Some fun (and potentially horrifying, if you know anything about coding) facts about Google docs that I have forcibly discovered via my new job:
1: due to their newest "this is a GREAT IDEA!" idea, Google docs is now actually an Image, not actually text on your screen.
1a: Google docs uses an html element called a Canvas now, which is exactly what it sounds like -- using JavaScript, Google accepts your key presses, cursor movement (for selecting, moving text chunks, etc), and other such interactions, translates those actions into a form the canvas can understand, and then DRAWS THOSE ACTIONS ON THE CANVAS
2: if you're wondering how efficient this actually is, the answer is "not very". Every interaction you make, from clicking to move the cursor, typing a single letter, deleting a single letter, highlighting words... it all triggers code that quickly erases a large chunk of the canvas and then redraws everything previously erased with your new change. Sometimes even just sliding your cursor across the doc is enough to make the JavaScript code erase and rebuild an entire page image. Yes, this happens literally on every keystroke. Yes this is probably part of the reason that Google docs eats things sometimes.
3: yes this is actually Horrible for accessibility needs, because all that text you see on the screen? It's not text. It doesn't exist AS TEXT in any location that external code (or you and I!) can access. Google saves your document as a bunch of text + metadata about that text (and any images, so yes, images being added to a Google doc are being Redrawn On The Canvas) but we can't access that without explicitly getting access to the Google doc API
4: yes this means that screen readers can't actually read anything on Google docs except via the API (which requires a Lot of hoops and is frankly very poorly documented, as many APIs are) or via some. Fascinating code wiggles.
4a: yes I'm aware of this specifically because I needed to get a specific screen reader web extension working with Google docs, and yes I went the route of the fascinating code wiggles because it enabled me to get screen reader support on shared but uneditable documents, which is actually NOT GUARANTEED with any other method of getting access to the text.
5: somewhat unrelated to screen reader accessibility, and much more of a 'huh, weird decision, but I guess I get it', but all those Pages you scroll past in a long document? Google is reusing 4 canvases at most to display that whole document. Depending on your direction of scroll, Google keeps Last Page, The Two Pages Potentially Visible On Screen, and Page After Those Two Pages (so if you're looking at the middle of page 4 of a document, Google has probably got page 3, page 4, page 5 and page 6 loaded on the four available canvases. If you scroll up to the bottom of page three, those loaded pages switch to pages 2, 3, 4, and 5). The canvases are erased and redrawn with the new page as you move, which is why if you fast scroll thru a long document, everything goes WEIRD as gdocs tries desperately to load/erase/load canvases fast enough to keep up.
That bit really doesn't affect too much of my work, it's just a weird aside I found fascinating while I was working on the extension.
6: have you ever felt that the font and font size you're typing with on gdocs doesn't look Quite Right? That's because the canvas interface has it's own specific interpretation of font and font sizes that doesn't always align with browsers or word processors. This is less on google and more just a result of the fact that font and font sizes are not, and have never Been, actually standardized across different programs. Every browser, word processor, browser based word processor, text pad, etc has Literally Their Own Interpretation Of Display. Most of the time you can't see the difference with your eyes, because a lot of these interpretations agree pretty well with each other, but sometimes the difference CAN be spotted, especially if you're opening the same document in multiple places and comparing them.
I'm sure there are other things I've forgotten about, but this is getting long enough, so XD
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