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Comment by breck | Hacker News Reader

I love information density!

I collect old newspapers and back then info density was way higher (for an _amazing_ coffee table book, google "nytimes complete front pages"). So much critical info above the fold.

I think high information density === high intelligence. Getting sort priorities right is very valuable and important.

The past few years the web seemed to be going the other way. Good to see people still rowing in the other direction.

Other examples:

I designed my blog to allow one to zoom in/zoom out to see ~20 years of posts at once (https://breckyunits.com/).

I've got some stuff coming out to promote (and make it easier to build) highly information dense cheat sheets (I'm trying to get the name "Leet Sheet" to catch on - https://pldb.io/blog/leetSheets.html)

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> I think high information density === high intelligence.

Just packing loads of stuff on-screen at once, with tiny fonts and tiny margins and all the rest presents a lot of accessibility issues, even for intelligent people.

Google et al are adding padding and white space to make their UIs more accessible for more people. It's not just eye sight we're talking here, but also physical issues with clicking/tapping small targets accurately (e.g. someone with Parkinson's), and also neuro divergent issues where a page full of text or whatever can disorient just by sheer amount of stuff happening on-screen at once (e.g. epilepsy)

You can be very intelligent, but still benefit from well-designed and accessible UIs. Don't assume people who need it are less intelligent.

All my stuff is 100% public domain and open source and can be piped through whatever people need to make the most custom experience.

The default is high information density. This is how they did it in the old days. It makes a lot more sense to default to high information density with 100% public domain open source content in clean code for perfect accessibility.

Anything with a (c) or license has bad accessibility.

> Google et al are adding padding and white space to make their UIs more accessible for more people. It's not just eye sight we're talking here, but also physical issues with clicking/tapping small targets accurately (e.g. someone with Parkinson's), and also neuro divergent issues where a page full of text or whatever can disorient just by sheer amount of stuff happening on-screen at once (e.g. epilepsy)

We’re not in a physical world and FAANG is not bound by money (no, I don’t care about budget allocated to specific teams, I’m sure Android team has Pichai’s credit card), so why are we settling for lowest common denominator instead of creating best UIs for every user type?

Maybe the design that addresses accessibility is better for most people, and the high density crowd for most types of apps is tiny.

Google's design frameworks for the last five years have been completely unaccessible for those of who need concise and compact UIs.

Font too small? Just ctrl +. Raw data with huge padding is inaccessible to literally everyone who's trying to do work (the intelligence framing of the other user was stupid) and it's meant to look pretty, not be accessible. If you're genuinely concerned about accessibility, the computing world is a never ending world of inaccessibility, but this ain't it.

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