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I posted on Monday about the situation where the blind man and his lawyer were sanctioned by the court for scheming with regard to ADA lawsuits. I still stand by that post, and the general condemnation of this, but I’d also like to spend some time exploring the other side of the coin and what contributes to this, at least from the side of the blind people involved.

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A New Era for the Genesis Framework: Recapping the Biggest Changes and How to Work with Them by Carrie Dils
It’s been roughly one year since WP Engine acquired StudioPress, the makers of the Genesis Framework. There’s been a lot of forward progress, but it may have left some people feeling unsure about how to work with Genesis or best take advantage of new features.

I’ve always loved the Genesis framework, and I still use it on client sites. While reading this post by Carrie, I began to think that those of us in the Indieweb community may quickly need to embrace blocks.

Yes, I know, that’s basically heresy, but I’m thinking this may need to happen sooner rather than later since Gutenberg development is pretty rapid, the accessibility issues are being fixed pretty quickly, and the end of 2021 will get here before we know it. Post kinds as blocks, for example, would probably be a lot easier to share across themes, as opposed to now, when themes either have to be forked and customized or created from scratch to explicitly support microformats 2.

Granted, you can have indieweb without post kinds, but post kinds is what enables people to truly own all of their content. And right now, there are only a few people doing the heavy lifting with regard to themes. That’s an untennable situation for a ton of reasons.

In order for this to change, it’s going to have to become easier for other designers and developers, (let alone users), to implement this stuff, and there are two ways that can happen. The first is WordPress as a project adopts all the indieweb building blocks. This would be the best solution, but I don’t see it happening anytime soon. The second way is us adopting blocks on the model of something like the Automic Blocks plugin or similar, at least for the post kinds/microformats 2 part.

I suppose there’s a third way, where WordPress adopts things like webmention and the other open standards, and blocks for post kinds is the compromise.

These are all just thoughts, but the Genesis framework has somewhere around 250,000 users, it’s backed by its owning hosting company, and it really does provide an easy way for users to build sites, with some accessibility included. And I think expecting users to do the heavy lifting for themes just isn’t sellable.

There’s a lot of promise contained in Gutenberg and the whole blocks concept, including the up-ending of what is the current raging dumpster fire which is the WordPress theme ecosystem, (with some notable exceptions for some themes). I’m thinking we should go with the flow as best we can.

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Florida Judge Sanctions Serial Ada Plaintiff Alexander Johnson And Attorney Scott Dinin | JD Supra
Seyfarth Synopsis: Serious sanctions imposed on a serial ADA Title III plaintiff and his attorney should concern the plaintiffs’ bar.

This appears to have a little something for everyone, including a heaping helping of “you can’t fix stupid”. Emails? Seriously? They emailed each other and were explicit enough in the emails to prove that this was a scheme? I know I’m not really supposed to talk about the people who agree to be plaintiffs of record in these cases, (or at least, it seems, that not many people are willing to bring that part of it up), but yeah, this gravy train appears to be coming to its final stop. At least, I hope it is. Note: If anyone else has posted about this angle of it, influencer or not, get in touch and I’ll be happy to link.

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I have several concerns with the Aira service specifically, and prefer to use Be My Eyes instead, But, taken together, both Aira and Be My Eyes are doing something for the blind community that I couldn’t be more thrilled to see, and that thing is democratizing skills attainment and thereby helping blind people to be as self-reliant as possible. I hope to see the day when democratization of skills attainment for blind people is at the same level democratization of publishing is. at: decentralized and as open as possible. The blind community is at its best when we’re sharing skills hacks and other hacks with each other freely, and I think services like Be My Eyes and Aira will help to escalate that free sharing. There are, in the US, rehab counsellors and other professionals who are great at their jobs, and there will be a lot of situations where those professionals are necessary for a long time to come. But I think the rehab system as a whole has at least contributed to what I think is a multi-generational problem within the blind community of dependence on others for basic skills learning, and there are a ton of people who fall through the cracks and don’t even have the professionals on which to depend, which is a huge disservice to them. And the consumer organizations are just a different flavor of the same problem. I suppose all of this is incredibly radical, but so be it. I think that, in order to fix a lot of the problems we have as a community, we’re going to need to do the fixing ourselves. We can’t afford to wait for the professionals to catch up eventually. I am totally cool with watching from the sidelines as the professionals and the consumer organizations fight each other to the death, and while they destroy themselves the rest of us can not only take control of our technological destinies, we can take control of our entire destinies. In other words, fuck the establishment, all of it, and burn the whole thing to the ground once it outlives its usefulness, and do our best to make sure the day it outlives its usefulness gets here as quickly as possible. Oh, and spice that up with making sure the entire establishment, all of it, the consumer organizations and the professionals, know damn good and well they’re close to outliving their usefulness and that those of us who have chosen to not be caught in the middle of their whose-junk-is-bigger contest are looking forward to the day when its grave becomes a communal partying spot complete with bonfire and liquor.

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What Tumblr Taught Me About Accessibility by Nic Chan
As someone who was a teenager during its peak, Tumblr has had an undeniable influence on my life. Like many people my age, my first exposure to the concepts of ‘accessibility’ and ‘ableism’ was through Tumblr. In sharp contrast to the web accessibility community, where we often focus on technical details, meeting clear criterion and legal compliance, Tumblr’s disability community focused on more human facets of accessibility by practicing accessibility in a variety of creative ways. Even when presented with access barriers created by the inaccessibility of Tumblr as a platform, Tumblr as a community has found unique ways to support disabled users. As developers, we need to learn from our mistakes by finding out where our users compensate for our deficiencies, and learn from how disabled communities support themselves.
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#a11yWin #Indieweb Summit 2019 was captioned for the first time this year. I would like to point out that this conference has a $5 ticket price as well as the ability to stream it for free if you can’t attend in person, and yet they still managed to caption their talks and committees. I don’t have any data on attendance numbers but I’d be surprised if attendance is above 500, and I’m being very liberal with that. If a bunch of homebrew hackers and hobbyists can figure this stuff out, there’s no reason anyone else can’t. The only thing left is excuses and those become flimsier by the day.

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Domino’s asks the Supreme Court to shut down a lawsuit requiring its website be accessible to blind people by Nick Statt
Domino’s is arguing the requirements would be inconsistent and costly

One more time for the folks in the back. Accessibility guidelines and a metric ton of supporting documents with examples along with easily findable mailing lists with every accessibility practitioner on the planet providing help and advice on accessibility for free every single day have been around now for twenty something years. There’s also Twitter, where those same practitioners have been providing free help for something like ten years every day. This isn’t hard. And a multi-million-dollar company to complain about paying $38,000 to fix their website so that it’s accessible to everyone is crap. Dominos wouldn’t be charged $38,000 to fix things if they had, wait for it, built accessibility in from the ground up. Stuff like this is why people with disabilities are practically in “sue them all and let God sort it out” mode. We shouldn’t have to keep asking politely that large corporations not violate our civil rights. “Please Sir, may I use your site?” I’m not sure if this will make it to the Supreme Court, it can decline to hear this case. I’m not even sure if the court ruling in favor of the plaintiff in this case is likely. But if it has to come to this, then so be it.

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#IndieWeb Yes! Thanks to the very hard work of @dshanske @whiskeydragon1 now has working indieauth. I will get him added to the wiki later on today but I think this is the official welcome to the IndieWeb. Post kinds are already present and his personal site also supports webmention and most of the other building blocks. Good start to a Monday.

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I just got done attending this week’s WordPress Accessibility Team meeting, in which I got a chance to try the new Slack, since that’s what the WordPress project uses for communication. I remember when WordPress started using Slack back in 2014 at the last WordCamp San Francisco, and I have personally and professionally given Slack a metric ton of crap over the intervening years with regard to accessibility.

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How to Use Brand Names on Your WooCommerce Store by Bob Dunn
Let your customers search your products using the brands that you resell on your WooCommerce online store with lists an widgets.

This site continues to be an excellent resource for user-centered WooCommerce information. wooCommerce is a very powerful, and very complex plugin, and Bob does a great job highlighting extensions and providing instructions for using those extensions as well as the plugin itself in clear, easy-to-read language. Bookmark his site and check back often if you run your own store.

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Link + Disclosure Widget Navigation by Adrian Roselli (Adrian Roselli)
Early in 2017 I filed an issue against WAI-ARIA Authoring Practices (APG) requesting a change to the menu navigation pattern. Despite a great deal of feedback in agreement, it languished.

I’m looking forward to taking this pattern as well as the linked ones for a spin. I’m hoping for an opportunity to find at least one of these in use in the wild, preferably coupled with research with other people with disabilities. Barring that, it’ll be fascinating to find out which one I like better.

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I’m pleasantly surprised to find that Vimeo now has a much more accessible player. I plan to check out #PostPublish after I’m done with my next meeting. I will announce if it’s captioned. If you’re not already a PostStatus member you should be. Best WordPress newsletter around.

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Friendly public service announcement to all corporations: Sponsorship of the #NFB19 convention is not a shortcut to the accessibility of your websites or apps. That sponsorship money would be much better spent on doing the actual work of making your websites and apps accessible to everyone.

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Facebook's Image Outage Reminds Us How Bad Social Media Accessibility Really Is by Kalev Leetaru
Facebook’s brief image outage earlier this week exposed the general public to just how bad accessibility really is in our modern visual-first social Web. While governments and the technology community are investing heavily in AI bias, they care little about accessibility bias.

I don’t use Facebook very much these days, so I heard about the media outage from the outside. And yes, while there have been improvements, and while I’m not placing blame on Facebook’s accessibility team, the accessibility isn’t great even when the AI so-called alt text functionality is working. The best alt text is text which exposes the context of the image being described, and this is down to content creators. This incident is a prime example of why accessibility advocates and consumer organizations should not be using Facebook as their primary distribution platform. If you must use something like Facebook, then you have a responsibility to make the content you host there as accessible as you can by learning how to add alternative text to your images and, (if you’re using Facebook Live), to transcribe that content and host those transcriptions somewhere else until you can make arrangements to use either a different third-party platform or your own platform, otherwise known as your own website.

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A post from Greg McVerry by Greg McVerryGreg McVerry (quickthoughts.jgregorymcverry.com)
@cswordpress Wow, thanks for pointing this out! Was commenting at #IndieWeb organizing meeting that we have a strong #a11y presence, especially among people who use screen readers. Would love to learn more about your voice and journey. Maybe make a section here: https://indieweb.org/accessibility?

I agree that there is a strong accessibility presence within the Indieweb community. The focus on semantic HTML is the catalyst for this in my opinion. The backbone of accessibility is semantic HTML, which at its heart means using HTML elements as they were intended to be used. Thanks for making me aware of the accessibility page on the Indieweb wiki. Adding some information there could be useful to others. I’m getting back into the swing of writing things on my own sites again, and I still have several Indieweb tutorials to finish. Tiny steps.