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Students are failing AP tests because the College Board can’t handle HEIC images

(www.theverge.com)
669 points danso | 5 comments | 20 May 20 19:36 UTC | HN request time: 0.856s | source
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crazygringo ◴[21 May 20 16:55 UTC] No.23260987[source]▶
I thought iOS was supposed to convert HEIC images to JPEG automatically behind-the-scenes in any file transfer situation where HEIC isn't supported. The article itself even says:

> iPhones convert HEICs to JPEGs automatically when they’re attached to emails in the Mail app

I'm just curious technically why the same didn't happen with the testing portal? If you have a webpage that accepts image uploads, is iOS Safari not smart enough to do the same conversion?

Or was the portal programmed badly or in a non-standard way that that couldn't happen? Or is there a way to do it that the developers ignored?

Just curious for the technical details of who's more to blame here -- Apple not providing enough backwards compatibility, or the testing portal being designed poorly.

Because blaming students for not following obscure instructions to change their phone's overall configuration is not the right path. A national testing portal ought to support the default image format taken by the world's most popular phone, period.

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oefrha ◴[21 May 20 17:08 UTC] No.23261216[source]▶
Tried a standard input tag with the proper accept attribute

  <input type="file" accept="image/jpeg,image/png" />
Selected a HEIC file from Photos in Safari, the selected image was automatically converted to JPEG.

Ten bucks says College Board programmer(s) failed to do the most basic and standard filtering.

Edit: Like a sibling comment said, the accept attribute actually isn't necessary; even PNG images (e.g. screenshots) from Photos are converted to JPEG automatically. This is true on both macOS and iOS Safari (latest). To be clear, on macOS you need to select from Photos instead of the filesystem for this to take effect.

In case anyone's interested, source code you can use to test for yourself (a Flask app):

app.py:

  import flask
  
  
  app = flask.Flask(__name__)
  
  
  @app.route("/", methods=["GET", "POST"])
  def index():
      if flask.request.method == "POST":
          image = flask.request.files["image"]
          return f"uploaded {image.filename!r} ({image.mimetype})"
      return flask.render_template("index.html")
templates/index.html:

  <html>
    <head>
      <meta charset="utf-8" />
      <meta name="viewport" content="width=device-width, initial-scale=1" />
    </head>
    <body>
      <form method="post" enctype="multipart/form-data">
        <input name="image" type="file" required />
        <input type="submit" />
      </form>
    </body>
  </html>
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dragontamer ◴[21 May 20 18:00 UTC] No.23262200[source]▶
> Ten bucks says College Board programmer(s) failed to do the most basic and standard filtering.

Why is it a failure of the college board to put "accept="image/jpeg"", instead of iOS which failed to default to the more standardized jpeg format when HEIC was not specified?

HEIC is a newer format which fewer systems support. iOS / Safari should default to JPEG in this case.

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1. bjtitus ◴[21 May 20 18:04 UTC] No.23262291[source]▶
The comment was edited to show that iOS does in fact do this.

But even if it did send HEIC, if you're going to fail to handle "any" format, then you better specify the one you can handle. By the same token, why shouldn't my computer convert every .docx to PDF, or some other "more universal" format?

Instead of specifying the requirement programmatically, they spent their time sending out tweets and writing help docs.

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2. nitrogen ◴[21 May 20 18:14 UTC] No.23262490[source]▶
When was the accept attribute added to the input tag?
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3. bchociej ◴[21 May 20 18:32 UTC] No.23262807[source]▶
I was surprised by this, but at least as early as September 2008: https://github.com/whatwg/html/commit/c67bb312ac44737c6c175b...
4. derefr ◴[21 May 20 20:21 UTC] No.23264563[source]▶
> Instead of specifying the requirement programmatically, they spent their time sending out tweets and writing help docs.

Point of order: separate people, with separate/independent/concurrent job responsibilities. It very likely wasn't the programmers tweeting and writing docs. (Heck, I expect that the College Board doesn't even retain any full-time programmers, only contracts with firms for projects.)

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5. braythwayt ◴[22 May 20 01:03 UTC] No.23267626[source]▶
Separate people, yes, and we should not blame the people sending out the tweets. But we can hold the organziation they belong to responsible.

It's the same as if Apple shipped me an empty box instead of my iPad Pro. Of course I can't blame the customer support person who takes my call, and I shouldn't be rude to them. But I would still blame Apple the corporation for such a thing, had it happened.