1. Take the files and figure out what to do with them so they can be read. This isn't a hard problem.
2. Ask everyone affected to email you the photo or a new photo of the documents. We'll just take it on trust that you do so honestly because there's no way you would've seen this coming.
That's not what happened at all. The college board admitted their fault and are letting students take the test again. Even without that, they mentioned in their FAQ that JPEGs and PNGs are the only file types acceptable and even sent out a tweet (which should have been an email) a week before especially for iPhone users to let them know how to take pictures as JPEGs.
I agree with the people blaming the board for not having a standard image input field that lets the OS know when to convert images to JPEG but that is their only fault and I wouldn't have thought of that as a bug deal if not for this issue. While I'm all for open source media formats replacing what we have, HEIC certainly isn't big enough to be considered as among standard input options. Also, isn't Apple themselves infamous for not supporting certain formats throughout their devices?
Emails, tweets, texts are no excuse for broken products. The iPhone is the best selling model in the United States. It is on College Board to support its default image format.
Good product design is owning your users' success. It is not sending people workaround emails.
The bare minimum would have to be to do a warning before every single AP test about this and giving students a few minutes to change their default image format. Sending a tweet (!!!) out does not count as doing any work.
This is a failure. An abysmal failure.
Seriously, fuck Apple. It took legal changes in the EU to force them to the "Just f'ing support USB-C like the rest of the world instead of making half your money selling dongles".
Apple was early in supporting the standard. Windows, Android, others have followed. More to come.
When venting one's spleen, it's best to be at least a tiny bit correct.
Still, what matters is the reality of the situation. They could have easily made it so that uploading or transferring images, especially to websites, uses a standard format that 99.9% of websites support, instead of one that virtually noone supports (yet).
And at the same time that Apple rushes to support this new standard without providing a good backwards compatible experience, they've been dragging their feet for YEARS on Safari support for progressive web app features that would let devs build truly feature-comparable web apps without being beholden to the App Store walled garden.
It’s hard to call something an “open standard” if anyone who wishes to use it needs to license patents from nokia.
(https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/High_Efficiency_Image_File_F... under “licensing”)
If something needs a licence, it isn't open. I mean, it literally doesn't meet the definition of open.
What's more, if the standard was open, then that would be great, but adopting it so soon and setting it to be the default is woefully shortsighted.