: : : # Donald Trump is whining about the Democrats again. ## And the web design team he hired are clearly incompetent. (Read article below) On October 1st, 2025, the US government shut down, due to _both parties'_ bills not getting enough votes to pass[1] (despite what the administration wants you to think). Subsequently, a shutdown counter was put up on the White House's website (Archived). Now, since it's an official government website you'd think the counter would be done well and accessible to screen readers, right? Well, it's surprising just how wrong you'd be. Well, first let's take a look at the HTML structure of just one of the digits, lit up to show a "0": <div class="digit" id="d1"> <div class="segment a lit"></div> <div class="segment b lit"></div> <div class="segment c lit"></div> <div class="segment d lit"></div> <div class="segment e lit"></div> <div class="segment f lit"></div> <div class="segment g"></div> </div> That's right. Every segment of the 7-segment display is a separate div. There's no extra information that a screen reader could possibly make use of. The spacing is all off, so it just looks like a continuous line of numbers, with no grouping to indicate what the numbers mean. Not to mention, the script driving the counter on the original page logs a bunch of debug info to the console every second, which is just unnecessary, especially in production. Here's a quick sampler: updateDisplay called Setting digits: d1=0, d2=1, d3=1, d4=0, d5=3, d6=5, d7=5, d8=8 Setting digit d1 to value 0 Lit segment .a for digit d1 Lit segment .b for digit d1 Lit segment .c for digit d1 Lit segment .d for digit d1 Lit segment .e for digit d1 Lit segment .f for digit d1 Setting digit d2 to value 1 Lit segment .b for digit d2 Lit segment .c for digit d2 So, why are we here? The counter at the top of this page is my own version of the White House's counter, but done right. It uses a 7-segment font, and each digit is a single element with the number as its text content. I used the original counter's JavaScript logic as a base, and rewrote it to be more efficient. Additionally, I added Now, I'm not saying I'm the greatest web developer in the world. Hell, I'm just a random teenager who knows how to smash their keyboard in the right places. But when a government (especially the government of what is supposedly the leader of the free world) can't even get something as simple as a counter right, I think it's fair to call them out on it. From 🇨🇦 with ❤️ </article>