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Sorry Appin, we're not taking down our article about your attempts to silence

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Re: Sorry Appin, we're not taking down our article about your attempts to silence

#11

Post by munk-a »

nickdurfe wrote: post #9
dylan604 wrote: post #7

Hey TechDirt! What's the point of making a image of text to embed in your site? Its text becomes blurry and hard to read compared to using an actual font. What a horrible decisions for legibility. But seriously, what's the thought process for a website to do this? Even embedded tweets are not pre-rendered images. Some one in some meeting decided that using a rasterized image would be awesomesauce. What kind of sick p…

??? Those images aren't blurry or hard to read at all. What does it really matter if they embed a legible image or use text?

When you decide to use a non-default format you adopt all of the responsibility to make that work: How do I select text from this image to reference it in a discussion? How does my screen reader handle the information? Does this text scale and wrap if I need to zoom due to a visual impairment? Can I use a high readability font with this text? If I color invert my browser how readable is this text?

This whole thread is wildly off topic to the article but I really wish developers would think more thoroughly before rejecting standards and rolling their own.

Re: Sorry Appin, we're not taking down our article about your attempts to silence

#13

Post by wolverine876 »

Dalewyn wrote: post #2

The Streisand Effect is in full force alright: I never even heard of "Appin" until this thread.

That means they were effective (or you are generally missing important news). Reuters didn't stand up to them, as of maybe a week ago, and took down a story.

Re: Sorry Appin, we're not taking down our article about your attempts to silence

#15

Post by dannyobrien »

abirch wrote: post #12

The Streisand Effect is real. https://wikipedia.org/wiki/Streisand_effect Thank God Tech dirt stood up

For those who don't get (the whole) reference, Mike Masnick, who founded and heads Techdirt, is the original coiner of the term "Streisand effect".

He's also been legally targeted by those who want to silence critical coverage of their behaviour before, and received an EFF Pioneer Award in 2017 for his journalistic work (though he joked at the time "The sort of obvious interpretation to me is that this is an award for getting sued"). I don't know whether his acceptance speech is online somewhere but I remember it being a vivid description of the pressure legal threats have on people and businesses, even when they are ultimately dismissed.

https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2017/10/celebrating-2017-pione...

Re: Sorry Appin, we're not taking down our article about your attempts to silence

#16

Post by dylan604 »

nickdurfe wrote: post #9
dylan604 wrote: post #7

Hey TechDirt! What's the point of making a image of text to embed in your site? Its text becomes blurry and hard to read compared to using an actual font. What a horrible decisions for legibility. But seriously, what's the thought process for a website to do this? Even embedded tweets are not pre-rendered images. Some one in some meeting decided that using a rasterized image would be awesomesauce. What kind of sick p…

??? Those images aren't blurry or hard to read at all. What does it really matter if they embed a legible image or use text?

Yes, those images are not blurry, that's precisely the reason I described them as blurry. /s

If all you do is read things on a microscopic mobile screen, maybe the sizing didn't scale a raster image beyond it's native size. For those of us boomers that read things on screens with plenty of screen space, things get scaled with that fancy mobile first responsive layout so that images are scaled larger than their normal size.

So as soon as you're willing to accept that not everyone views the web like you, we can all have a better experience. That's not just for the web page's designer, but for other readers on forums making comments about things they don't know about.

Re: Sorry Appin, we're not taking down our article about your attempts to silence

#17

Post by dylan604 »

lcnPylGDnU4H9OF wrote: post #8
dylan604 wrote: post #7

Hey TechDirt! What's the point of making a image of text to embed in your site? Its text becomes blurry and hard to read compared to using an actual font. What a horrible decisions for legibility. But seriously, what's the thought process for a website to do this? Even embedded tweets are not pre-rendered images. Some one in some meeting decided that using a rasterized image would be awesomesauce. What kind of sick p…

I think it's a reasonable way to present it as evidence of what had been available from someone else's server rather than just words that are presented by their own server. From an accessibility perspective, it would be nice if they could ensure that a screen reader will start reading the text when it encounters the image but it otherwise seems to be a good reporting practice.

If it was a scan of an actual document embedded into a webpage, then maybe we can say it's an acceptable format. But having some designer do a layout and then save it as a rasterized image so that it scales beyond original size so that it lowers the legibility of the text, then no, it is not a reasonable method.

Re: Sorry Appin, we're not taking down our article about your attempts to silence

#19

Post by lcnPylGDnU4H9OF »

dylan604 wrote: post #17
lcnPylGDnU4H9OF wrote: post #8

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think it's a reasonable way to present it as evidence of what had been available from someone else's server rather than just words that are presented by their own server. From an accessibility perspective, it would be nice if they could ensure that a screen reader will start reading the text when it encounters the image but it otherwise seems to be a good reporting practice.

If it was a scan of an actual document embedded into a webpage, then maybe we can say it's an acceptable format. But having some designer do a layout and then save it as a rasterized image so that it scales beyond original size so that it lowers the legibility of the text, then no, it is not a reasonable method.

> scan of an actual document embedded into a webpage

I see, download the HTML as provided by the server at the time. Then provide that separately and include the relevant text in the article. Yeah, that would be a better method.

Re: Sorry Appin, we're not taking down our article about your attempts to silence

#20

Post by dylan604 »

lcnPylGDnU4H9OF wrote: post #19
dylan604 wrote: post #17

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If it was a scan of an actual document embedded into a webpage, then maybe we can say it's an acceptable format. But having some designer do a layout and then save it as a rasterized image so that it scales beyond original size so that it lowers the legibility of the text, then no, it is not a reasonable method.

> scan of an actual document embedded into a webpage I see, download the HTML as provided by the server at the time. Then provide that separately and include the relevant text in the article. Yeah, that would be a better method.

We've had full page documents as PDFs for a long long time now. This isn't new. It's just someone wanting to be fancy/trendy/whatevs without consideration that people use the web in ways other than the designers do.
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