Attorney Charged With Filing Fraudulent Lawsuits Under The Americans With Disabilities Act by Department of Justice
Geoffrey S. Berman, the United States Attorney for the Southern District of New York announced the arrest today of STUART FINKELSTEIN on charges of mail fraud, aggravated identity theft, false declarations to a court, and obstruction of justice.  Specifically, FINKELSTEIN has been charged with stealing the identities of two individuals in order to file hundreds of fraudulent lawsuits pursuant to the Americans with Disabilities Act (“ADA”) that those individuals never authorized.  In addition, FINKELSTEIN has been charged with making false declarations and obstructing justice in proceedings in the United States District Court for the Southern District of New York.

This adds an entirely new dimention to the whole ADA trolling thing, and for those in the blind community who advocated for HR 620 that bill would not have addressed this because there are already laws which do, as illustrated by this case.

And for the sake of all of us in the accessibility and disability rights spaces, if the evidence against Finkelstein supports a guilty verdict he definitely needs to be made an example of because attorneys like him are giving all of us a bad name.

Someone needs to tell Stephen King that you cannot create lovable creatures like Billy Bumblers, spend several books making us fall in love with them, and then in the last book of the series have the demonic baby you created in the book before that eat one alive.

The Dark Tower series will definitely end up on the reread pile but this is definitely the absolutely weirdest most screwed up fantasy series I’ve ever read.

I know, it’s Stephen King, we should expect screwed up, but still.

I think education of others by people with disabilities is important. Not that we’re obligated to do it, but it’s more productive a lot of the time.

One thing we don’t seem to be discussing though, (and I hope we can), is burn-out among people with disabilities with regard to being educators.

People who aren’t expected to do their jobs every day of every minute of their lives, and they still suffer from burn-out.

I’m not saying education is our job, but lots of times it feels like one, and so I think maybe we should look at helping each other recognize burn-out, recognize when to take a break, and more importantly learn how to give ourselves permission to take a break, because these don’t seem to be things we’re talking about when it comes to advocacy and education.

And I suspect needing a break is where a lot of us are at.

The fight seems endless, and it’s hard to see impact when you’re in the thick of it.

Just something to consider.

The dictionary is caving and listing “literally” as meaning “actually”, “in effect” or “virtually” along with the original meaning and I completely resent this caving.

Militant wing of Toastmasters, rise up! (don’t tell me there isn’t a militant wing of Toastmasters I know there is you’all are just hiding it).

Sweet! The Supreme court is going to hear Google V. Oracle, in which Oracle is trying to claim they can copyright the Java APIs which are necessary for Android among other things to run. Hoping the nerds win this one because FFS can we have at least one thing that Oracle doesn’t ruin upon contact?

WordPress should deprecate themes — a modest proposal by Mike Schinkel
Personally, I have never found a theme that is 100% useable without some significant HTML+CSS customization and/or PHP/MySQL/Javascript customization. And even the best themes use approaches that result in sites that require a huge amount of time to maintain the content because the themer made easy coding choices rather than build functionality to allow managing content with less effort. Examples include using categories to group content where a custom taxonomy would be better, and a custom post would be best.

WordPress themes as they currently stand should absolutely be done away with, even though the concept of separating presentation from content is an excellent foundation.

Sepearating content from presentation might have been the original purpose of themes, but that definitely hasn’t proved to be the case in practice.

Put more succinctly, the law of unintended consequences strikes again.

As a general rule, I find that themes, (and I’m not including every theme developer or designer here, just lots of them), promise way more than they can ever deliver.

I can’t count the number of sites I’ve worked on over the years in which management of expectations with regard to what a client can do with a theme and what they can’t has played a significant role.

Add to this the complexities of customizing a theme so that it becomes accessible, (something required especially when there’s a lawsuit or demand letter or even just a desire to make the site accessible involved), and you have a recipe for more headache for the developer and the client than there should be.

There’s a reason I won’t touch anything from Theme Forest, which is admittedly the most extreme case but far from the only concentration of trashfire from a code standpoint that’s out there.

And I don’t see any of this changing until one of the least-modernized parts of WordPress, (the theme infrastructure) is gone.

If Gutenberg helps us get there, I’m all for it, even though I still think Matt should spend about three days without his mouse and monitor stuck with a screen reader and Gutenberg.

Assistive technology testing on any site is important. I know that.

But effectively being demoted from someone who contributes content to a site to someone who simply tests the final product with assistive tech because Gutenberg required when Gutenberg is part of the project I’ve invested years in and accessibility is an afterthought for the top dog of said project is a thing I am never going to get used to.

I’ll get over this particular instance and steal myself for the next one but if I ever get the opportunity it’s no-mouse plus no-monitor plus screen reader plus Gutenberg challenge for said top dog.

For the entire next possible WordCamp US.

This is crap and while yeah we should all be professional bla bla bla this is personal and I’m not apologizing for it or even here for putting a positive spin on this.

These days I don’t usually drink coffee past noon, but I’m going to make an exception for today because it’s cold outside.

Plus, the embargo has finally been lifted on my favorite peppermint mocha creamer and I haven’t had any of that today.

Right now I’m incredibly thankful for the radiator heat, and at the same time I think I totally get why people up here will open all the windows once it reaches 50. Compared to today, 50/55 was absolutely balmy yesterday.

We got our first flurries last Thursday and we’re supposed to get more today. That counts as the first technical snow if not the first impactful one.

And yeah, I can’t wait for the first one that sticks because there will be pictures of snowmen this year. I haven’t made a snowman since I was a kid and I’m really looking forward to it.

Current status: Hangry.

Really, really hangry.

We are having tacos, and they will be in my belly, but I’m thinking I might end up literally inhaling them because I am that hangry.

We started a new book, and this is book 149 of 150 in my challenge. After this one I’m not going to up the challenge any more this year so we can read slower or read less, mostly so we can read slower though.

I’ll talk more about books when I’m no longer hangry.

I agree with a lot of the posts I’m seeing from the Unfiltered Blind Tweets twitter account.

That said, I can’t get behind a single individual claiming to represent the views of every blind person.

It’s no different than the NFB claiming to be the voice of the nations blind, or anti-NFB people claiming to represent the views of blind people in opposition to the NFB.

And you’d never see this on Jewish Twitter, for example.

Any single individual claiming to post unfiltered Jewish tweets would be ratioed with a quickness because we’re all comfortable with the fact that there are a range of opinions and views on just about every issue, and we have a serious problem when someone else, (especially someone outside the community), attempts to speak for us or divide the community into good and bad Jews based on expressed opinions or actions of particular Jews.

See, for example, the frequent “What about Israel!” replies from the left any time a high-profile Jew expresses an opinion about any political subject, or Donald Trump’s label of “very disloyal” for Jews who don’t vote for him, which happens to be most of us.

We should be careful about who we allow to represent us, and the best representative we can have is ourselves, not someone whose primary goal is to acquire clicks, whether that’s the NFB, anti-NFB, or someone who’s using their voice to talk about what may be controversial topics they view as important.

We had salisbury steak with noodles and green beans for dinner, and, wow.

Those were the thickest slices of salisbury steak I’ve ever eaten

It never occurred to me that someone would make it from scratch. I mean, obviously it’s possible, because you can homemake anything, but the only salisbury steak I’ve eaten before this came from a box, since I was a kid.

So yeah, I wasn’t expecting super-thick slices with homemade gravy.

And it’s not even that I don’t like salisbury steak from a box. It’s good enough over some rice or potatoes. But I’m going to have to get a recipe for that because it would be great for sandwitches with onion.

OK, very late MicroMonday recommendation, but my friend Monica Plumlipstick has joined Micro.blog and she likes cooking and books and all sorts of fun things so give here a followo if you like meeting new people.

She’s made all the posts I’ve been putting out on Facebook regarding Micro.blog worth it.

Welcome Monica!

A note by John Carson on #WordPress, #a11y, Gutenberg and the TwentyTwenty theme by John CarsonJohn Carson
Being a screen reader user, I find it very disturbing that more attention has not been given to accessibility #a11y. Just a thought; it would have been much easier and simpler to design and develop for accessibility before starting to code this project. It will be much more difficult to implement accessibility after the fact. Who made the decision to move forward with a project this large without accessibility from the ground up? In my opinion this is the most ridiculously moronic decision I’ve ever encountered!

I met John when I started working for Freedom Scientific.

He had already been with the company a long time, (ever since the days when it was Henter-Joyce and when Jaws 3.0 was new).

He taught me everything I know about screen reader internals, has likely forgotten more about screen readers and assistive technology in general than I’ve ever learned, and did a ton of the scripting work that still makes Jaws for Windows work with websites.

He retired in 2017, and started working with WordPress in 2019. So he can’t be targeted with the “just afraid of change” argument.

I’ve watched him test the TwentyTwenty theme with three different browser/screen reader combos, read through every line of the CSS, and I’ll watch him read through every line of the functions file and other associated templates.

And he was developing with Javascript before there were frameworks.

I’m not saying any of this because we’re friends or otherwise, I’m saying this because he’s earned the right to be listened to.

And yes, his post is pretty damning because this stuff should not still be happening on a project whose leardership continues to claim that WordPress is for everyone despite specifically refusing to put policies in place (accessibility) which are part and parcel of every successful accessibility effort.

Matt, I get it. Gutenberg has been a goal of yours since at least the final WordCamp San Francisco. I get that you and the rest of the Gutenberg team have worked very hard on it, and that you really are trying to move the web forward.

I also get that you’re probably tired of every accessibility advocate, in and outside this community, giving you crap about this stuff. Hearing that you’re not doing a good job, however politely, is not pleasant. It’s not even pleasant when it’s polite, especially in the Gutenberg case, because everybody’s essentially calling your baby ugly.

I can’t speak for anyone else who’s advocated for accessibility in this space, because I’m not them.

Speaking for myself though, I’d genuinely like to quit criticizing you over this, and I’m saying that as someone who has been and will continue to be one of your harshest critics for as long as it takes. No, I’m not forking WordPress and I’m not walking away.

Seriously, quit being so bullish about this. I have no idea why you are as opposed as you are to even the prospect of an enforcible, project-wide accessibility policy, and enforcing same, but setting policy goals regarding accessibility for a project this size, (or really any project), is required for any accessibility changes to be lasting and successful.

An accessibility policy is how you ensure that you don’t keep repeating the same mistakes.

Technical accessibility is the beginning, not the end of accessibility efforts. And if you really want to move the web forward while safeguarding its openness and independence, please do not carry on one of the worst aspects of the free software movement, the one that leaves whether or not people with disabilities are included as part of the “everyone” you champion up to developer and designer and founder choice.

We’re still fighting discrimination in the workplace, and we’re still fighting for equal access when it comes to the technology we use to do our jobs. But the beauty of WordPress and its community is that we can create opportunities for ourselves.“People of WordPress: Amanda Rush” published at WordPress.org

In order for everyone, including people with disabilities, to be able to create opportunities for ourselves, WordPress the project has to make accessibility a priority. The way that happens is through leadership making accessibility a project-wide goal instead of just something individuals work for and fight for.

Last time this became an issue, Web Accessibility Deathmatch happened. If we’re going to keep it positive, and prevent that from happening again, then things have to change and that change has to be led from the top down, since this is a project with a benevolent dictator.

Matt, please rethink your public stance regarding a project-wide accessibility policy.

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.

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.