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In an exclusive interview, I sat down with Libo Cao Meyers, a top engineering executive at Apple, and talked with her all about her having polio, immigrating to America from China, working in tech, her new memoir, and giving back to the disability community.

https://www.forbes.com/sites/stevenaquino/2023/05/18/how-a-disabled-chinese-immigrant-turned-polio-and-ableism-into-becoming-an-apple-executive-and-author/

—@steven_aquino

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#Google just announced that going forward, any account not logged into for two years gets deleted.

This means huge amounts of rare or unique #video is about to disappear from #YouTube as accounts get flagged as inactive, such as when the user dies. Families’ #HomeMovies (often posted by an older relative for their family’s benefit), historical footage, rare #television clips, etc. What an incalculable loss to human #history and culture!

If there are videos important to you on someone else’s video channel, find a way to download them. And if you have rare #media of historical importance, consider leaving it to institutional #archives or lending it to archives for digital preservation.

—@StevenCapsuto

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Hugops to every other #mastoadmin having to deal with this spam wave. We have been fighting is on mastodon.social for days, and were forced to close registrations yesterday until we could emergency-deploy countermeasures.
Unfortunately, this made them realise they are other servers in the Fediverse to target.
If any admin needs help fighting this, please ping me either on the server admin discord, or directly here, and I will gladly help.

—@renchap

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Great NPR article over the weekend on Gertrude Oforiwa Fefoame, the blind chair of the United Nations Committee on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities. I highly recommend you read it! Key sentence, “How do you define disability?
It is not the presence of the impairment, but it is the social and attitudinal barriers that are hindering our performance.”
Link: https://www.npr.org/sections/goatsandsoda/2023/05/13/1174089463/when-getty-began-losing-her-vision-as-a-girl-she-was-told-her-life-was-over-wron
#blind #NFB #LowVision #disability

—@NothingLeftOfMe

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IRS tests free e-filing system that could compete with tax-prep giants by Jacob Bogage
The tax agency has quietly built its own prototype system for filing tax returns digitally and free of charge, according to current and former officials.

The good news here is not just that the IRS will debut a “prototype system to allow Americans to file tax returns digitally and free of charge” in a pilot test next year—it’s that the IRS was smart enough to get help from the U.S. Digital Service instead of rounding up the usual government-contracting suspects. And this is probably at least one of those suspects, Booze Allen Hamilton, is finally trying to hire a senior web accessibility specialist.

I’m so glad we have an administration and a president who actually gives a shit about accessibility, and plan to do everything in my power to keep the Republicans from regaining the presidency since they continue to demonstrate that they couldn’t care less about web or any other kind of accessibility, and continue to fuck up everything they touch with regard to technology.