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Current status: Banging on the Twentytwenty theme with all the screen readers and helping @whiskeydragon1 set up his .org account because he’s also testing. #ScreenReaderTagTeam #AllTheProps #5FTF and we haz some patches coming.

It’s very nice to have someone in real time and not remote or chat-based to bounce ideas off of.

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It’s cold up here, and the cold happened a lot earlier in the year than I’m used to, so I think it’s time to start listening to the Harry Potter film scores while I work.

I could do this in the summer but it’s just not the same.

Luckily there’s already a playlist for this, so I can just hit play and let it go.

I don’t shuffle them, I just let them play all the way through in order.

Best way to listen to film scores.

Other favorites: Star Wars, (originals, not remasters), Labyrinth, (original, not remake), Hobbit and Lord of the Rings, (all of them, in order of Hobbit movies and then Lord of the Rings movies).

I should put together a list of all the film scores I like and stick them on a page.

162 McCormick Ave, State College, PA 16801

41 °F Clear

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#WCUS I’m glad that @RianKinney asked that question regarding accessibility and other policies.

It would be so cool if we could treat #a11y as an “everything-is-awesome” moment and not as a must-do.

Problem with that approach was aptly illustrated by Gutenberg being released in an inaccessible state.

I’d like to say I’m surprised we’re apparently still doing this despite $31,000 worth of audit, but I’m not.

Yes, it would be totally awesome if we didn’t have to say “you must” with regard to accessibility, but unfortunately the makers of the web have consistently demonstrated that that is literally the only way anything gets done.

For the first few years of my career as an accessibility practitioner, I worked on a series of projects whose final reports heavily focused on only the positive, including asking testers with disabilities to talk about what they liked, even on seriously inaccessible sites.

That approach wasn’t just partially ineffective, it was one hundred percent ineffective.

Absolutely none of the sites reported on were fixed, or even improved.

Those sites are still broken.

That’s what happens when you spend your time objecting to accessibility must-dos because they’re must-dos instead of realizing that, yes Matt, there really are things that developers and designers have consistently demonstrated they will not do unless you basically force them to do those things.

All of this also goes for privacy and codes of conduct.

Why do we have to keep saying this?

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#WCUS #sOTW @photomatt didn’t mention this, but as of WordPress 5.2 the widgets screen got a metric ton of #a11y improvements, which means I get to update the WordPress with a Screen Reader widgets tutorial and you get to use the same widgets screen as everyone else, including when plugin developers explicitly disable widgeet accessibility mode.

Huge hugs and shoutout to everyone who worked on that.

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#WCUS Question: Do you find it easier to read websites/pages that are multicolumn or single-column?

It doesn’t matter to me as a screen reader user, because everything is always a single column, but I’m thinking that if a page is one column, never-ending scrolling can become an issue.

On the other hand, there could be a reason that multiple columns could also be an issue for people who use their vision to read.

Thoughts?

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Everybody’s new #WCUS selfies and headshots were making me jealous and agrevating the fomo, so I decided to bite the bullet and put some work into customerservant.com

I’m just focusing on a few simple things today because, well, I need some easy wins.

Right now it’s just a picture and some text on the website, cleaning up things that aren’t being used, and then later on after the State of the Word, some things I need to have my host handle.

I’ll do some more complicated work tomorrow during the contributor day.

But, starting is much better than planning and not doing, so I’m taking the easy wins for now.

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OK, this book and Hummus. First, if your hummus tastes like baby shit, then it’s really bad hummus. Second, if your tahini isn’t spicy, it’s not tahini. You mix the tahini with the hummus and then you dip your meat or pita bread or veggies (cucumbers or tomatoes or artichokes work best but zuccini is workable) in the mix. People who eat hummus eat meat all the time, you dip lamb in hummus if you don’t like mint jelly. This author usually does good research and it could be that this character is meant to be an ignoramus, but yeah hummus plus tahini plus meat is absolutely a thing, and you can do it with lamb or steak or chicken or goat. Trying to decide if this will effect the rating I give this book.

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True love is your boyfriend buying a case of a local brew he thinks you’ll like, and recommending you drink some of it and call your best friends after you’ve had a bad day.

I’ll post about the beer later, but mad elf is fucking right. That’s also one of the best craft beers I’ve tasted, and it’s got something like two times the alcohol as store-bought beers, so yeah I ended up definitely drunk last night, and I have zero regrets. Will definitely do again.

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Welp looks like I will be taking time out of my work day to pause and install a new iOS update that is thankfully available because after taking a phone call earlier today and ending that call I have encountered what I’ll call the “all your sounds are belong to us” feature of iOS 13.

Apparently this is applicable to VoiceOver users only, and it wouldn’t be nearly as big of a deal as it is if it weren’t for the fact that just about everything I log into requires two-factor authentication and I need my phone for that because Google Authenticator is on my phone and so is the SMS app which I use for backup or for services that won’t let you use an authenticator app.

I am very much not happy right now because this requires me to not do things like log in to GitHub or Google Drive or a ton of really important stuff for work.

For those of you who aren’t voiceOver users, it happened like this.

Take phone call, say things, end phone call. Phone then completely shuts down and refuses to reboot despite having 94% battery power, requires sticking it on the charger and having John call me which then rings my watch which apparently sets off a chain reaction between phone and watch which the attempt to ping my phone from my watch did not set off.

That’s it, the rule about not drinking while working is being temporarily suspended because I have a meeting at 8PM and I just wasted something like forty five minutes. Update is installing now so I get to restart the phone and go through the whole “getting started” bullshit and pray that this bug is resolved in 13.2 because it is absolutely not cool that I’ll have to look out for this every time I take a phone call.

How’s your Tuesday going?

162 McCormick Ave, State College, PA 16801

59 °F Cloudy

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I’ve been forcibly upgraded to iOS 13.2. Yes, it finally happened.

I was just pleasantly surprised by the fact that VoiceOver audio is no longer send to a paired bluetooth speaker. I forgot that was a new feature of iOS 12.

I was not so pleasantly surprised by VoiceOver repeating “space space” at its loudest volume even though its volume isn’t set there.

Thankfully it didn’t wake the sweety up. He’s out like a light.

117 McCormick Ave, State College, PA 16801

51 °F Cloudy

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#MeetTheBlind Independence means not being turned into a zoo exhibit without my consent by those who would claim the title of being my spokesmen, and it means calling out those who would lead the blind community when they attempt to coerse me into participating in inspiration porn after they have failed to convince me to join the ranks of inspiration prostitutes. Independence means calling out those who would represent me when they talk but do not walk with regard to sexism after having made repeated promises to fix it within their ranks. Independence means shining a bright light on significant accessibility failures on the part of those who would represent me when they claim the right to enforce accessibility for others. And finally, independence means that my friends and family and colleagues view and treat me like a human first and an inspiration second not because I’ve had to constantly remind them to do so, but because they didn’t need Meet the Blind Month to convince them of my humanity.

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The first complete Siddur (prayerbook) I ever used was the 1949 edition of Hasiddur Hashalem, translated by Philip Birnbaum and published by the Hebrew Publishing Company.

I still love that prayerbook, despite its stilted English.

Since the Hebrew Publishing Company basically hasn’t existed since 2016, all of their works have entered the public domain through a combination of a lot of the works being published before 1975 and several more of the works having reached 75 years since the death of their authors, which automatically puts them in the public domain.

One of the things I always wondered about is why Birnbaum spends a significant portion of the introduction to HaSiddur HaShalem essentially trashing the work of every translator who came before him.

Why would you spend something like 5 or 10 dense pages basically subtweeting every other translator?

Since all these works have entered the public domain, now I know why.

Apparently this is a thing they all did up to a certain point. There are limits, (for example, everybody’s wives and kids are off limits, and nobody’s Jewish status is questioned), but other than that, everything’s fair game, personal or professional.

It is, (or was) apparently a long-standing tradition which seems to have been set aside for the most part after the Holocaust and then is completely gone by the 70’s.

And it apparently started around the first time the prayerbook was translated and edited in America.

Brittish translations, on the other hand, are on the surface more polite, however the insults are basically “bless your heart” to the Americans and a lot more backhanded to their fellows in Britain, specifically England.

The Scottish make the Americans look like they’re having milk and cookies together.

All of this is fascinating to me.

921 S Pugh St, State College, PA 16801

59 °F Clear

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I missed this earlier in the year, but apparently the NFB is partnering with Be My Eyes as self-described blindness experts.

Sorry NFB but if you’re declaring yourself an expert, you’re not an expert.

Why do I have a feeling this is going to be just as useful as WordPress experts?

I can see it now. All the disability related posts featuring hard-core federationists in the comments sections are going to come with tons of “as a blindness expert” in the comments aren’t they?

That’s all we need. Thought leaders ultiplying at gremlin-like rates.

Points to the first person who comes up with a stealable designation for these ever-multiplying thought leader gremlins, extra if the word gremlin is involved.

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Wow. Basecamp’s gotten a metric ton of accessibility improvements.

Finally, reasonably accessible project management.

I have a lot of catching up to do to get in line with the way everyone else manages their projects, but I suspect my life’s about to get a lot easier.

Mmmm fewer spreadsheets and fewer hacky internal applications.

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One of the things I love about Micro.blog is that the timeline is chronological. This means I can hit the back button after reading through a conversation and land on the post that started the whole thing off. On Facebook, for example, if I hit the back button, I get dropped to a random point within my newsfeed, and I lose the place I was at. The post from which I rabbitholed is never to be seen again. Thanks, Micro.blog.

117 McCormick Ave, State College, PA 16801(3811ft)

43 °F Partly Cloudy