51–60 of 62 posts
I think they are amongst the worst data display widgets you can possibly use. They have terrible visual SNR, since most of the visual representation is just borders, backgrounds and other visual gimmicks.
These do not appear to be accessible at all. If you use this on your site, I will not be able to read whatever you're trying to tell me, other than by making me look at source. Please don't do that. I know accessibility is hard, and the developers of this were just trying to make something that looks nice and gets the job done. Every time an inaccessible reusable {component, library, toolkit\, framework} is released,…
As long as we're on the subject, the gauges don't appear at all if cookies are blocked. Console says "The operation is insecure." This is the case on almost every demo, period, even if they claim to have tested on 8 different platforms. Just wrap your feature test for localStorage (or sessionStorage) in a try/catch. An `if/then` block is an insufficiently powerful construct for feature testing the storage API. So man…
javascript.min.js:558 Uncaught TypeError: undefined is not a function
Also see what you see, lots of blankness.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
I'm the defacto accessibility guy at work, and I'm trying to think of a good way to present this type of data in an accessible way, but I'm having trouble. When the gauges are fixed, it would be pretty straight forward, but as the gauges change, I'm not sure of a good way to present that, especially when the gauges are moving quickly.
A. Allow the refresh rate of your gauges to be set, or disabled entirely and only refreshed manually, perhaps with a button (so your user's screen reader can finish at its own pace). B. Use SVG, and something like D3 to build your graphs with a textual representation. I have no idea if ARIA works in SVG, but I know there are plenty of ways to label your data textually, even without aria-label, etc. Unfortunately, the…
What about games? There should be more accessible games. But there will always be inaccessible ones and that's fine, too. Let them have gauges, too, why not.
These gauges can be used irresponsibly, yeah. You know what that reminds me of? Every other web thing. Imagine every time any program or article relating to images on the web is published discussion of it devolved into how images without alt tags are bad, and that images should just be a bonus on top of an accessible description. I'm exaggerating, but to make a point.
I think these gauges look really neat, and while I can't think of a use for them for myself right now either, well, let's come up with some, or don't. Let's look at the code and iterate on it if we want and post our findings. But all this "oh, thing X! all the best practices related to X, let me tell you them" should be a thing on the side, not the predictable main event.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
There's a reason that automobiles continue using radial gauges: They're the quickest way to convey a scalar value at a glance. It has little to do with acceleration. If you're going to have a monitoring dashboard, radial gauges make immediate sense. (The wobble is dumb, though)
They take up a lot of real estate on a display and aren't particularly easy to read unless you get up close. If you already know what thresholds are it is far better to display a number and use the color to indicate where that is within the continuum of states. There are practical uses for steam gauges, but I would argue that monitoring complex IT systems is not one of them.
Since this thread is already on the topic of accessibility, I feel compelled to point out that this is the single worst option when considering colorblindness unless you mean shades of one color.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
> Consideration of "good" vs. "bad" of anything is essentially a trait of use vs. them propaganda. Value judgements are both very, well, valuable AND not "propaganda". Some things ARE plainly worse than others for some uses or in general too. Nothing "propagandish" about aknowledging that. Even if you are wrong in your evaluation it's simply a mistake, not propaganda. Propaganda is a method you employ to convey thing…
I agree with you mostly. Not with the anti-skeuomorphism tirade however. That is pure propaganda. Anti-skeuomorphism picked up momentum only after Apple's iOS7 update -- around the time when Tim Cook took over and Apple (and its fanboys) moved away from purpose-inspired design to selling 'flat and clean' (supposedly purpose-oriented) design. Whether it was good or bad move for them eventually is another subject altog…
Maybe let's put it this way: a lot of it is misguided and/or throwing the baby with the bathwater.
But it does have some merit in some cases: when the skeuomorphic design dictates the use according to non-existing in the digital world constrains.
For example the dreadful DVD player apps of yore, that mimicked physical DVD players, making us push the same inconvenient buttons we hated on the physical devices too, but without any reason like the physical objects had.
These do not appear to be accessible at all. If you use this on your site, I will not be able to read whatever you're trying to tell me, other than by making me look at source. Please don't do that. I know accessibility is hard, and the developers of this were just trying to make something that looks nice and gets the job done. Every time an inaccessible reusable {component, library, toolkit\, framework} is released,…
I'm not sure whether it is all that useful for a generic gauge display component to be accessible - rather, when using them an application author could probably make the overall application far more accessible than the gauge could itself ever be. The application using it has much more context with which to provide an alternative text based representation of the data, right?
My first thought is for the data to be in the HTML as a input type="range," with the readonly attribute and the value updated as needed by JavaScript. An additional ARIA live region attribute to offer guidance on when (or if) changes to the value should be announced would help. The canvas object could either get the range and current value from the input element or whatever JavaScript updates the input value also updates the canvas gauge. As someone else suggested though, SVG is probably a better choice than canvas.
Doesn't work on Ubuntu 12.04's Chromium. (Chromium 37.0.2062.120 (Developer Build 281580) Ubuntu 12.04)
Radial gauges are an example of bad skeuomorphism. They don't convey any history and more importantly they don't have useful meaning unless you have a measurable first differential (i.e. no step change). They're useful for literal physical speed, because the movement of the needle helps give a sense of acceleration as well as speed. But if you don't care about acceleration (or more generally the delta of the primary…
> Sorry for the rant, you're just responding to a demand. It's a demand I'd rather see met through educating better data visualisation than through prettier gauges. If there is demand it's probably good to respond to it as it is . There is no need to fucking educate propaganda like you said about skeumorphism or no-skeuomorphism. Besides can you give one example of any software product that is not skeuomorphic? There…