Nor can the design world, for that matter. They think that making slightly darker gray text on gray background using a tiny font and leaving loads of empty space is peak design. Meanwhile my father cannot use most websites because of this.
That's part of the problem, they'll defend their poorly visible choice by lawyering "but this meets the minimal recommended guideline of 2.7.9"
It's like dark patterns are the ONLY pattern these days.. WTF did we go wrong?
Win95 was peak UI design.
I don’t understand modern trends.
Then the world threw away the menus, adopted an idiotic “ribbon” that uses more screen real estate. Unsatisfied, we dumbed down desktop apps to look like mobile apps, even though input technology remains different.
Websites also decided to avoid blue underlined text for links and be as nonstandard as possible.
Frankly, developers did UI better before UI designers went off the deep end.
A few days ago I had trouble charging an electric rental car. When plugging it in, it kept saying "charging scheduled" on the dash, but I couldn't find out how to disable that and make it charge right away. The manual seemed to indicate it could only be done with an app (ugh, disgusting). Went back to the rental company, they made it charge and showed me a video of the screen where to do that. I asked "but how on earth do you get to that screen?". Turned out you could fucking swipe the tablet display to get to a different screen! There was absolutely no indication that this was possible, and the screen even implied that it was modal because there were icons at the bottom which changed the display of the screen.
So you had: zero affordances, modal design on a specific tab, and the different modes showed different tabs at the top, further leading me to believe that this was all there was.
99% of the users are not using the mobile version.
