Comment by riazrizvi
6 hours ago
Yeah. OP has an egocentric bias - it’s not the norm in the world of work sharing that you can faithfully reproduce the live/contextual environment of the sender given the raw string.
(OP’s blog purports to be pertinent to freelance software development).
What about accessibility?
What about it? There simply isn't any information format that's both perfectly accessible and reproduces what you're seeing with perfect fidelity. In the happy path you can make the important parts match, but almost by definition, when someone's reporting an issue it's because what they "should" see and what they are seeing don't align.
There are many accessibility issues with using a screenshot of text instead of text directly:
- displaying a white background image of text when I'm using dark mode;
- using a small font to a user with a visual imparement or on a high DPI display;
- using a colour scheme with low contrast, or colours that are indistinguishable for people with a form of colour blindness;
- using a font that is difficult to read for someone with dislexia;
- etc.
And others have mentioned not being able to search for the text within the image, or select/highlight the text (useful for copying a function name, link, or term in the text, or for keeping track of where you are when reading).
Well, that's not the scenario relevant to the article and not a scenario I encounter much these days. I'm not a designer or a front end dev anymore so I rarely encounter a situation where "perfect fidelity" is relevant to me.
I'm biased, but I can't help but feel like chances are, if the screenshot is text, the content of the text is important, not the visual aspects.
99% of the time I get a screenshot these days, it's people sending me screenshots of text logs or code, and almost always cropped in a way that eliminates any context anyway. Give me plain text or give me death.
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