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

It’s amazing to me that so many are blaming Apple. Despite the fact that this site is all about new technology (so ironic!), uploading a photo from an iPhone isn’t exactly an edge case. They should have tested this, and apparently they did enough to send a tweet about it.. as if that’s enough. Clearly the college board dropped the ball in adequately informing people of their not-great workaround, instead of either specifying the accepted types directly in the web page’s input tag (as many have pointed out, and thus would have just worked correctly in the background), or by accepting and converting HEIC files themselves. At minimum, they should have put their suggested settings changes into the webpage itself before you started, and/or given a practice website to make sure it worked correctly.

College board owns this process, and it’s their job to make sure the setup works correctly for all students, including those who might not all be technically inclined.

Using HEIC apparently [1][2] requires a license and is patent encumbered[3], so I actually blame Apple for using a closed format by default.

[1] https://forums.developer.apple.com/thread/97036 [2] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17587923

[2] http://www.hackerfactor.com/blog/index.php?/archives/833-HEI...

Here's a LGPL decoder: https://github.com/strukturag/libheif

Assuming GP is right about the patents, the College Board would open themselves up to patent suits by using that without a license.