[HN Gopher] Adding keyboard shortcuts to a 24 year-old governmen...
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Adding keyboard shortcuts to a 24 year-old government website with
userscripts
Author : thunderbong
Score : 71 points
Date : 2024-02-20 11:25 UTC (11 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (wcedmisten.fyi)
(TXT) w3m dump (wcedmisten.fyi)
| willdr wrote:
| I'd probably reach for playwright to do something like this. The
| form seems structured enough that you could easily hack something
| together.
| kibwen wrote:
| Bookmarklets/userscripts are such an excellent showcase of why
| the web is so empowering to users and why native apps are such a
| depressing, user-hostile regression.
|
| Example from literally just this morning: I'm organizing an event
| and the venue wanted an attendee list in Excel format. The event
| is organized through meetup.com, which has been "app-ifying"
| their site for years now, which is to say, turning it to useless
| crap. I went to the list of attendees for the event and tried to
| copy-paste the 80-ish names so I could clean it up into a usable
| list... but some cabbage-brained PM has apparently decided that
| users shouldn't be allowed to copy-paste names out of the
| attendees list (literally all the text on the page _except_
| attendee names was selectable). Fortunately it was trivial to
| whip up a tiny script to circumvent this, and made me appreciate
| how annoying it would be to transcribe this all by hand if all I
| had was a useless locked-down mobile app.
| mdrzn wrote:
| Cases like this highlight the importance of having accessible
| OCR tools, such as the one in Windows PowerToys which I learned
| to love. With just a shortcut you can extract text from any
| window, effectively bypassing browser or app limitations.
| crimsontech wrote:
| This is also built in to macOS and iOS now too. Such a handy
| feature that I find myself using a lot.
| dimator wrote:
| How does one do this in macos?
| solardev wrote:
| I thiiiiiiiiink it's technically part of Preview (you can
| paste it into that app after you take a screenshot):
| https://support.apple.com/guide/preview/interact-with-
| text-i...
|
| I don't THINK there is a way to do it straight from the
| snipping tool, but someone correct me if I'm wrong.
|
| Edit: Personally I use the paid Cleanshot app, which is
| not only great for OCR but all sorts of screenshots,
| videos, and annotations: https://cleanshot.com/ You just
| drag a box around the text, click "OCR", and it gets
| copied into your clipboard. I find it easier & faster
| than having to deal with Preview.
|
| I think the free Shottr does the same: https://shottr.cc/
| reaperducer wrote:
| _I don 't THINK there is a way to do it straight from the
| snipping tool, but someone correct me if I'm wrong._
|
| It can be done from the screenshot tool. Take the
| screenshot, and an icon will appear in the lower-right
| corner of the preview. Click that icon and it selects all
| of the text in the preview.
|
| If you don't want all to select all of the text in the
| window, just select the text in the image the same way
| you'd select text in any other program.
|
| _I find it easier & faster than having to deal with
| Preview._
|
| OCR is system-wide on macOS without Preview.
| solardev wrote:
| Great, thanks for the explanation!
| 0cf8612b2e1e wrote:
| On Linux, I created a little script which uses maim to
| capture a user selected screen region, save that to a
| file, run tesseract, and dump the output to stdout. Since
| it is all digital (minus weirdo fonts) the OCR should be
| perfect.
| reaperducer wrote:
| _How does one do this in macos?_
|
| On recent Macs, it's automatic in most programs,
| including Mail, Preview, Quickview, and others. Just
| hover your pointer over text in an image, and if the
| computer recognizes it, you get a text cursor so you can
| select the text. No extra software needed.
|
| If it's a language you can't read, you can often [?]click
| the selected text and it will be translated into the
| language of your choice.
| lancesells wrote:
| It's in the last two versions of macOS. You can grab text
| off of pretty much anything (with text). I've
| occasionally found it annoying when I'm trying to drag
| and drop an image that contains text but it's very useful
| and seamless.
| BlueTemplar wrote:
| Isn't the distinction instead between open source and closed
| source ? (With minified JavaScript counting as "closed" for
| most intents and purposes.)
| kibwen wrote:
| I didn't need the source to fix the issue here, I can
| trivially introspect and open a console to modify the page
| with a single keypress.
| roywiggins wrote:
| You can usually extract text straight from the DOM (barring
| special efforts to obfuscate it), it doesn't matter much if
| there's layers of opaque JavaScript generating it.
| Leftium wrote:
| I think there is a far more effective method in this situation:
| the FDA has mercifully made this data available for download as
| plain text files: https://www.fda.gov/medical-
| devices/510k-clearances/download...
|
| So I would download all 6 files, then write a script/app to fuzzy
| search/filter/transform those files as needed. No need to
| manually scrape using the web form!
|
| For example, here is line 65457 from PMNLSTMN.ZIP. It seems the
| OP is interested in searching the last column and outputting the
| first column: K202167|Cordis
| Corporation|...|N||Brite Tip Radianz Guiding Sheath
| wcedmisten wrote:
| Author here!
|
| That's true, and I actually used that dump[1] and OCR to
| automate about 80% of this project. The manual data entry was
| only required for the 20% that couldn't be found automatically.
|
| Since this was just to fill in the gaps, I figured there would
| be diminishing returns on re-implementing fuzzy search on the
| data, but adding shortcuts to my manual workflow took less time
| for a reasonable speedup.
|
| [1] I also used the JSON dump of this data that the FDA
| provides here: https://open.fda.gov/apis/device/510k/download/
| Leftium wrote:
| Thank goodness~ I imagined the author doing nothing but
| manually scraping data from this web form for an entire year.
| edarchis wrote:
| Nice work and thanks for sharing, it's a good source of
| inspiration for similarly antiquated government web sites.
| TheJoeMan wrote:
| I use this website for work. That search page is certainly dated,
| but may I suggest there is actually the very similar Devices@FDA:
| https://www.accessdata.fda.gov/SCRIPTS/cdrh/devicesatfda/ind...
|
| The Devices@FDA is a single search box, while the one the author
| used breaks out by field, more useful if you know exactly what
| company name, etc. you're looking for. Also, Devices@FDA searches
| both 510(k) and PMA's (the other 1%).
|
| As a side note, for a while the Devices@FDA page was not linked
| from the "databases" root https://www.fda.gov/medical-
| devices/device-advice-comprehens.... I emailed them at the
| comments and feedback link, and they added it within days!
| wcedmisten wrote:
| Author here! I didn't know about that Devices@FDA search,
| thanks for the tip!
|
| My goal for this project is to create a free/open source
| website that enhances this 510k data based on the public data
| dumps. I'd be very interested in hearing about how you use the
| current website for work, and what improvements would be useful
| for you! My email is in my about page.
|
| The major enhancement is to show predicate device information
| as a first-class property of each 510k, since right now the
| data is buried inside various PDFs.
| Keep3893 wrote:
| We can also Userscripts to update old goverment websites, with
| new informations! Like updating vaccinations policies!
| mkl wrote:
| I do this sort of thing a lot, for a bunch of websites I need to
| use for work. I make tables sortable with DataTables, add
| buttons, add important info, fix formatting, make things
| clickable, move things around, sometimes I add whole new UIs. I
| mainly use TamperMonkey, as I like the built-in editing more than
| ViolentMonkey (though it still has its problems).
| glaucon wrote:
| "... it seems to be built from a 1995 tool called Adobe
| ColdFusion"
|
| As an old guy I have to say the "here be dragons" tone of this
| phrase made me laugh. I never used it myself but there was a time
| when ColdFusion was huge.
| Dwedit wrote:
| In 1995, it wasn't an Adobe product. Macromedia was a thing.
| 39 wrote:
| Website keyboard "shortcuts" are the worst, they always break
| other things to give a very non standard means to mutate state.
| 0cf8612b2e1e wrote:
| Looking at all of the sites who have taken over Ctrl-K which is
| the browser shortcut to jump to the search bar.
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(page generated 2024-02-20 23:01 UTC)