oh my god, I'm taking an OpenSesame course and I think it's specifically designed to hate my brain.
It defaults to voice-over, which apparently just READS OFF THE TEXT ON SCREEN, and you have to find the mute option while it's talking, but it gets worse...

IT HAS MANDATORY MINIMUM TIMES FOR EACH SLIDE

"sorry, you're not allowed to read fast here. better sit here for another 30 seconds!"

I have ADHD. if you put a "do nothing for 30 seconds" roadblock in front of me, the best outcome is that I go off to read twitter for 10 minutes.
if you're unlucky, I'll remember your stupid course 2 days later when I'm closing the tab to reboot my laptop

and the mute option is fucking insulting, too.
You open the course and it starts talking at you, so you scramble for the options and hit mute.
then you hit next slide and it STARTS TALKING TO YOU AGAIN

because sorry, that mute only applies to voice overs, not embedded movies. they use the volume slider, not the voice on/off toggle.

so you mute the slider too, then click next slide, and it goes DONK at you because of course they added sounds to every navigation click like this is fucking internet explorer 5 on windows 98

so now I've muted the entire tab in my browser but I can't mute my entire system so I'm scared it's going to find another way to make noises.

brb installing a VM configured to have no sound hardware so I can run the training inside that.

it's probably gonna connect to my work account and pull my phone number off LDAP and ring my cellphone
"YOU THOUGHT YOU COULD ESCAPE MY NOISES, EH FOONE? THERE IS NO ESCAPE! THERE IS ONLY OPENSESAME."

current status: I hacked their CSS to make all the slides Comic Sans.

Why? I don't know. but they deserve it.

oh goody, it's tracking when I activate/deactivate the tab and is sending it to the backend server.

is it gonna email my boss and say "foone finished this training in 4 hours and 37 minutes, but they were tabbed out for 98% of that time"?

and then my bluetooth headphones silently cut off
I DON'T NEED YOUR HELP TO MUTE THIS, HEADPHONES! I HAVE IT UNDER CONTROL

my CSS hack also applied to the closed captions of the video.

oh god. the video can be paused or restarted but not rewound or fast forwarded.

That's basic functional included in every video player so YOU HAD TO BREAK THEM ON PURPOSE

I can understand their disabling of fast forwarding given their "you need to be on this page for Xty seconds" thing. It's stupid and I hate it but I understand.

But no rewinding? REALLY?

it's a good thing no one ever misses a line and needs to rewind to hear it again!
and that's both audio and captioning:
did you hear it in time? or read it in time?

and you might be able to ignore these problems if the videos were like 15 seconds long BUT NO THIS ONE IS 4 MINUTES LONG

hopefully we'll be following up this training with accessibility training.

"Foone, according to the analytics, you spent 30 minutes paused on slide 7. Now that slide is a video that's only 4 minutes long, can you explain why you took so long to watch it?"
"Yeah I only watched 2 minutes into it, then spent the rest of the time trying to hack the JS"

"what? why?"
"I was trying to re-enable seeking! The native <video> element they use supports it, so it should be easy to do, but their JS is just labyrinthine. "

"Why wouldn't you just add a controls element to the <video> tag, bypassing their custom controls entirely?"
"good idea! I didn't think of that. BRB"

no luck.
but fun fact: if you reload the page, it keeps your session enough to reload you to the same slide... but it "forgets" that you turned off voiceover and captions.

accessibility is job #947

fun fact: if you reload the course and then go back a page, it resets the progress, so now you have to wait the 30 seconds again

it's getting dangerously close to the point where it's going to be easier for me to write an automated system to complete course for me than to actually try to complete it with my ADHD brain

my current strategy has been to click "next", and as soon as the time-limited slide shows up, I click over to twitter for like 5 minutes.
then when I come back, the timer is up and I can read it at my leisure

but then it tried to throw bandersnatch mid-video choices at me and I couldn't rewind or even restart only reload the page and kicked me back several pages and lost my progress, so...
I tried pirating the video directly using curl but it's a weird form of MPEG-DASH

so I got corrupt videos

and there's no warning a slide will contain a video. if it does, it autoplays, and can't be rewound. going back a slide will reset the progress for that slide and the one before it

it kinda feels like they just wanted to ship me a 1 hour long DVD but that was too expensive and also it was rightly pointed out to be completely inaccessible so they compromised by designing this clusterfuck

although I joke about it just being a dvd, but... if it was a DVD, I would have more control. I could rewind and fast forward.

for their upcoming TrainingNightmare 2.0 they're just gonna ship you some VR goggles. When you put them on, it starts playing, and if you take them off, it'll stop.
put them back on within 30 seconds and it'll resume, otherwise it resets to the beginning

better hurry, they ship them with batteries that'll only last up to 2.5 hours, so if you can't get the 1 hour course completed in one go you're at risk of not being able to complete it.

the batteries are soldered in and non-rechargable so just throw them into the airpod landfill when you're done.

oh and make sure you stay within wifi connection distance while using the VR goggles, or they won't be able to upload your progress.

boss: "hey foone, you need to retake that training, the accelerometers showed you were moving too much while they were on, which indicates you were pacing and therefore not paying attention. remember to sit still and attentive."

"but not too still, or they'll assume you're sleeping or trying to bypass it by putting it on a mannequin head or something. the next version is gonna have life sensors built in to detect those, btw"

DON'T LAUGH IT'S ONLY A MATTER OF FUCKING TIME

I'd like to announce that with the death of twitter, I'm moving all my tweets to a opensesame course.
You'll have to spend at least 40 seconds enjoying each of my tweets before you'll be allowed to continue to the next one.

fun fact: when opensesame asks you a question, the CSS class for the buttons has "correct" and "incorrect" on them.
So you can just open up the content inspector and know which answer is right.

their incompetence and annoyance extends right up to the end. At the very end that ask for your name to send you a completion certificate.
Why does that piss me off? BECAUSE WHEN I STARTED, STEP 1 WAS CREATING AN ACCOUNT, WITH EMAIL ADDRESS, PASSWORD, AND FULL LEGAL NAME.

I got a score of 100.0000000%.

Yes, we need 10 significant digits. You know, because it's possible that you have quiz that has, uh... ONE BILLION QUESTIONS? and therefore you really need that last digit of precision

So after you complete a course, it doesn't let you go back into it. You'd have to ask an account administrator to let you back in... except what's that text in the bottom left? is that a link?

oh hey I can go back in. and get another certificate. for any name I want.

so if I wanted to help all my coworkers skip the training, I could just do this Xty times, save all the PDFs, and pass 'em around for everyone to send to HR or whoever.

OpenSesame would have been doing really well if this was a class on accessibility and/or security and/or ethics, but it wasn't, so they just failed massively in multiple different ways.

BTW, this was supposed to be a 1 hour course.
I started this thread shortly after first opening the course, and that was seven hours ago.

YOU SEE WHAT HAPPENS WHEN YOU TRY TO SLOW DOWN SOMEONE WITH ADHD? IT WORKS A LITTLE TOO WELL!