Deep cut · May 2024
Teletype Weather
Today's forecast rendered as if it printed on a 1970s teleprinter, one character at a time.
Why it matters
None. It's a toy. I wanted to feel the cadence of a teletype — the specific, mechanical rhythm of a machine printing the news to you one clatter at a time.
What I built
A static page that pulls a public forecast API and types it out with authentic teleprinter timing, bell characters, and column wrapping — with an instant-render fallback for reduced-motion and screen readers. The full text is in the DOM immediately; the animation is purely decorative.
What I learned
"Decorative animation" is a real accessibility category. The trick is making the experience optional without making the content optional. Also: accurate teletype timing is weirdly specific — the carriage return is the slow part, and getting that wrong breaks the whole illusion.
Some projects are arguments and some are just pleasures. Teletype Weather is a pleasure. It fetches the day’s forecast and prints it to the screen the way a Model 33 Teletype would have — character by character, with the right delays, a bell on the alerts, and a carriage return that takes its sweet mechanical time.
There’s nothing useful about the delivery; the same forecast in plain text would be faster to read. That’s the point. The cadence is the product, the way the slowness of a film projector is part of the film.
The one thing I took seriously was access. The complete forecast is written into the DOM the instant
the data arrives, so a screen reader gets it immediately and anyone with prefers-reduced-motion
set sees it all at once. The clatter is an enhancement layered on top of content that never depends
on it. A toy can still be built correctly.