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Comment by HoopleHead | Hacker News Reader

It doesn't even have to be an "edge case", as stated in the article. My first name has a single accented vowel and breaks tons of online forms.

What annoys me is not so much having to re-enter my name with the unaccented version of the vowel, it's when the form throws up an error message saying "Enter a Valid Name" [or suchlike]. I find that insulting.

At least make your error text put the blame where it belongs: "Sorry. This form can only handle ASCII Text". Don't insult your users by telling them their name isn't real.

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These kinds of limitations are fascinating because they reveal the cultural biases (and I don't mean bias in the negative sense) of their creators. A Western, American system might not be designed to accept names with accents and vowels because who has those in the States?

Anecdotally, I also heard of a female games journalist who had trouble using a VR headset because she wore mascara. It threw off the eye tracking because the system wasn't designed to handle that.

Any designer must test his or her product on many groups of people to find these problems.

> These kinds of limitations are fascinating because they reveal the cultural biases (and I don't mean bias in the negative sense) of their creators. A Western, American system might not be designed to accept names with accents and vowels because who has those in the States?

My guess would be on the order of tens or hundreds of thousands? It's 2016. There are very few good reasons left to assume text == ASCII anymore.

Having one good reason is enough, and the "it's easier" reason won't be going away anytime soon.

Wasn't there a thing that happened a while back where a fitness tracker was found to not work with darker skinned individuals?

I recall Kinect had the same problems.

And now I feel compelled to mention Better Off Ted, Season 1 Episode 4.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RIBdmyFWZVE

It was the apple watch. It also had problems with wrist tattoos.

We had some face-tracking Sony pan/tilt cameras in the mid 1990s. They were also racist - they worked fine for me but wouldn't track an Indian friend of mine at all.

It could also be a cost benefit analysis. How much business lost vs. the cost of supporting. Especially when many such users have encountered the problem often enough to already have a work around.

There are definitely some cases where it is a testing issue, but especially with accepting all possible valid names, sometimes the cost is too high to convince the one in control of funding.

It's just really annoying when it's a government system and it's use is required.

This is slightly off topic, but I recently came across a lawsuit involving German passport and their having a person's name printed IN ALL CAPS. The plaintiff was suing for his right to use lower case characters as that was how his name was spelled correctly vis-a-vis how other families who use the same letters in the same order but with different casing spelt it.

falsehoods government bureaucrats believe about names...

This reminds me of the (endlessly hilarious) tax protester argument that you don't have to respond to a court summons where your name is in all caps: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tax_protester_conspiracy_argum...

Relatedly, the OCR machine-readable part of a standard (ICAO) passport can't contain accented letters, so ICAO has a standard for how to systematically transliterate various scripts into Basic Latin.

> A Western, American system might not be designed to accept names with accents and vowels because who has those in the States?

Here in Brazil, names with accents on vowels are common. Yet some banking file formats still use positional (fixed-length fields) uppercase-only ASCII files.

The format I'm thinking of also has a field in the header to specify whether the tape is formatted as 1600 BPI or 6250 BPI, so I'm inclined to think the cause is more technological than cultural.

> ...because who has those in the States?

Right! Just:

Hernández, Martínez, Rodríguez, García, González, Gómez...

Jacques Villeré, Jacques Dupré, and Paul Octave Hébert - all governors of the state of Louisiana.

Luis Muñoz Marín, Luis Fortuño, and Aníbal Acevedo Vilá - all governors of Puerto Rico.

Ben Ray Luján - current U.S. Representative

I once sent a package to Curaçao. I bought postage online from USPS.

The package was delivered to Australia, as my local post office showed me on a printout, and lost forever.

The best I can figure out it, it was because I dared to use the accented 'ç' character in the country's name, and their computers were not able to handle this.

US immigration thinks I live in a city called Z?rich.

Hey, I live there too.

On a recent visit to Boston I wanted to use my credit card to buy my wife a gift at Best Buy whose special price was internet-only for store pickup. For those of us whose credit card billing addresses have non-US addresses, their special magic address to get past the US-only address form is:

10780 Kempwood Dr. Houston, TX 77043

http://www.bestbuy.com/site/help-topics/international-orders...

I once sent a package to Curaçao. I bought postage online from USPS.

Click-N-Ship used to be able to handle Unicode characters but for some reason that was removed a few years ago. I always had success with it, but there must have been enough situations similar to yours that they decided to do away with it.

It's a shame. Every time we get an order from Spain and the customer uses the superscript "o" in the address, I have to substitute (normal) "o" and pray that the package actually arrives.

> Sorry. This form can only handle ASCII Text

Do you honestly think that's a good idea? IMHO, 95% (yes, this a guess, but I think a conservative one) of people will have no idea what that means. It will only confuse them and leave them feeling stupid - don't make users feel stupid.

This is not to say you don't have a valid point, but end-users need error messages that tell them how to fix the problem, not a diagnosis.

Look, dont you insult the user too. Everyone ouside of the ascii alphabet have at least a vague notion that americans dont allow all letters in their forms, so telling the user that an "forbidden letter" was used is clear enough.

Yeah, my last name has a space in it. For a while, the NY DMV's computer couldn't handle that, so my license had a hyphen in my last name. Talk about insulting.

Kind of ironic given the name of the first New Yorker to become President of the United States.

Which is weird because my first name is hyphenated and so many computers refuse to accept a hyphen in a first name. And even if they do accept a hyphen then there are still many times (including my state's online system) where my first name is too long.

I think the problem is that coders who realize that their form can't handle many common characters don't make a specialized error message, they just fix the problem. Basic Latin Unicode support isn't hard to do. If you've written code that can't handle it, you very likely aren't aware that you've made a mistake.

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