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I think education of others by people with disabilities is important. Not that we’re obligated to do it, but it’s more productive a lot of the time.

One thing we don’t seem to be discussing though, (and I hope we can), is burn-out among people with disabilities with regard to being educators.

People who aren’t expected to do their jobs every day of every minute of their lives, and they still suffer from burn-out.

I’m not saying education is our job, but lots of times it feels like one, and so I think maybe we should look at helping each other recognize burn-out, recognize when to take a break, and more importantly learn how to give ourselves permission to take a break, because these don’t seem to be things we’re talking about when it comes to advocacy and education.

And I suspect needing a break is where a lot of us are at.

The fight seems endless, and it’s hard to see impact when you’re in the thick of it.

Just something to consider.

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The dictionary is caving and listing “literally” as meaning “actually”, “in effect” or “virtually” along with the original meaning and I completely resent this caving.

Militant wing of Toastmasters, rise up! (don’t tell me there isn’t a militant wing of Toastmasters I know there is you’all are just hiding it).

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Sweet! The Supreme court is going to hear Google V. Oracle, in which Oracle is trying to claim they can copyright the Java APIs which are necessary for Android among other things to run. Hoping the nerds win this one because FFS can we have at least one thing that Oracle doesn’t ruin upon contact?

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WordPress should deprecate themes — a modest proposal by Mike Schinkel
Personally, I have never found a theme that is 100% useable without some significant HTML+CSS customization and/or PHP/MySQL/Javascript customization. And even the best themes use approaches that result in sites that require a huge amount of time to maintain the content because the themer made easy coding choices rather than build functionality to allow managing content with less effort. Examples include using categories to group content where a custom taxonomy would be better, and a custom post would be best.

WordPress themes as they currently stand should absolutely be done away with, even though the concept of separating presentation from content is an excellent foundation.

Sepearating content from presentation might have been the original purpose of themes, but that definitely hasn’t proved to be the case in practice.

Put more succinctly, the law of unintended consequences strikes again.

As a general rule, I find that themes, (and I’m not including every theme developer or designer here, just lots of them), promise way more than they can ever deliver.

I can’t count the number of sites I’ve worked on over the years in which management of expectations with regard to what a client can do with a theme and what they can’t has played a significant role.

Add to this the complexities of customizing a theme so that it becomes accessible, (something required especially when there’s a lawsuit or demand letter or even just a desire to make the site accessible involved), and you have a recipe for more headache for the developer and the client than there should be.

There’s a reason I won’t touch anything from Theme Forest, which is admittedly the most extreme case but far from the only concentration of trashfire from a code standpoint that’s out there.

And I don’t see any of this changing until one of the least-modernized parts of WordPress, (the theme infrastructure) is gone.

If Gutenberg helps us get there, I’m all for it, even though I still think Matt should spend about three days without his mouse and monitor stuck with a screen reader and Gutenberg.