I guess marketing.
I'm going with the first one after downloading and skimming the inclusive design guidelines pdf listed.
However, I'm still confused. I don't know how much confidence I have in Microsoft being able to design universally accessible interfaces if this marketing vomit of a website does everything within its power to obscure what it's trying to actually say.
http://download.microsoft.com/download/B/0/D/B0D4BF87-09CE-4...
As far as I can tell.
Microsoft have never been very good with visual and interaction design in their desktop operating system. However, Windows Phone is the exception. It's visually attractive, and has nice, well thought-out interactions. I think it's superior to Android and iOS in many ways. It's obvious that both Apple and Google took some cues from Windows Phone in the updates to their own mobile operating systems. (Undoubtedly, all these companies look at each others products when designing new features).
1) https://i.imgur.com/VAwaroi.jpg
2) https://i.imgur.com/mSGwDsg.jpg
Disability equals Mismatched Human Interactions - really?
http://download.microsoft.com/download/B/0/D/B0D4BF87-09CE-4...
Why not just accept that some people have disabilities and it's everybody's responsibility to help these people out to the best of our abilities? It's the moral thing to do.
Why bend and squish words into different definitions?
It's not bending definitions, the World Health Organisation's definition of disability is a generic description of what a disability is.
To be clear, the definition given was...
“a mismatch in interaction between the features of a person’s body and the features of the environment in which they live.”
In what way does that not line up with what a disability is?
What does this sentence even mean? Who else would be at the center? Cats?
I think the danger is that if you don't intentionally use human-centered design processes, you could end up "just getting it done", or "reducing cost", or nothing at all in the center.
Surely you've heard some horror story of engineers spending millions of dollars designing software, but they neglect to include the end users in the design process. What happens in this story? It finally makes it to the users and they deem it unusable.
There was a fun little incident in Canada recently where this was probably part of the issue [2].
[1] http://www.designkit.org/human-centered-design
[2] http://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/newfoundland-labrador/psac-pro...
Changing your underlying technology ( as far as I know they adopted DirectWrite as replacements for ClearText) with out caring about your users experience (and ironically making it worse that what it was) does not mean anything other than ignoring and don't caring about your user base.
Font rendering in Windows 10 is ridiculous. It is in worst possible shape. (In UWP and modern app). At the other hand, Ubuntu, Fedora (with freetype tweak) font rendering is fabulous.
I hated that guy, Steve Ballmer. He didn't know basic rule of management. You as manager cannot force people to use something you want. You should provide them better experience overall.
I know there are some technical issues there about ClearText (which was not that good -far from freetype-, but much better than DirectWrite). We are talking about biggest and most successful software company in history of mankind. There is got to be better way than ignoring your userbase. I am sure they can provide better font rendering for UWP in low DPI monitors.
Let be honest nobody cared about windows modern apps before integrating them into Windows core itself. Right now every time i open settings app my eyes hurt.
P.S. I do realize most people in HN have high DPI monitor, but if you can just try to use UWP app in 14 inch monitor with 1366x768 resolution (which is more than common in third world countries), and compare it to ClearText.
P.S 2. this is not only for third world countries. As far as I know gamers tend to buy large screen but with 1080p resolution. I tested on it, font rendering on anything less than 200 DPI is fucking nightmare. And doesn't matter how much smoother UWPs animation's are. Or how much their design are cool. When text is ridiculously awful, it doesn't worth using.
www.sven.de/dpi
P.S 3 This is one of the saddest experience I had as SE. Microsoft knew they had desktop users locked in, and because of that they didn't care. Imagine a world which Microsoft had serious competitor in desktop/laptop OS space. I am sure they wouldn't dare to mess with user experience in such way. I am really happy with recent increase in Apple's iMac's and MacBook's.
But small fonts and etc problems in high DPI monitors raised in kind of adoption old apps (Win32 API) in new technologies (high DPI monitors). This is quite ordinary. Every manufacturer or company will experience something similar eventually.
Accessibility is about lowering barriers to people and making things actually easier, not about making a message difficult to understand with marketing gibberish.
Why can't a landing page, especially one about accessibility, be concise and straight to the point?
Maybe they're testing AI-generated content?
I didn't find there any ready to use design recipes.
Linking to the PDFs or something would be a lot more straightforward than linking to their general design page.
The PDFs make some good points about how designing for accessibility has secondary, wider reaching impact.
It's nice to see at the very least that Microsoft cares enough to make this.
1. The URL is http://download.microsoft.com/download/F/2/C/F2C19EC6-03E2-4...
Why the heck does everything at Microsoft have to involve URLs with GUIDs in it?
2. That PDF is one of the worst documents purportedly on design frameworks I've ever seen. It's not functional, or direct, the text is in a tiny font, there are pages that do nothing with no content.
Ironically in page 20 they specify a minimum size of 12 EP, yet the label on the side is like half this size! Wut?
The page has javascript, so I know they can put in javascript that targets the keyboard and helps users know where the hell they are focused. The focus outlines on those damn buttons is way too non-obvious.
(Double speak, meaningless sentences abound - that if you were to strip them from the article no meaning would be lost.)
