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by sixstringtheory 1589 days ago
IMO text still provides the best combination of flexibility, power, simplicity and accessibility.

A screen reader can’t describe a JPEG or animated GIF. You can’t diff images/animations as easily as text. You can’t automatically translate text in images. Images and their toolchains like imagemagick introduce attack vectors. They take up more disk space. You can’t change the font of text in images. Text in images is not greppable.

Do you need to change some text in that documentation image? Hope you have the vector-based original!

And FWIW, Xcode’s rendering of markdown files and markdown doc comments with media assets in playgrounds isn’t the best experience, IMO.

2 comments

>A screen reader can’t describe a JPEG or animated GIF.

Sure it can. There's a whole field of computer science for doing just that, computer vision.

>You can’t automatically translate text in images

You can use OCR to read text from images.

>Images and their toolchains like imagemagick introduce attack vectors.

This isn't fair. Text based toolchains can be vulnerable too. There have been millions of vulnerabilities with string handling

>They take up more disk space.

Buy a bigger hard drive / cloud storage.

>You can’t change the font of text in images.

Pick a readable font in the first place.

>Text in images is not greppable.

Again your could use OCR to make thi spossible.

>Do you need to change some text in that documentation image? Hope you have the vector-based original!

Check in the project file to source control or just draw over the current one.

Now do a list of all the things you can't do with text.