#54 Demo time

Cats at the core.

Hooray, the Saving Satoshi demo is ready. Holocat (one of the characters in the story) is excited. Still rough around the edges in various places, but in a good shape for us to gather feedback from friends & family.

Then we’ll be off to scope out a V1 release, which will include at least one more chapter and potentially features like accounts (with a proper database). My next steps are generating more chapter cover images (testing the new Midjourney V5 here), and designing the chapter 2 experience.

Jarol also demo’d the new Bitcoin Core App at Austin BitDevs, and got a great response. Really awesome to see. While Jarol and Johnny are wrapping up the tech side, I’m helping with QA and need to update some of the design documentation, and I’ll need to find some time to squeeze in some animations for the onboarding flow.

Now, the topic of accessibility came up this week. I remembered from last year that there’s a Global Accessibility Awareness Day and thought that it would be highly appropriate and interesting to participate as a community. So I posted something in Slack about it. The same day, a Twitter thread popped up on the topic, lamenting that accessibility sucks in the bitcoin space, with a request if someone from Bitcoin Design could maybe help. Practically speaking, my observation is that accessibility gets lip service here and there, but no one is really acting on it. I think it’s just too abstract and out-of-sight for most developers who could make a difference there (although it’s really not that difficult and doesn’t take a ton of time). Maybe we need some bounties or a grant to get momentum going? Anyhow, Brad Mills recommended to reach out the a specific blind bitcoiner, which I did. I told him about the accessibility research we did last year for the accessibility page in the guide. He asked what issues I found. At first, I was wondering why. But then he said that what I told him explains why he hasn’t been able to certain features in some of our beloved open-source lightning wallets - they are simply non-existent for him. If a QR code or button is not properly labelled, the screen reader can’t pick it up and therefore the code/button does not exist for him. I knew that, but hearing these types of things directly from someone always drives the point home much harder. I am really annoyed by this situation. So I think we really need to make this accessibility day event happen, and push a bit harder for contributions to fix these issues. I really think that with a bit of concerted effort, we could very quickly fix a lot of these problems (examples of what to fix are here, here, and here).

Nostr Nests worked great for the community call. It’s more accessible since it works in any browser, and it was technically rock-solid (and it was designed by Karnage). Felt refreshing after using Twitter Spaces for the past months. Also, Nostrica starts today.

Next week will be all over the place:

• Scoping out chapter 2-3 for Saving Satoshi

• Home page design for Wallet Scrutiny

• BTC Prague planning

• Design guide jam session & payjoin PR review

• UI Kit milestone planning

• Accessibility awareness day planning

• Bitcoin Core App design tweaks & documentation

• Research kit writing about building in public

• Foundation statute writing and research

• Nostr hackathon participation

Let’s do it.

🏕️