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OK Micro.blog in particular and #indieweb in general, we have another insentive to work on accessibility: Mastodon will be accessible, but only to a point, for the foreseeable future.

I am a huge fan of what the federated web represents, and I hoped Mastodon could be a way for more people to participate in that without having to manage the technical aspects of going full Indieweb. But if the federated web is going to carry over one of the worst parts of the corporate web, (intentionally cutting corners when it comes to including everyone while at the same time the expectation of recognition for the parts of the community of disabilities it has included), then it’s time to fedquit.

It’s like silo-quitting, except a whole lot more disappointing.

I can, and will, quit using Mastodon, as soon as I’m done writing this status. I’ll continue supporting the underlying protocols which are the back end of Mastodon on my personal site, in the hope that someday there’s a project that supports open protocols but is built with accessibility in mind from the ground up.

But I believe I’d be missing out on a huge opportunity to help move the IndieWeb forward if I failed to use this moment to encourage other platforms which make it easier for other non-technical people to participate in the IndieWeb to up their game and make sure that everyone is included.

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Has there been any further communication from NFB leadership regarding that instance of providing a serial sexual harasser a platform coupled with organizational blessing at this past summer’s convention, or is that one of those things we’re just supposed to memory hole.

Last time I heard, President Mark Riccabono

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Marcy Sutton (@marcysutton on Twitter) asks:

For people with disabilities out there: how does it make you feel when a website isn’t accessible? I’m mostly looking to hear about the quality of your experience when you encounter barriers to access, more than the types of problems out there. This applies to physical spaces and events, too. (I don’t normally dwell on the negative, but it’s for a purpose)

(thread starts here).

I was going to answer this on Twitter by way of a quote, but I think it’ll take more than 280 characters. The short answer: It depends on the site or event.

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I watch panels like this as well as related talks, and then I think about the state of tech privacy and ethics generally in the United States, (see our recent congressional tech hearings), and I’m asking myself why I haven’t started day-drinking. Europe is having constructive discussions about this stuff while

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Takeaway from this talk, which anyone who contributes to open source or free software or anyone introducing others to said software should take to heart: Capitalism loves what you create, but companies do not love you and never will, even if they create things you like. Companies are not your friend. They are not on your side. We should all keep this in mind the next time we find ourselves overcome by the desire to kill ourselves in the creation of something which has the potential to benefit a lot of people. By all means, create that thing. But we need to make sure we look after things like our mental health, our relationships with our loved ones, the things that are truly important in life. I saw some tweets today mentioning the fact that Apple essentially glorified working weekends and the like during WWDC. I’ve seen the prioritization of working basically non-stop for the cause of disability rights or equal access for all. Of course nobody comes out and recommends that, but it’s there. It’s sort of expected I think, (see, for example, people with disabilities being urged to educate rather than to demand

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I happen to agree with Matt’s assessment of Twitter which he expressed at the WordCamp Portland Q&A, so I’m going to try a different tack than Twitter because I hate Twitter threads and this is something that just can’t be discussed in two hundred and eighty character bursts.

Matt, I get that it bothers you at a deep, moral level to hold back a user experience that will significantly upgrade the publishing ability and success of tens or hundreds of millions of users. What should also bother you at a deep, moral level, (and it really doesn’t seem to be bothering you at all), is that you are significantly downgrading

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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.

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I just accidentally closed my browser and lost a ton of work. How’s your Friday going?

This post is a test of how post kinds will display when sharing to Facebook.

I’m biting the bullet and letting WordPress.com manage syndication to Facebook since I really don’t want to rangle Facebook and Facebook seems to be giving Micro.blog a hard time by (seemingly randomly) discontinuing publishing to Facebook pages.

Specifically, I want to see if I can publish without manually adding a custom message and still have the contents of titleless posts post in their entirety to Facebook.

There’s a bit of an issue for low-vision users of the Facebook app on iOS at least when you post just the title of a post and the link without an accompanying message.

I seriously doubt Facebook is going to do anything about this, since they pretty much don’t listen to their accessibility team unless someone somewhere in management decides it’s time to throw them their occasional bone, so I’m trying to mitigate it from my end.

Apologies in advance to those who are following me on Facebook while I test this.