The Editorial Team and I am thrilled to share some exciting news with you! After a decade of serving our incredible AppleVis community, we are embarking on a significant journey of improvement and transformation for our website.
A decade ago, I created AppleVis with little more than a vision and a dream. Never did I imagine that it would evolve into the vibrant and valuable resource it has become, all thanks to the incredible support and engagement of our community.
Over the past decade, our content management system has served us well. But it's begun to limit what we can do on the site. I want AppleVis to keep growing and improving to better serve your needs. So for the past few months, I've been working hard on a total rebuild of AppleVis from the ground up.
My primary goal throughout this process has been to maintain the user experience you love while introducing essential accessibility and usability enhancements. I especially aimed to enhance the experience for users with low vision, particularly on mobile devices.
While I've made every effort to ensure compatibility with the previous site, I anticipate some initial hiccups. There may be overlooked issues that only come to light now that the new site is live, or aspects I couldn't address until this moment. Additionally, I've made some required changes to some features and functionality due to the significant nature of this upgrade.
In the past, our routine site maintenance and upgrades mainly involved behind-the-scenes improvements. However, this time, due to the absence of an 'in-place' upgrade path, the process has been considerably more involved, necessitating certain alterations.
Although I've successfully carried over much of the old website's functionality to the new platform, some features couldn't make the transition due to technical limitations of the available tools. One such feature is the auto-posting of new content to our Twitter accounts. I understand the value these posts hold for many in our community, and I'm actively exploring alternative methods to automate this process. In the interim, I plan to manually share links to blog posts, podcasts, and trending forum topics on Twitter.
I anticipate ongoing fixes and enhancements in the days, weeks, and months ahead, so I kindly ask for your patience during this transition period.
This month, AppleVis will celebrate its remarkable tenth anniversary. None of this would have been possible without the unwavering support of our users and visitors. With this upgrade, I aim to secure AppleVis on solid technological footing for many more years to come.
Thank you for being a part of our incredible journey. I can't wait to share this exciting new chapter with you!
Comments
Anchor links
I'm using Jaws 2020 and the Brave browser. Jaws with Brave definitely worked in the previous version of Applevis. This is the link that Brave displays for my last comment:
https://www.applevis.com/comment/115802?utm_source=dlvr.it&utm_medium=twitter
I don't see any anchor in that URL. That's why I'm reporting this. I think something might be broken in the URL produced for the tweet.
Can I get an acknowledgement?
Michael, David, somebody... Can I get an acknowledgement that the anchor links are missing or not working in the ApplevisXL tweets? I've brought this up 2 or 3 times and each time my posts seem to be ignored. If you're aware of the problem, why hasn't it been fixed?
Twitter links
Hey Jeff,
Michael Hansen did reply to your earlier comment on this.
As he said, there is a great level of variation in how different combinations of screen reader, browser, and platform handle links to a specific position on a web page. The links posted to Twitter are to the position of the comment in the thread, but I've yet to find a way of having the site handle these which is consistent across all screen readers, browser, and platform combinations.
But the Twitter link does *NOT* contain the anchor
David, I realize not all browsers work consistently when handling anchor links, but Brave *does* handle them correctly when they are constructed properly. I responded to Michael's post showing that the anchor is not present in the Twitter link. There needs to be the number-sign character (#) preceeding the anchor in the URL. Here is the URL for your response above from the tweet:
https://www.applevis.com/comment/116114?utm_source=dlvr.it&utm_medium=twitter
Note that there is no number-sign (#) in that URL. Now, from the email I received because I subscribe to this thread, it contained the following link to this comment:
https://www.applevis.com/comment/116114#comment-116114
That URL *does* take me directly to your comment above using the Brave browser.
Basically, you need to construct the URL for the tweet the same as you construct it in the email you send out for subscriptions. I hope you will correct this problem, or at least, explain why you won't.
Unfortunate tone
Jeff, your tone in recent posts hasn't done anything to make this more of a priority over the other tasks on my ToDo list or to feel a need to explain anything to you.
For what it's worth, I have made some changes. They don't change the behaviour for any of my test combinations of screen reader, browser or platform, but you do at least now have the number symbol that you were demanding.
I apologize and thank you!
I'm sorry my tone came acrosss as negative. I was just feeling ignored and frustrated. As you can see above, I responded to Michael's answer with an explanation of what was happening. That was a week ago and I never saw any response from him or anyone else. And that was at least the second time I had described the problem with no response.
Anyway, I can't explain why your tests haven't worked for you, but they certainly have worked for me. With the latest tweets, I now land on the specific comment referenced in the tweet. Thank you so very much! It's working again like it used to work and I'm very, very happy.
Definitely Not Intentional
Hi Jeff,
I did see your reply last week, and it honestly fell off my radar. I was definitely not trying to ignore you--I just read the comment, had no immediate answer, and then went on to reading and doing other things. Again, I definitely did not intend to ignore or disregard your feedback and concerns.
All is well
That's ok, Michael. As I just posted, the problem has been fixed, at least as far as I can tell. Frankly, I'm surprised it didn't fix the problem for other browsers/platforms, since this format of URL encoding has been a standard for years. But it works with Brave, and I suspect for other chromium-based browsers. I don't use Safari, which is the browser you mentioned. Thanks again for getting this fixed. It's great!
A workaround for Voiceover on iOS and anchor links
Greetings,
there is a workaround, though not ideal you can use for Voiceover on iOS to focus the new comments correctly. This might require some mussle memory, but once you get used to it, it's fairly easy and I am able to consistently do it.
Once you click on such a link, while the page is still not loaded, touch the area of the screen below the address bar, which would be close to the top but not at the top exactly. You can also touch the center of the screen I believe. Keep your finger on that place until the page has finished loading, and this will prevent Voiceover from jumping to the top of the page, and once you lift your finger you should be able to swipe to the new comments or at least be relatively close.