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.
Perhaps Apple should make it easier or automatic to convert into a format that's universally usable.
Bet the same thing would have happened with webp images too.
JPG and PNG are like the FAT32 format of images. Always accepted, everywhere.
Further down this thread you’ll see that the board have messed up and they aren’t accepting images they should due to poor implementation.
“ oefrha 1 hour ago [–]
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”
That said, come on College Board. Fix your crap. What a stupid bug.
By "raw octet stream", I meant that the client should upload a file named X made of opaque bytes 0xABCD, as a file named X made of opaque bytes 0xABCD; rather than assuming a higher-level intent on the server's part to acquire some abstract document, where the client would be able to better serve that request by transforming its file to a different file-format.
I didn't mean that e.g. the client should avoid using Transfer-Encoding compression during the HTTP POST request, or anything like that. (That is, after all, a fact about the wire representation of the request; it doesn't affect the file received on the server end.)
Or, to put that another way, an <input type="file"> with no `accept`, is to the client, as `Cache-Control: no-transform` is to the server: an expressed desire to get some specific data that exists the other end sent over "as it is", rather than to get something customized to the peer's needs.
I thought you were suggesting that images should be sent as raw octets for the image, rather than picking a compression format. But that raw data is extremely large, and therefore would have horrible impacts on bandwidth and latency.
That said, you're right. Trying to be clever about what people are sending results in a lot of hidden complexity and bugs of various forms.