdote in this HN submission, the person who pays for the phone bill must be the person who is validating a YouTube account with that phone number.
Validating an account with a phone number constitutes phone use so, yes, Google and Youtube have shown an instance of belief that the person paying is the same as the person who uses.
To be completely fair, Android also allows having multiple sims and phone numbers on a single phone. I've never heard of people sharing a device without sharing the number, but it's possible.
This belief gets very interesting with company phones, where 1 person pays several hundreds/thousand phones. Oh wait, that's not a person but a legal entity?
I don't even want to guess the percentage of couples where one partner pays for (both, maybe three) phones/landlines, and that's ignoring all children, underage or not.
Don't remember what service exactly (Paypal I think?) that some time ago asks for me to "verify" the account by showing some bills with my name. At that point, the only utility bills they accepted for the verification, were all in my wife's name, which they didn't accept, so now I no longer have Paypal.
Good point. I actually think we're both on some of the statements, so that's at least one problem I wouldn't have. Still ridiculous overall, of course.
I’m sure the police would come to my door, but I could show records of it not really being “my phone number”.
Family plans are pretty common here, so I wouldn’t expect too much friction.
I would absolutely cooperate (obviously through a lawyer) with records if someone else on my family plan did something illegal.
I also have records showing that they pay me for the line.
Also yes, it would be a huge hassle. The probability of that happening is small, and I’m willing to risk it like many other things in life. I only do this for very trusted people.
The rationale of that falsehood¹ addresses that point:
>> It wasn't even that long ago that mobile phones didn't exist, and it was common for an entire household to share one fixed-line telephone number. In some parts of the world, this is still true, and relatives (or even friends) share a single phone number. Many phone services (especially for businesses) allow multiple inbound calls to or outbound calls from the same phone number.
How does that address the point? They've got nothing to do with each other. Our example user isn't sharing a phone number with his mom. He's having his phone bill paid by his mom. It is correct to believe that the number uniquely identifies him. Explaining that "all phone numbers uniquely identify a single individual" is false doesn't matter in any way, because it isn't false as applied to the phone number that's giving us trouble. That number uniquely identifies an individual.
This should be a hint that you've misdiagnosed the problem... shouldn't it?
> Our example user isn't sharing a phone number with his mom. He's having his phone bill paid by his mom.
Having his phone bill paid by his mom makes it his mom's phone number by default; it's then shared with him, making it a non-unique identifier. That's why it falls into Falsehood #4 (and likely into Falsehood #3, assuming that his mom has a separate phone number that she doesn't share with anyone else).
> Having his phone bill paid by his mom makes it his mom's phone number by default;
No, it makes his mom the account owner. Just because I pay the bill for mine and my wife’s phones doesn’t mean her number is actually my number. Imagine operating a company and the CEO isn’t the one paying the phone bill, it’s the accountant, and you claimed that it’s not the CEO’s phone number, it’s actually the accountant’s, but it’s shared with the CEO. It’s nonsensical. The number is assigned to a person on the account which has nothing to do with who pays the bill.
Which makes the phone numbers under her account hers.
> Just because I pay the bill for mine and my wife’s phones doesn’t mean her number is actually my number.
It absolutely does mean that her number is actually your number. That you choose to share it with her doesn't change that; you can revoke that sharing at any time, or even cancel the line entirely.
(And of course, if both of you jointly own the account, then the numbers therein would simultaneously belong to both of you.)
> Imagine operating a company and the CEO isn’t the one paying the phone bill, it’s the accountant, and you claimed that it’s not the CEO’s phone number, it’s actually the accountant’s, but it’s shared with the CEO.
Is the phone bill under the accountant's name and paid from the accountant's personal bank account in this hypothetical? Or is it under her employer's name, and paid from her employer's bank account? The answer to that question determines the owner of the CEO's phone number, and in neither case is the CEO himself personally the owner of that number.
> The number is assigned to a person on the account which has nothing to do with who pays the bill.
And if that assigned person was the son then it would've been the son's name that Google pulled instead of his mother's, and Google's ignorance of its own advice would've gone unnoticed.
You don’t know how phone numbers work… and you’re making really bad assumptions through your entire post. Just like shipping addresses are different than billing addresses, account owners are different than account payers are different than account assignees. Google is tying to account payers, not assignees. This is clearly incorrect to everyone else in this comment section.
> You don’t know how phone numbers work… and you’re making really bad assumptions through your entire post.
My understanding and assumptions are evidently no worse than yours.
> account owners are different than account payers are different than account assignees
For residential/personal phone plans, they are not. In my T-Mobile account there is exactly one person who can be designated as the owner, payer, and assignee for all of the lines on my account, that person being me. I can at most change the label on a given line, but that label can be literally anything.
> Google is tying to account payers, not assignees.
There is no notion of an "assignee" from any perspective that Google can see. There is only the account payer, which is one and the same with the account owner.
(If the payer is not the owner, then that's called fraud and is a crime in most countries.)
> This is clearly incorrect to everyone else in this comment section.
And it's also clearly incorrect by Google's own guidelines as quoted above. That's the entirety of my point.
We're obviously not going to change each other's minds, so this is probably the point where we should agree to disagree and move on. Last word's yours.
Your quote disproves you. That explanation does not address the point of who pays. It addresses what point 4 is actually about, multiple people sharing a number, which is not happening here.
I have some very bad news for you how ID works in countries that don't have national ID systems: companies use all sorts of awful hacks instead.
The UK treats "utility bills" as proof of address. Yes, these are trivially forgeable and often incorrect. Yes, it's a big pain that you don't exist if you're not paying bills.
> The UK treats "utility bills" as proof of address. Yes, these are trivially forgeable and often incorrect. Yes, it's a big pain that you don't exist if you're not paying bills.
Spent the last few months trying to explain to a randomly changing E.ON representative how unacceptable it was for them to send bills with my name on it to a non-existent address.
I moved out of the country in 2018.
They've offered me £10 credit. That I can't use, because I left the country.
I need to gather all the emails together and send them to the ombudsman, but there's around 80 emails now.
I've always vaguely wondered how the US knows who to tax, if they have no complete, trustworthy register of who the citizens are and where they live. It presumably works, I just don't understand how.
They rely on a number of inefficient proxy systems, like the UK: making employers keep track of the tax of employees, and making all the banks report "suspicious" transactions.
The US even tries to make its overseas nationals pay tax. As a result, everyone everywhere in the world who wants to get paid by Amazon has to sign a US tax form saying they're not a US taxpayer.
How does that even work these days? Taking a picture of a bill physically mailed to you is bad enough, but all of my utility bills nowadays are nothing more than an email! How's that supposed to prove anything?
I mean, I guess you could do something with the DKIM signature, but good luck getting non-technical people to forward a mail in a way which leaves that intact. Realistically the best you're getting is a butchered screenshot.
Lots of us have had to implement changes we've disagreed with or pushed back on, but this one looks so obviously wrong, it's particularly mind boggling.
I'm almost inclined to think maybe the process/tech isn't designed to do this and there's a bug, or somebody tasked with a manual verification made an outright mistake, or something else went off the rails. Any number of this could have gone wrong.
Then I think of the number of sites and services that have started asking for phone numbers, as if they believe doing it over and over will somehow change the nature of telephony--it would probably be a mistake for me to give Google or any of these other companies the benefit of the doubt.
It feels to me that insightful details about what's going on have been coming out of tech/startup publications like TechCrunch and Wired instead of some more traditional news media. These stories feel relevant to the communities and interests here in a way that other political ones don't.
[Edit: That said, there's a risk some lower quality, less substantial, and more sensationalist articles or publications will be submitted as a result, so it's extra important to not just vote based on headlines.]
My thoughts are similar, but I think the cost of commercial space is also driving costs up for everyone, so I classify it as "rent." I'd love to see data, but small businesses (at least in certain sectors) seem bare able to survive--opening and closing constantly.
But, to get to a root cause, I think we have to keep asking why. Why are rents high? One reason is that cities seem unwilling to rezone. Okay, why is city council/the mayor unwilling to rezone (sometimes vast swaths of single family homes?) Voters? Corruption? Something else?
There are several root causes we can potentially drill further down to, but making headway will likely require hard work and involvement in our communities. You could always try running for something and becoming a politician.
My point is: when looking for the "root cause" of these problems, people shouldn't stop asking when they get to the rent being high, that's a symptom.
Additionally, if people care about helping younger generations, it's within reach to jump in and help shape the communities they'll be living in. E.g. If an issue is zoning, go to zoning meetings.
Yes, I think we need to reform zoning and build like crazy. With everything costing a million dollars on the west coast, I don't see why there isn't a crane every block putting up a new building
I wouldn't be surprised if it turned out less than half of the custom tab interfaces on the web failed from an accessibility standpoint. When considering ARIA guidance, I don't even think it's possible to build an accessible version in HTML alone.
Other people have recognized it's missing. Open UI has a draft spec for it[0] and CSS Tricks has an article from 2001 about Open UI's experiments with sections for tabs[1]. I have no idea what happened on this front, though.
[0] https://open-ui.org/components/tabs/
[1] https://css-tricks.com/newsletter/281-tabs-and-spicy-drama/