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I still think it’s pretty messed up that, for the purpose of getting the topic of equal access for all on the web some play, we have to refer to the benefits for search engine optimization, (most of which are myths), because that’s the only way most people are going to pay attention. It’s either that, or try scaring people by reminding that eventually, they won’t be fully abled. I get it, I’m not going to stop doing it, but it’s still one of the less-desirable, less-lovable parts of accessibility for me.

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I’m helping a screen reader who has been recently introduced to WordPress configure their new site, and noticed that they were becoming frustrated with the clutter of their WordPress administration menu thanks to plugins arbitrarily adding things to their top-level menus and inserting their own top-level menus in between the out-of-the-box ones. I had them install Menu Humility by Mark Jaquith. Despite the plugin not being updated in over a year, it still works exactly as it is intended, and I install it on every new site I build and every site I rebuild. I’ve mentioned this plugin before on this site, but wanted to mention it again because I find it so useful in my quest to minimize the trashfire that can result when plugin and theme authors clutter the dashboard in order to fulfill their own hopes or desires for more downloads or upgrades with no regard for the users actually using WordPress. If you’re running the latest version of WordPress, (and you really should be), upon viewing the plugin in the plugins/add-new screen, you’ll get a notice that says “untested with your version of WordPress.” In this case, ignore that notice, because this still works, thanks to WordPress’s commitment to backwards compatibility. This isn’t so much an accessibility issue as it is a “get off my lawn, stop cluttering my dashboard with your crap, my dashboard isn’t your playground” kind of scenario. Menu Humility isn’t the only plugin that can help with dashboard clutter, but it’s the first step to making it a saner place which induces less rage. Go get it if you haven’t already.

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I want to put an Apple Watch on a drummer from a speed metal band. Then, I want that drummer to perform a concert, and I want to see the results. Specifically, the step count and the exercise/move numbers. That would be really interesting. Come on speed metal drummers, cough up your data! Think of the children!

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Wow. Apparently I have not had enough coffee yet, because I just tried to log into a WordPress install on a domain I haven’t owned for a while now. I have no idea why I even typed that domain as I haven’t thought about it in months. Maybe even a year or more. I’m not sure why it popped into my head just now. I wasn’t planning to be up this early today, but my brain woke me up around 4AM, so up it is I guess. Welcome to Sunday.

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Me, after the windows have been open for a few minutes: “Something smells good coming in here. It’s probably the drier.” The Sweety: “Na, I farted.” This is how you win Friday night, I’m still laughing. Shabbat shalom y’all.

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Since I have to re-add tabs to the browser, I’ve decided micro.blog gets the first spot this time. I’ll be taking a good hard look at what gets launched at startup. Maybe I’ll leave some of them off. I’m still deciding. For right now, an ice cold root beer is in order.

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Sooooooooo……. Firefox updated, and after the updates were finished, all my tabs are gone. How’s your Friday going? I’m going to be so glad when this day is finally over. The universe has been telling me all day I should not be working and it’s apparently hell-bent on forcing the issue. I may take Monday off as well since I didn’t get this past Monday off. Only two more hours left.

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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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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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This essay from the Hoover Institute is worth a read for anyone discussing either online speech in general or the embarrassingly wrong pieces on Sec. 230 which have appeared in both Vox and the Washington Post in the last few days. Click here to read the full version in as accessible a format as possible without having to download the document yourself and tag it.

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Avoid Emoji as Class Names by Adrian Roselli
The title of this post is not broad enough. Avoid emoji as any identifier, whether as strings in your script, IDs on your elements, classes for your CSS, and so on. As soon as you start using emoji, you are blocking some users from being able to understand or use your code. It doesn’t matter how popular the technique becomes (or doesn’t).

As a screen reader user, I agree with this advice, but mostly because Jaws for Windows, (“the best-in-class screen reader), pretty much sucks at any language that isn’t written with Latin characters. And quite frankly it’s time for this situation to change. In order to read Hebrew using Jaws, I’d have to call to have a flag added to my serial number to allow for Hebrew and Arabic. I don’t have to do that with my operating system, and I can handle switching my database over so that WordPress will handle actual unicode, which is necessary for expressing anything in any language which is not composed of Latin characters, but when it comes to a screen reader for which I must maintain a license, I essentially have to ask for someone else to handle this for me. That’s crap.

If you want to read or type in Hebrew or any other non-western language on a notetaker, be prepared to turn off your speech and essentially trick the braille display if it exists into accepting Hebrew braille. Turn off the speech because otherwise you can’t think in Hebrew while typing since every notetaker embeds Eloquence, and Eloquence absolutely does not speak Hebrew. Want to interact with Hebrew text on your phone and get braille feedback? Hahahahahahahaha no because even if VoiceOver and Talkback support Hebrew, (VO supports Hebrew and will smoothly transition between it and other languages), braille displays don’t. And braille displays absolutely do not support unicode to any extent.

More broadly, regarding non-western languages and code, I don’t think we should continue to ask developers who are not native English speakers and who also do not speak a language which is expressed in Latin characters to make sure their English is good enough so they can code. That seems like an all too arbitrary requirement to me. So it’s not that I’m disagreeing with Adrian, because he’s acknowledging the reality on the ground, and practically speaking his advice is what we need to follow. I just think the whole situation of coding in general and assistive technology in particular being as incredibly ethnocentric as they are is pathetically stupid.

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I spent some time this afternoon converting my Facebook profile into a page so I can automatically post to it from my website. Then I jumped in the shower and, (because hot showers are excellent places for ideas), a few things occurred to me, in no particular order. First, my websites have feeds for post kinds and categories. Why this is or how this works doesn’t matter though. What does matter is that I can automatically post to any particular Facebook page with one or all of the feeds, which means I can also create a page for each category on Facebook. This means people on Facebook can consume whatever content of mine they want, and not consume the stuff they don’t want, sort of like newsletters except for Facebook, and I get to automatically post to these pages, which means I don’t have to do the work of manually copying and pasting to Facebook whenever I create content. I still haven’t figured out how I’m going to handle Twitter yet, except that I can send technical content to my business account and all the boring personal stuff to my personal account. I’ll figure out something for the stuff that may be controversial or start arguments later. I’ve sent invites to the new page to the friends on Facebook who I think are probably more interested in my personal goings on than my opinions on whatever, but just in case I’ve missed anyone I’ll also share this to my profile so that anyone who didn’t get the invite can follow it.

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The united States tax situation is, I think, worthy of having a well-known user experience design truism applied to it. To paraphrase the truism: Don’t listen to what people tell you, watch what they show you, and then proceed accordingly. Everyone wants to pay less taxes, until it comes to their favorite, (for the lack of a better term), handout: Medicare or the military or supposed border security for the red, and supposed social programs for the blue. The only people who seem to be completely honest about their positions are the libertarians and the socialists. I personally disagree for the most part with both, but I respect their consistency. I’m thinking that, for the most part, Americans treat politics like religion, and the two are almost indistinguishable at this point. Maybe we should ease up on the holy wars, because there are enough logs for all of our eyes.

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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 16801

67 °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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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 16801

57 °F Partly Cloudy

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The president of the United States manages to accuse American Jews of being foreigners and of dual loyalty at the same time. This brings to mind a certain verse:

And Haman said to King Ahasuerus, “There is a certain people scattered and separate among the peoples throughout all the provinces of your kingdom, and their laws differ from [those of] every people, and they do not keep the king’s laws; it is [therefore] of no use for the king to let them be. (Esther 3:8).

Unfortunately, we know where this all too often ends. But don’t worry Mr. President, when the bigotry is inevitably stirred up, (as it always is after you drag out anti-semitic tropes when they suit your agenda), you’ll have plenty of supporters who will be all too willing to sweep this under the rug, as they always have. And if the stirred-up bigotry results in enough deaths, you’ll find an opportunity for another political photo opp, and probably a token to serve to cover your ass.