Notes – Page 108 – Amanda Unvarnished

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· 25 Iyyar 5779 (Thursday 30 May 2019) · 1 minute to read

I re-added my main feed so I could continue using Icro to post to Micro.blog. It apparently does not work if you add a single post kind feed. Having to load the mobile version of the ad new post screen from my WordPress it’s just a little bit too much work. I like to be able to compose a note quickly on my phone without having to navigate through a bunch of headings and buttons and check boxes. I’m not sure how all of the other post will show up, like chickens, but do not have a title, on Twitter, but I guess we will figure this out. I don’t post very much, so this shouldn’t become a real issue. Not chickens, check ends. God, dictation on the iPhone still sucks. Now I am tempted to go create a chicken post kind, just for laughs.

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Amanda CAARSON

· 25 Iyyar 5779 (Thursday 30 May 2019) · 1 minute to read

Dear fellow developers: If you’re one of those developers who makes it impossible to press the tab key to move through a screen, hand in your dev creds now and put down your IDE until you learn to do better. I should not have to get help from a sighted person to add FTP users to a server. This is becoming a serious problem. Learn HTML damn it! Learn HTML as if I am going to find out where you live.

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Amanda CAARSON

· 20 Iyyar 5779 (Saturday 25 May 2019) · 1 minute to read

Waaaaaaa! My weather widget broke! I’m pretty sure this is absolutely something I did, and I’ll get it fixed. But still, Waaaaaaaa! I had to break with developer best practices and code in production. Well, I suppose I technically didn’t have to, I could have made a call to support to copy production to development, added my few lines, and then made another call to copy development back to production, (don’t ask, but it has to do with accessibility of the copy tool I need to use to copy back and forth between environments), but yeah, not interested in calling to have someone copy back and forth. Not for a few lines anyway. So, the weather widget is gone for now until I figure out why it broke.

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Amanda CAARSON

· 3 Iyyar 5779 (Wednesday 8 May 2019) · 1 minute to read

Dear #1u #UberLyftStrike #UberShutDown I am totally on board with gig economy workers receiving just wages and all the benefits of employment, but these campaigns once again ignore the fact that, in a lot of locations, Uber and Lyft are the only sources of reliable transportation for people with disabilities who cannot drive and where public transportation is sorely lacking. People with disabilities cannot just take a day off work or cancel appointments for the sake of a boycott. Activism which mandates the participation of everyone without exception and without considering whether or not it is possible for everyone to participate fully is just as ableist as legislation which specifically targets people with disabilities, and just as in the legislation case, good intentions don’t mitigate the harm. And yes fellow liberals, I’m calling you on this, because theoretically at least, you’re supposed to know better. So, do better.

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Amanda CAARSON

· 3 Iyyar 5779 (Wednesday 8 May 2019) · 1 minute to read

Everybody is swooning over Google’s upcoming automated captions, except zero of the people who actually need them. I have to wondere how it is that as an industry we manage to convince ourselves that we’ve collaborated with people with disabilities on all this amazing new accessibility tech that helps us avoid the obvious solution: Do it right in the first place. I’m sure there were messages across email lists, or surveys, or whatever, with asks for testers, ETC. But the deaf community has been saying for years that automated captions aren’t an optimal solution, and it seems arrogant to me at worst and well-meaningly naive at best that all that advice about automated captions would be ignored for the sake of Google’s business goals. We know what accessibility advancements look like, because people with disabilities have been telling us what they need, for years. Maybe one day as an industry we’ll actually start listening. I’m not holding my breath for the foreseeable future though.

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Amanda CAARSON

· 1 Iyyar 5779 (Monday 6 May 2019) · 1 minute to read

Amazon Help now requires an inaccessible capptcha in order to add gift cards to your account. Multiple calls and chats basically tell us: your screwed get a friend or someone to help you. Are we still going with moderate advocacy? Are we still going with moderation in the pursuit of justice? Asking for a fuckton of friends. Because really, how many times do we have to offer a pass on what has been around for twenty plus years before we’re allowed to say enough? How many times do large organizations with a metric ton of resources with which they can handle accessibility get to fuck this stuff up before the dipplomatic wing of the blind community allows the rest of us to to express anything other than walking on eggshells when it comes to advocating for accessibility? How many times does Amazon or similar get to be called out on accessibility-related matters before the dipplomatic wing of the blind community decides that maybe it’s time to either help by not scolding the rest of us regarding advocacy methods, or get out of the way if it can’t help? Once again, asking for a fuckton of friends.