Designing Developer Tools with Accessibility and Utility in Mind

Design Lounge Interaction design
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Hi everyone!

I’ve been working on a developer-focused utility site called HexCalculator.org, which offers a suite of fast, accessible, and ad-free hexadecimal conversion tools — including hex to binary, decimal, IP, UTF-8, EBCDIC, and more.

My goal was to design a toolset that:

  • Loads lightning-fast (even on slow networks)
  • Has a clean, distraction-free UI
  • Works well across devices and screen sizes
  • Helps developers, network engineers, and embedded systems enthusiasts

I’m particularly interested in how open-source design principles can be applied to improve developer tools. I’d love feedback on:

  • UI/UX — Is it intuitive enough?
  • Accessibility — Are there improvements I could make for keyboard or screen reader users?
  • Feature suggestions — What tools or formats would you like to see?

Although it’s not fully open-source yet, I’m considering opening it up if there’s interest. What are your thoughts on involving the community in design and development for tools like this?

You can check it out here: https://hexcalculator.org

Looking forward to your feedback and suggestions!

— Peter Parker
(Full Stack Developer & Creator of HexCalculator.org)

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Personally, I consider being open source as a perquisite for this community. Could you elaborate a little bit on the current status? (From my personal view, being open source is not a thing you do after there is interest. You do it from the start, because it’s the requirement to get open source communities involved. Even if it doesn’t always work out)

Personally, I find the “overview” of available conversions not really intuitive. It’s a rather long list that takes a while to scan. And it’s below the fold, so not immediately visible. Given your conversion requires JavaScript anyway, what about something like a dropdown to select a “From” and “To” conversion, and maybe a button to swap the direction. So the list length is only half of what it is right now.

Also, the navigation bar currently requires a lot of space and adds little value. I would recommend to put something useful in it or reduce/remove it.

Last but not least, your site currently connects a lot to Google services by default, which I disapprove on from a privacy perspective. If you must embed YouTube, please ask for a consent before loading that content.

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