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

(www.theverge.com)
669 points danso | 6 comments | 20 May 20 19:36 UTC | HN request time: 0.631s | source | bottom
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coffeefirst ◴[21 May 20 17:38 UTC] No.23261776[source]▶
"Our system broke, you're screwed now, sorry" is never an acceptable answer. Do they really not have anyone who knows how to get stuff done?

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.

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xienyc ◴[21 May 20 18:11 UTC] No.23262428[source]▶
>"Our system broke, you're screwed now, sorry" is never an acceptable answer.

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?

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pwthornton ◴[21 May 20 18:15 UTC] No.23262512[source]▶
If they had enough time to warn people ahead of time, they had plenty of time to push a fix to their system for this. We are literally talking about adding support for one more image format.

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.

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1. sh-run ◴[21 May 20 19:42 UTC] No.23263933[source]▶
ImageMagick supports HEIC to JPG conversion. It would take at most a few hours to hack together an interim solution.
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2. ◴[21 May 20 20:06 UTC] No.23264312[source]▶
3. mohdmasd ◴[21 May 20 21:46 UTC] No.23265824[source]▶
That support depends on installing or building native libraries (mainly libheif I think) which is not trivial or may be that something developers can't do due to security reasons, also it's different for each platform.
4. Rebelgecko ◴[21 May 20 22:25 UTC] No.23266234[source]▶
IIRC, you have to use special flags when you compile from source to get HEIC support. And just because it's available doesn't mean you can legally use it. For example, the HEIF container's reference implementation is pretty explicit about not allowing commercial use [0]. The MPEG consortium lists over 7000 patents on their webpage for HEIC[1]. Making sure that you're bit infringing on those patents and/or working out a license deal with the patent cartel is a nontrivial amount of work.

[0]: https://github.com/nokiatech/heif/blob/master/LICENSE.TXT

[1]: https://www.mpegla.com/wp-content/uploads/hevc-att1.pdf

5. loeg ◴[22 May 20 00:44 UTC] No.23267487[source]▶
The software is open source, but (legal) usage requires a patent license from MPEG-LA for the H.265 compression (HEIC is just single-frame HEVC).
6. mafuy ◴[22 May 20 05:49 UTC] No.23269030[source]▶
I don't think you would be comfortable pushing this few-hours-hack to a system of such high importance. A mistake, be it stupid or complex, could break far more than the issue at hand does. And you would be at fault. Would you like to receive the response of all the students then? Would you really dare to risk this scenario?