Now that this Facebook video debacle has finally put the lie to the idea that video is a better way to communicate, can we PLEASE stop making video-only tutorials for COMMAND-LINE PROGRAMS AND TEXT BASED LANGUAGES

I AM LITERALLY BEGGING YOU

You, an obnoxious genius: “Hey, it’s me, YouFace McVideopants, with the only explanation available online for this obscure feature of a poorly-documented language!”

Me, a fundamentally broken human: “Welp, guess my only option is to disassemble the compiler.”

Just. Copy. Text.
Like... I have literally browsed Japanese and Russian forums, languages I barely speak or read, to get info instead of sitting through a 10-min video. And when YouTube inevitably collapses, all that video will be gone. FOREVER. The forums will still be on https://t.co/HEVsJtUnAw.
Your computing ancestors would beat you senseless with an acoustic coupler if they knew you were making video files larger than their entire file servers’ combined drive space just to convey the information present in a few kilobytes of text.
Kibibytes, whatever.
For example: I recently had the Cursed Idea to write a plugin for Netscape 4.x to handle XMLHttpRequest so you could work with (some) AJAX frameworks. Dumb idea, right? But there are still dozens and dozens of pages out there on how to write Netscape 2+ plugins.
The images are almost all broken, though. How do you think video content would have fared? It’s the first to get scrapped because it’s big, and if you put your content at the mercy of some third party to host it? Good luck, even if that third party is currently owned by $GOOG.
Since this struck a bit of a chord, I actually have an accessibility question. Obviously, video tutorials are useful for some things. For example, I learned to knit a year or two before YouTube, from books and pictures. It was frustrating as hell, and videos would have been nice.
But how do videos affect accessibility of content for users with various impairments? I have to imagine that watching someone type commands isn’t more helpful than seeing them laid out on a page, even for dyslexic people. And for blind folks, videos have to be a nightmare.
But I don’t have any direct experience in that arena, other than having moderate ADHD (which, obviously, colors my views on video content quite a lot). So, accessibility-needers: how does video change things for you, given these specific constraints?

More from All

You May Also Like