Guess who starved their Apple Watch to death during a workout today? That’s right kids, me! So I had to charge it in order to get my last couple of stands and my last two workouts in in order to achieve my 600 points for my Apple Watch competitions. I had most of it knocked out by 10 o’clock this morning though. I will probably do the same thing again tomorrow.
Blog
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If you’re waiting to add accessibility to your projects until your clients ask and pay for it, please rethink your strategy. Accessibility is not a feature. It is not a nice to have. It’s harder to do when you bolt it on after the fact instead of building it in at the start, and the only thing you’re doing with this approach is creating more work for yourself, more hardship for your clients, and a shitty experience for people with disabilities. Please do not do this. Add as much aas you can by stealth if you have to. If your client asks you for some functionality, build the accessibility in without their permission if necessary. If the eclient balks at accessibility, (this does happen), walk away. I’m telling you to do that because I’ve done it myself. I promise you that if they’re balking at accessibility there’s a pretty safe bet they’ll balk at other best practices too, and then blame you when things go south because best practice corners were cut.
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This week I learned that, in order to receive credit for excercise minutes when you engage in an indoor walk, you first have to calibrate your Apple Watch using the Outdoor Walk workout while outside with good GPS reception. I have not done this, so the Apple Watch did not give me credit for the fifteen thousand steps I took on Tuesday, nor the thirty-minute indoor walk I did yesterday. I am participating in three challenges this week, so this matters a great deal. To make up for this, I spent forty-six minutes on the bike yesterday and today. Denise has joined the fray, and now has an Apple Watch, and she is one of my coompetitors this week. I plan to go out at some point to calibrate the watch, but I was still pretty pissed when I realized I wasn’t getting exercise minutes credit. I’ve already done my workout for today, so all I have to do is concentrate on filling up the move ring. Right now though I’m contemplating lunch.
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I am so glad to be done working for today. Today was as crazy as Mondays usually are, except towards the end of the day things got very crazy very fast. I ended up multitasking during my last meeting, and we all know how dangerous multitasking can be. For now though, it’s time to think about dinner.
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Link
Better Link Text: 4Ss for Encouraging Clicks
Link text which makes sense out of context is often cited as an accessibility concern. It’s not only an accessibility concern, it’s also beneficial for the people in your audience who do not have a disability of any kind. Like several of the other things which are primarily accessibility concerns but which also end up benefiting the rest of your audience, (captions for videos, transcription for audio, heading structure of your website as a whole and each piece of your content separately, just to name a few), it turns out that link text which can be made sense of out of context by assistive technology users are also a great way to increase clicks generally. Most people do not read an entire page on the web. They scan it instead, so links that make sense out of context, along with being distinguishable in othere ways from the rest of the text, (underlining links, anyone)? are more likely to capture the attention of your visitors than are links which have vague or repetative text as their label. I will note that you can’t take advantage of any of these benefits if your primary platform for content distribution is a social media presence as opposed to a website you own and control. (Indieweb for the win, again).
So, score one more for accessibility benefiting everyone. And, if you’re not doing so already, spend some time putting some thought into your link text. If you’re using social media as your personal or professional home on the web, here’s one more reason to consider either starting your own website, or hiring someone to build one for you.