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Current status: Looking around the Podtrac dashboard to see if I can delete my address and phone number, which it required for registration and autopopulated, correctly, without asking my permission. I am very much not amused right now. There are zero, absolutely zero reasons why podcast statistics should require anybody’s personal details like that. If those details are sought, then permission should be explicitly asked. If those details are going to be autopopulated then explicit mention of where they’re being pulled from should also be made, and permission to autopopulate should also be asked for. This kind of shit is why people hate big tech so much.

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I just spent over an hour fighting with an admin consul with a pretty much inaccessible UI and a metric fuckton of settings. I really don’t care at this point why things on the web end up inaccessible or how it happens. If you put things on the web that are inaccessible you can go fuck yourself and you can do it until your shit is accessible. If you are a person with disabilities urging dipplomatic restraint in accessibility negotiations you can go fuck yourself too. I am tired of this shit. All I want to do is get my work done without a ton of shit, without having to fight with screen readers and browsers and switch back and forth between the best combinations and I am tired of negotiating and educating. I want to live my fucking life why is this so Goddamn much to ask? Fuck!

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Dear creatives with disabilities, including musicians. So-called exposure by way of contest, competition and, (in a lot of cases), volunteer work is bullshit. Don’t run after it. Your time and talents are just as valuable as those of your abled counterparts, and any person or organization trying to trick you with promises of exposure or large impact in exchange for free work is a vulture worthy of your contempt. Your time and talents do not become less valuable just because you may be unemployed now or because you’ve been unemployed for a long time. Dear people and organizations: People with disabilities are not a source of free labor.

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Shoutout to all the automatticians currently slogging through the VIP Go outage, from the people on the front lines dealing with customers to the people behind the scenes in the proverbial basement who are usually never noticed until something goes wrong. Support and server maintenance are often thankless jobs, but without people like you this stuff doesn’t run. I don’t work with y’all, and I’m not a customer, but I see no reason why we can’t support each other from afar.

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? I’ve read all but one of the books in the Prey Series by John Sandford and started the latest one yesterday. I’ve finished forty-two percent of Cryptonomicon by Neal Stephenson, and I’ve really enjoyed it. I plan to read some of his other novels, including Fall which was published this year if I can get them. The book challenge is moving ahead at full steam, but other than the Neal Stephenson books, I’m not sure what I’ll read next.

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The crockpot barbecue chicken has been unit tested. Verdict: Awesome! Dinner is going to be amazing, and all the moreso because I get to have it and you don’t. 🙂 If you want it, it’s a matter of getting some of your favorite barbecue sauce and some boneless skinless chicken thighs from your grocery store, making sure they’re thawed and washed, and put in the crockpot with the sauce poured over them and cooking on high for about five hours. Cook on medium if you’re going to be gone all day. For the blinks, when it starts to sizzle, turn it off and let cool, after unit testing of course. Then, serve with veggies cooked and seasoned according to preference, and a starch, (potatoes new or red, or yams). Bread and dessert optional. If you’re going to serve with a bread, challah is great.

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A huge grocery run was executed yesterday, and since I got one of the boxes with pots and pans in it this past weekend, I am making barbecued chicken in the crockpot tomorrow for dinner and mixed veggies and I am looking very much forward to it. I’m looking forward to doing a lot of cooking experimentation this summer and into the fall. I have so many recipes I want to try out. Welcome to Wednesday everybody.

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So apparently the 10,000-step count was a marketing campaign to promote a particular pedometer. I’m glad to find this out. Not that I’m feeling particularly guilty for not meeting my 10,000-step goal, but I now have sort of official permission to rebel against my pedometer overlords and adjust my goal down. Thanks for that tip, Kerry.

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Shoutout to the humans I know who work at Google and had to endure the outages Sunday and yesterday. It might be fun to snark on social media when big companies fall on their faces, but there are always humans who end up having to stick around and thanklessly fix the messes. I don’t know if any of you were caught up in that, but if you were I hope you get some extra off-time.

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The president bemoans the indiscriminate bombing of Idlib Province as his administration indiscriminately bans anyone from said province from seeking refuge from that bombing. Thoughts and prayers for all those dead civilions and their families I guess. The one person who could do something to alleviate some of the suffering for some of the people would rather play keyboard commando instead. What a pathetic contemptible weakling.

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The difference between keyboard and screen reader navigation by léonie Watson
People often include screen reader users in the much larger group of keyboard-only users. Whilst this is correct (most screen reader users don’t use a mouse), it also creates a false impression of the way screen reader users navigate content.

This is a really good primer for anyone building things for the web as well as screen reader users on the differences between screen reader and keyboard navigation. I’ve seen lots of situations where the two are conflated, by both developers and screen reader users.

Also, I really like the footer text on léonie’s site.

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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.