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

(www.theverge.com)

669 points danso | 1 comments | 20 May 20 19:36 UTC | HN request time: 0.205s | 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]▶

>>23260987 #

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]▶

>>23261216 #

> 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. salamander014 ◴[21 May 20 18:11 UTC] No.23262430[source]▶

>>23262200 #

Generally I agree with your point but this isn't your uncle's homemade public photo gallery. These are people's lives on the line. These kids have no say in whether they think they should take these exams. And because of that yes it is absolutely College Board's responsibility to

1. Correctly label their expected stream types. 2. Test all of the most popular devices before having something this broken in production.

What about a kid that's using a cheap android tablet from aliexpress? Are you arguing that the company nobody's ever heard of is at fault for not programming their tablet to use the correct image format? I agree that they should probably be using JPEG but that doesn't mean College Board is off the hook for making it easy for a user to not be able to use their product for something this important.

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