Pennsylvania
41 °F Partially cloudy
Blog
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Damn it! This year’s first thunderstorm, (for Pennsylvania at least), just started, and I was going to leave the windows open so I could listen to it because thunderstorms are cool, but the rain was blowing in and soaking everything so I had to close them. I’ll open them again before bed since the heat is still on and this apartment is heated by boilers plus radiators and it gets hotter than hell in here unless the windows are open. Oh well, there will be other thunderstorms.
921 S Pugh St, State College, PA 1680167 °F Cloudy
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I’ve finally found a social reader that’s reasonably accessible and which I like, so now I’m in the midst of transferring all my RSS feeds over to Aperture in earnest. Organizing them is proving a bit of a challenge, but this is also an opportunity to clean things up a bit and decide what I want to continue reading and what I’m happy to discard. For me, RSS as opposed to social media is a much more digestable approach, or at least an approach that assists me in stopping to think about and ponder the things I read, when they require thinking and pondering. Organizing feeds into categories is a great way, for me, to put things like news or politics or whatever into a separate place where I can visit when I want to and then jump out again when it starts to feel like too many people are peeing in the pool.
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Status
Apple is now apparently saying that its Accessibility Events feature, (you know, the one that “may reveal whether an assistive technology is active on your iPhone”), is not enabled by default. Like hell it’s not enabled by default. It sure was enabled when I installed the iOS 12.2 update last weekend on my iPhone 8+). I specifically went in to general/accessibility/VoiceOver to check, and had to turn the feature off. This note includes a screenshot of my just-updated iPhone 5S, and as sure as the sun is shining, the accessibility events feature was turned on. I have a severe allergy to BS, and Apple doesn’t get to bypass the BSometer just because it has a history of caring a lot about accessibility. Websites should be designed and developed from the beginning with accessibility in mind. The guidelines are already out there and have been out there and freely available, complete with extensive documentation so that they can be understood, for over twenty years. There’s a metric ton of freely available information from the accessibility community of practice on every aspect of those guidelines, all over the internet, for basically as long as the guidelines themselves have existed. Assistive technology tracking has been covered already by this community of practice, and we’re probably all tired of it. For Apple to lie about something as simple as whether the feature is on by default indicates at least some corporate squeamishness around implementing it in the first place, and the best thing they could do at this point is to remove it.
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Link
Thoughts On: “Nothing Fails Like Success” by Jeffrey Zeldman
#Let’sFixThis To tell the truth, I don’t have an answer to the questions raised by Jeffrey Zeldman in Nothing Fails Like Success, but as someone who participates in the IndieWeb, and who has seen nothing but benefit from it, both personally and professionally, I have to hope that we can fix what we’ve broken. Not only that, I think we have to fix it, both because this is the only web we have, and because, really, we’re the ones who convinced the general public to use things like Twitter and Facebook and the like. We turned them onto these things, it wasn’t just marketers. I’m not suggesting that any of us should succumb to paralyzing guilt over any of this, and that includes Zuckerberg. For one thing, it’s a whole lot easier to see what’s wrong in the rear-view mirror than it is through the windshield, and for another, paralyzing built would prevent us from doing the fixing. We need to be clear-eyed when it comes to what we’re fixing, and in my opinion there’s a hell of a lot of things that need fixing.
If we have any hope of repair, I think we as designers and developers need to start with ourselves and our industry. We need to get our act together and start behaving like we’re a profession, and we need to discontinue the pervasive practice of rewarding all the wrong things. Those are just for starters, and they’re large undertakings in themselves. And once we get our own house in order, we’ll need to spend some time doing some seriously hard work convincing the genereal public that the content we convinced them to start putting in the hands of the big social media networks is in fact valuable enough to own and control. Next comes making it easier to own and control. Despite every word of criticism I’ve leveled against WordPress’s new editor, I believe Matt Mullenweg is on the right track, at least as far as the concept goes, because I believe the new editor will make it easier for the average, non-technical person to own and control their content, and at the end of the day, average non-technical people are the majority, not designers and developers.
I have to hope we can accomplish all these tasks. Otherewise, the only thing left is to burn everything to the ground. I hate to think we might be at that point. I’m still optimistic about the web, about its openness and independence, about it’s fundamental accessibility, and I’m optimistic about fixing it and making it easier for everyone to participate in the web. To that end, I hope to have at least a small part in fixing it.
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I got an incredibly late start this morning, which is no surprise because I didn’t fall asleep until close th 3AM. I blew through the fourth Virgil Flowers book last night, and holy hell that was some twisted shit. I won’t give the book away for anyone who wants to read the series, but let’s just say I was very, very satisfied when all the villains were gotten rid of or otherwise taken care of. I spent the better part of Saturday sitting on a deck drinking, listening to music, and enjoying the company of friends. I’ve spent the rest of the intervening time between then and today working and reading Virgil Flowers books. At this rate I’ll be done with the series by the beginning of May, if it takes that long. After finishing what’s there I’ll start the Prey Series by the same author I think, because I’ll need to wait until the next book in the Foowers series comes out, and that won’t be until October. The Hockey play-offs start tonight, and my teams are (I think) all playing, so I’ll spend the evening listening to the games. I’ve taken a break from Apple Watch challenges for the moment. I was really, really tired after the last round, so I’ve taken the last week off, and will get things rolling again with regard to exercising starting on Sunday I think.
921 S Pugh St, State College, PA 1680157 °F Partly Cloudy
