One of the things I really like about LessWrong is that we’ve historically had an openness to non-standard ways of explaining things. A lot of Eliezer’s writing included weird fictional dialogues, some weird bouts of poetry, personal stories, napkin diagrams and standard popular science explanations, and I feel having Abram’s comics on here continues that legacy quite well. I am excited about people experimenting with new ways of explaining things, and am very very hesitant to discourage that.
Please see my comment elsethread about usability/accessibility/etc. Note that none[1] of the concerns I listed apply to Eliezer’s writing.
I think experimenting with non-standard ways of explaining things is great.
But a total disregard for usability and accessibility is not so great.
[1] Well, almost none; one may quibble that people on text-based browsers and screen readers won’t get the benefit of Eliezer’s diagrams—but at least they’ll have the rest of his posts, the overwhelming majority of the content of which is text, and which provide context for the diagrams. In contrast, with the OP, such users get absolutely nothing at all.
I am in favor of accessibility, but I would be highly surprised if more than 3% of users to LessWrong have a limitation of not being able to see images, so text-based browsers and screen readers do not strike me as a major concern. I am however in favor of reducing the size of the images to make it easier to read on mobile, since that is a much larger share of our users, but I don’t think this is something the author should have to worry about, but is instead something LessWrong should make as easy possible by providing our own tools for image upload and associated conversion into sensible formats. I do think that’s something we should improve relatively soon (and/or we would appreciate a PR on).
… I would be highly surprised if more than 3% of users to LessWrong have a limitation of not being able to see images, so text-based browsers and screen readers do not strike me as a major concern.
That may well be true, but please note that this was only one of eight issues I listed.
Please see my comment elsethread about usability/accessibility/etc. Note that none[1] of the concerns I listed apply to Eliezer’s writing.
I think experimenting with non-standard ways of explaining things is great.
But a total disregard for usability and accessibility is not so great.
[1] Well, almost none; one may quibble that people on text-based browsers and screen readers won’t get the benefit of Eliezer’s diagrams—but at least they’ll have the rest of his posts, the overwhelming majority of the content of which is text, and which provide context for the diagrams. In contrast, with the OP, such users get absolutely nothing at all.
I am in favor of accessibility, but I would be highly surprised if more than 3% of users to LessWrong have a limitation of not being able to see images, so text-based browsers and screen readers do not strike me as a major concern. I am however in favor of reducing the size of the images to make it easier to read on mobile, since that is a much larger share of our users, but I don’t think this is something the author should have to worry about, but is instead something LessWrong should make as easy possible by providing our own tools for image upload and associated conversion into sensible formats. I do think that’s something we should improve relatively soon (and/or we would appreciate a PR on).
That may well be true, but please note that this was only one of eight issues I listed.