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Web Accessibility Is Out To Get You And Make You Feel Sad by Heydon Pickering (heydonworks.com)
Since the landmark Domino’s case, I’ve been having some conversations about web accessibility with people who wouldn’t ordinarily take an interest. Some of these conversations have been productive; others have not. The following is a dramatization based on true events.

This is a good read to keep on hand for those days when you’ve lost your patience with the pushback regarding web accessibility and will probably be necessary until things like punching people and daydrinking become acceptable options for coping.

I’m still laughing. This is the funniest thing I’ve read when it comes to web accessibility in a very long time.

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I’ve been forcibly upgraded to iOS 13.2. Yes, it finally happened.

I was just pleasantly surprised by the fact that VoiceOver audio is no longer send to a paired bluetooth speaker. I forgot that was a new feature of iOS 12.

I was not so pleasantly surprised by VoiceOver repeating “space space” at its loudest volume even though its volume isn’t set there.

Thankfully it didn’t wake the sweety up. He’s out like a light.

117 McCormick Ave, State College, PA 16801

51 °F Cloudy

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#MeetTheBlind Independence means not being turned into a zoo exhibit without my consent by those who would claim the title of being my spokesmen, and it means calling out those who would lead the blind community when they attempt to coerse me into participating in inspiration porn after they have failed to convince me to join the ranks of inspiration prostitutes. Independence means calling out those who would represent me when they talk but do not walk with regard to sexism after having made repeated promises to fix it within their ranks. Independence means shining a bright light on significant accessibility failures on the part of those who would represent me when they claim the right to enforce accessibility for others. And finally, independence means that my friends and family and colleagues view and treat me like a human first and an inspiration second not because I’ve had to constantly remind them to do so, but because they didn’t need Meet the Blind Month to convince them of my humanity.

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The first complete Siddur (prayerbook) I ever used was the 1949 edition of Hasiddur Hashalem, translated by Philip Birnbaum and published by the Hebrew Publishing Company.

I still love that prayerbook, despite its stilted English.

Since the Hebrew Publishing Company basically hasn’t existed since 2016, all of their works have entered the public domain through a combination of a lot of the works being published before 1975 and several more of the works having reached 75 years since the death of their authors, which automatically puts them in the public domain.

One of the things I always wondered about is why Birnbaum spends a significant portion of the introduction to HaSiddur HaShalem essentially trashing the work of every translator who came before him.

Why would you spend something like 5 or 10 dense pages basically subtweeting every other translator?

Since all these works have entered the public domain, now I know why.

Apparently this is a thing they all did up to a certain point. There are limits, (for example, everybody’s wives and kids are off limits, and nobody’s Jewish status is questioned), but other than that, everything’s fair game, personal or professional.

It is, (or was) apparently a long-standing tradition which seems to have been set aside for the most part after the Holocaust and then is completely gone by the 70’s.

And it apparently started around the first time the prayerbook was translated and edited in America.

Brittish translations, on the other hand, are on the surface more polite, however the insults are basically “bless your heart” to the Americans and a lot more backhanded to their fellows in Britain, specifically England.

The Scottish make the Americans look like they’re having milk and cookies together.

All of this is fascinating to me.

921 S Pugh St, State College, PA 16801

59 °F Clear

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I missed this earlier in the year, but apparently the NFB is partnering with Be My Eyes as self-described blindness experts.

Sorry NFB but if you’re declaring yourself an expert, you’re not an expert.

Why do I have a feeling this is going to be just as useful as WordPress experts?

I can see it now. All the disability related posts featuring hard-core federationists in the comments sections are going to come with tons of “as a blindness expert” in the comments aren’t they?

That’s all we need. Thought leaders ultiplying at gremlin-like rates.

Points to the first person who comes up with a stealable designation for these ever-multiplying thought leader gremlins, extra if the word gremlin is involved.

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Wow. Basecamp’s gotten a metric ton of accessibility improvements.

Finally, reasonably accessible project management.

I have a lot of catching up to do to get in line with the way everyone else manages their projects, but I suspect my life’s about to get a lot easier.

Mmmm fewer spreadsheets and fewer hacky internal applications.

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One of the things I love about Micro.blog is that the timeline is chronological. This means I can hit the back button after reading through a conversation and land on the post that started the whole thing off. On Facebook, for example, if I hit the back button, I get dropped to a random point within my newsfeed, and I lose the place I was at. The post from which I rabbitholed is never to be seen again. Thanks, Micro.blog.

117 McCormick Ave, State College, PA 16801(3811ft)

43 °F Partly Cloudy

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I’m writing this because the trend of blind people using Facebook Live is unfortunately spreading.

So, friendly reminder to blind people who are using Facebook Live that it still doesn’t support captions or transcripts and we don’t know when or if it evere will.

I get wanting to do video, and I’m not saying you shouldn’t.

But if you care about accessibility, then you shouldn’t be using a platform that makes it pretty much impossible to not actively discriminate against an entire class of people, in this case deaf and hearing impaired people.

We can sit here and talk about positive impact and other buzzwords all day long. But you can’t good intention or positive impact your way out of this as long as you’re using Facebook Live.

We can sit here and say “don’t do dos and don’ts because it hurts feelings” all day long. But there are somethings that really are as simple as “do” and “don’t” when it comes to accessibility, and prioritizing convenience over one of the most critical and impactful aspects of accessibility by choosing to use a platform that explicitly doesn’t support captions or transcripts is one of those things.

So, if you really do care about accessibility, such that all the hell-raising about inaccessible apps and websites really is more than just looking out for your own interests, don’t use Facebook Live.

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I used Noter Live to generate these takeawayss, post them to Twitter as a thread, and generate the HTML with Microformats 2 to then post on my website. It’s really easy to use, very accessible, and is great for helping to ownw the content I create.

As with all Inclusive Design 24 talks, this one will include captions soon after the conference is over.

Marco Zehe:

Marco has worked for Mozilla since 2007, always in the accessibility field. He does quality assurance. He also worked for Freedom Scientific and helped with braille display dev in the early 2000’s.

Accessibility inspector is a new addition to Firefox dev toools, it’s a year old now.

Mozilla wanted to make sure devs could make their sites more accessible without having to download extras.

accessibility inspector allows devs to inspect the accessibility tree as presented to assistive technology users.

Latere versions introduce auditing features to highlight easily solvable problems. Helps devs solve problems and lets them see the problems go away.

Accessibility inspector is inside dev tools beside the HTML inspector. can be turned on in the context menu as well.

Unless you’re a screen reader user, turn on accessibility engine first.

Turn off when not using because it slows down the browser thanks to extra processing. If you turn off for one tab it turns it off for all.

Screen readers can’t accidentally turn off the accessibility engine.

Marco is demoing the tree views of the inspector.

Inspector is fully keyboard accessible.

If you have more than one tool bar on a page make sure that they are labeled and state their purposes. Marco is citing chapter and verse of WCAG.

Another cool visual feature: Accessibility highlight. Use the mouse to highlight and info bar shows complete color contrast for all colors and shows which ones pass.

Mozilla is trying to advance auditing with machine learning. Trying to determine whether or not machine learning can help. Finds patterns for fake elements.

Helps with div soup.

Mozilla wants feedback. Bugzilla, Twitter, public chat facilities.

The inspector can output its results as a json file.

Import resultant json into your tool of choice.

You can use the inspector as a blind/VI person. Sweet! Gonna go play with this now.

The info from the inspector is available on Linux as well, so you’ll get good enough results to not have to worry about switching to Mack/Windows screen readeres.

Marco attempts to avoid Chrome V. Firefox accessibility toools death match. Playing this well.

You can make dynamic changes in the dom inspector and they will be reflected in the accessibility inspector. Seems like this could be great for temporary hacks by screen readers.

Oh hey it’s @aardrian!

Mozilla’s accessibility team heavily collaborates with the other teams. Collaboration is facilitated. WordPress, please take note.

Thanks Marco, this talk was excellent, and I’m looking forward to playing with this.

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Today I learned that Bridgy Publish will pass alternative text attached to photos when syndicating to Twitter.

I’m using Micro.blog’s crossposting feature but I want to play with photos more and the fact that it passes alt text through to Twitter is a really good reason to switch back.

I love learning about accessibility improvements to web-related things I love.

Especially indieweb things.

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Disabled friends of abled people don’t let said abled people un-ironically use the phrase “differently abled”. If you’re using that phrase, the odds are high that you haven’t spent any time around disabled people, especially visibly disabled people. I’m bringing this up because I’m scrolling through Twitter and just ran across someone using “differently abled” as part of their foundation name, and I kind of want to hurl.

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OK, post properties do not carry over.

I need to think about how I want to resolve this. It’ll take some code.

I think the links themselves would carry over, but then we’re back to the problem of contrast issues for low-vision people viewing from the Facebook app, and there’s at least one of those who likes this page.

Photos I believe I’ve figured out. I’ll either need to attach a featured image using the standard featured image box, or add them directly to the content.

Checkins should be OK because location and weather data get attached automatically to the content, so there will be something, even if it’s just a weather status.

I’ll need to figure out how I want to work around book posts and other similara content.

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I just accidentally closed my browser and lost a ton of work. How’s your Friday going?

This post is a test of how post kinds will display when sharing to Facebook.

I’m biting the bullet and letting WordPress.com manage syndication to Facebook since I really don’t want to rangle Facebook and Facebook seems to be giving Micro.blog a hard time by (seemingly randomly) discontinuing publishing to Facebook pages.

Specifically, I want to see if I can publish without manually adding a custom message and still have the contents of titleless posts post in their entirety to Facebook.

There’s a bit of an issue for low-vision users of the Facebook app on iOS at least when you post just the title of a post and the link without an accompanying message.

I seriously doubt Facebook is going to do anything about this, since they pretty much don’t listen to their accessibility team unless someone somewhere in management decides it’s time to throw them their occasional bone, so I’m trying to mitigate it from my end.

I of course have zero control over the styling of the app, and I can’t pass those kinds of changes through from my websites.

Apologies in advance to those who are following me on Facebook while I test this.

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I just accidentally closed my browser and lost a ton of work. How’s your Friday going?

This post is a test of how post kinds will display when sharing to Facebook.

I’m biting the bullet and letting WordPress.com manage syndication to Facebook since I really don’t want to rangle Facebook and Facebook seems to be giving Micro.blog a hard time by (seemingly randomly) discontinuing publishing to Facebook pages.

Specifically, I want to see if I can publish without manually adding a custom message and still have the contents of titleless posts post in their entirety to Facebook.

There’s a bit of an issue for low-vision users of the Facebook app on iOS at least when you post just the title of a post and the link without an accompanying message.

I seriously doubt Facebook is going to do anything about this, since they pretty much don’t listen to their accessibility team unless someone somewhere in management decides it’s time to throw them their occasional bone, so I’m trying to mitigate it from my end.

Apologies in advance to those who are following me on Facebook while I test this.

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Very unpopular opinion:

Users treat their WordPress websites like red-headed step children because people who cobble together themes and plugins while calling themselves building custom websites do stupid, stupid things.

Just because you can do anything you want with WordPress doesn’t mean you should do whatever you want with WordPress, or any other tool for that matter.

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Long-Needed Date/Time Improvements Land in Core by Justin Tadlock
After more than a year and several WordPress updates, an overhaul of the core Date/Time component concluded. WordPress 5.3 will ship with fixes for long-standing bugs and new API functions.

Not all heroes wear capes.

The core Date/Time component is a rabbit hole which is not for the faint of heart, and I’m glad to see these changes coming to WordPress 5.3.

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I have a feeling I’m going to be doing a lot of extra looking in the near future for hotels skipping the smart speaker craze. I do not want to walk into my hotel room and say anything to Alexa. If Amazon gets its privacy act together, (same with Google et al), then I’ll be happy to jump on board, but until then, I’d like to hold on to at least some choice in the matter.