Is GitHub Racist?

https://shkspr.mobi/blog/2013/06/is-github-racist/

One of the interesting aspects of privilege is how it lays bare our unconscious assumptions about the world. A male software developer may never consider that a user would want or need to change their name. Thus they would design a product which ignored the millions of women changing their names after marriage.

It's very temping to see software as racist when, in reality, it's more likely to have a root cause of unconscious assumptions.

Take, for example, GitHub. You can host all of your software projects on there - as long as you speak English.

Wait? What?

Try adding a repository which contains, say, Chinese - and all those beautiful characters will be replaced with "-".

I asked GitHub about this, and quickly got this reply.

Unfortunately, at the moment, you can only use ASCII (i.e. Windows-1252) characters in Repo names. Most things on GitHub.com support non-ASCII but because of limitations in Git, the repo name isn't one of them. Sorry about the international-unfriendliness

Interestingly, that's not quite the case. Windows-1252 contains some characters with accents - they simply aren't recognised by GitHub.

We don't live in a homogeneous world. US English is not the global language. Even if it was, ASCII is insufficient to the task of information interchange.

ASCII was invented in 1972 - 40 years later and our brand new shiny kit is hamstrung by the needs of the telegraph industry! It's like that wonderful urban legend about the Space Shuttle being constrained by the size of a horse's arse.

Obviously, GitHub isn't racist. Either they or the originators of Git have assumed that their local dialect is sufficient for a service which aims to be universally acceptable. All the more strange given that Linus Torvalds, the creator of Git, is Finnish and - one presumes - knows about ääkköset (the "extra" letters in the Finnish alphabet).

At this stage in the maturity of the software industry, we should consider the practice of not supporting Unicode as outmoded and dangerous as assuming every year can be represented by a two digit number.

There's a world outside our narrow viewpoint and, if we want to do business with that world, we need to speak their language.

Laptop Support and Usability (LSU): May 2025 report from the FreeBSD Foundation

<https://github.com/FreeBSDFoundation/proj-laptop/blob/main/monthly-updates/2025-05.md>

@FreeBSDFoundation

– via <https://www.reddit.com/r/freebsd/comments/1l5amd4/>

Catching up on @TetraLogical blog posts, and this addition to the Foundations series: Keyboard accessibility:
https://tetralogical.com/blog/2025/05/09/foundations-keyboard-accessibility/

Użyteczność YouTube'a z roku na rok spada. Google robi wszystko by wcisnąć wszędzie gdzie się da jak najwięcej reklam i by używanie serwisu do czegokolwiek innego niż oglądania reklam było jak najtrudniejsze. #YouTube #Googlw #UX #Usability

I've started publishing my “Introduction to human-computer interaction” slides as CC-licensed reusable teaching material. (My #OER debut!)

https://fietkau.science/teaching/intro_hci

I've been wanting to share these for more than a year. Doing that all at once felt insurmountable, so now I'm putting them up piece by piece over the summer. Two out of 15 sections are up and public now, feel free to browse!

If you follow me for fediverse stuff: this is my day job.

Интересный был подход к #usability у #apple в 90х
Смотрим на дно #eMate300:

1. Есть беджик, куда можно сунуть id-карточку, видимо, чтобы каждый ученик мог быстро из кучи свой найти. Допустим
2. А вот крепление под штатив зачем? По мысли создателей так работать удобно? Типа мольберта?

Кстати, дизайн должен был делать #jonathanIve

I wanted to know what people usually call "multi-level marketing" in Russian so checked #Wikipedia and, the Russian translation is listed in Europe, the Middle East and Asia. I guess that's maybe? accurate, but a bit weirdly redundant for a drop down-menu.

Keyboard Navigation: Ensuring Usability Without a Mouse, by (not found on Mastodon or Bluesky):

https://afixt.com/keyboard-navigation-ensuring-usability-without-a-mouse/

Dear webmasters: If your website is multilingual and has language selection link somewhere, PLEASE make sure they actually take the user to the translated version of the current page, not just the homepage. It’s so frustrating because it forces the user to search for the translated page manually.

#Accessibility hive mind, I have some questions about #ChromeVox as well as #Chromebook accessibility & #usability in general. I'm working with a #PixelBook that has never been used. ChromeVox is telling me to use commands involving the search key as a modifier, but these seem not to work as any use of the search key invokes #Google #Gemini. What's going on here? Additionally, how are #blind people using #Chromebooks? In what tasks do they excel. In what tasks do they fall short? Any input and/or information would be greatly appreciated.

#Blind #BlindMasto #BlindMastodon #BlindFedi #a11y @mastoblind

How Accessibility Audits Are Shaping the Future of User-Centered Design, by @uxmatters.bsky.social:

https://www.uxmatters.com/mt/archives/2025/04/how-accessibility-audits-are-shaping-the-future-of-user-centered-design.php

It vexes me that UI books written by current IT practitioners inevitably descend into API-call-fest—a code dump, as it were. This sort of presentation is ineffective. In fact, it is childish.

A typical #programmer in IT who designs and implements a non-trivial UI, webtop or desktop, is seasoned, experienced; he knows how to use an API. But he does not necessarily have a background in usability:

PSYCHOLOGY
• The #psychology of visual and tactile perceptions
• The psychology of human-computer interaction #HCI
• The design and administration of psychological experiments on interaction and usability
• The design of the interaction flow

LIBRARY SCIENCE
• The design of the underlying information architecture
• The design of information layout

VISUAL ARTS
• The effective use of colour
• The effective use of font

There are tonnes of other usability-related subjects that fall way outside of modern CS curricula. The #UI books should aspire to teach these cross-discipline subjects on #usability to #CS and #IT practitioners.

Sure, code samples and screenshots of some popular UI framework would be helpful. But the main thrust of these books must be usability, with the organisation that assumes tech-savvy engineers and programmers, not novices.

How to Write Error Messages That Actually Help Users Rather Than Frustrate Them, by @Amy_Hupe (@piccalil.li):

https://piccalil.li/blog/how-to-write-error-messages-that-actually-help-users-rather-than-frustrate-them/

Thin Fonts Are a Usability Nightmare—And Finally, Designers Are Waking Up

https://webdesignerdepot.com/thin-fonts-are-a-usability-nightmare-and-finally-designers-are-waking-up/

Unlocking 7 Hidden Benefits Through Web Site Redesign, by @uxmatters.bsky.social:

https://www.uxmatters.com/mt/archives/2025/04/unlocking-7-hidden-benefits-through-web-site-redesign.php

This is AT&T's email with images blocked. Fail! #email #att #a11y #usability

Top 5 CSS Navigation Menu Mistakes, by @zoranjambor (@cssweekly):

https://blog.css-weekly.com/top-5-css-navigation-menu-mistakes

Bike rack producers: »Let's create more front wheel bike racks because – reasons.«
Cyclists using these bike racks:

@fedibikes_de
@mastobikes_de