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The highest ranking search result for accessibility auditing tools is accessibilitychecker.org. The design and initial messaging had me suspicious out of the gate, but I didn’t see immediate branding for an overlay company.

That is until I submitted a sample test of Google and saw one of the overlay monsters appear as a recommended solution.

Equally as gross, to my mind, is the “legal action” modal that appears when you attempt to use the “back to home” link.

Don’t fall for this one, folks.

—@belwerks

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I see dueling opinions about whether the Fediverse needs to be easier for “normies” to use, against whether the “official” Mastodon app promoting the “official” server is a betrayal of the very idea of federated social media. This could be a spicy take, but I think both can be true at the same time.

The Fediverse is great because it can be as simple or as complex as you want it to be – you have the choice of what your experience is. You can have the easy app, or pick your favorite server, or even build it all yourself. Both can coexist!

I get the fear of one big player dictating the experience, but undoing the open standards already in place would be very difficult. I think the pendulum has plenty of room to swing toward being welcoming without endangering what we’ve already built 🙂​

—@courtney

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The inclusive design principles by @tink @iheni @heydon and @IanPouncey are back after a bit of a lie down

“These Inclusive Design Principles are about putting people first. It’s about designing for the needs of people with permanent, temporary, situational, or changing disabilities — all of us really.”

Available in 5 languages

#usability #accessibility #inclusiveDesign

https://inclusivedesignprinciples.org/

—@SteveFaulkner

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The Voice Dream team has announced that they’re dropping the yearly sub price to $40, which may mean more new users can afford it while still helping out the team with the costs of maintaining the app.

Imo some of the criticism that lead to Voice Dream making this decision was incredibly rude. There’s no cause for talking to small dev teams the same way you would to a multi-billion-dollar corporation. Fuck sake.

—@JustGrist

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A programmer makes a scraping bot. Makes it opt-out. The tool floods numerous websites with aggressive bandwidth requests.

When asked to change how the bot works, he tells the people complaining—led by well-known developer Terence Eden—that they’re getting in the way of progress and that his bot should be treated like a person.

Can we talk about how incredibly awful this behavior is?

https://www.vice.com/en/article/dy3vmx/an-ai-scraping-tool-is-overwhelming-websites-with-traffic

—@ernie