Ramblings on Librarianship, Technology, and Academia

The hundred year culture war

Sat, 06 May 2023 14:58:44 GMT

I've been reading the coverage of Maggie Tokuda-Hall's fight with Scholastic over removing references to racism in Love in the Library. It should go without saying that I'm immensely impressed with Tokuda-Hall for making the fight into national news. And it's important to cover the story in light of the ramped up culture war against books and libraries.

It's also true, though, that most of the coverage, such as The New York Times's "Asked to Delete References to Racism From Her Book, an Author Refused", present this story as

an example of how the culture wars behind a surge in book banning in schools has reached publishers

And that's all true but... Scholastic has always been this way, and it's always been extremely damaging. In 2009, they told Lauren Myracle to remove the lesbian parents from Love Ya Bunches. Myracle refused, there was an internet outcry, and Scholastic agreed to sell the book but not in elementary schools. This is Scholastic: they have immense market power in the US, and they use it to force vanilla conservative values down people's throats.

And the current fight is obviously more important. The culture war in the US is existential and life threatening. I get it! Nevertheless, it's annoying to see Scholastic's long-standing love of censorship framed as somehow the fault of Ron De Santis and Greg Abbott. When this nonsense is over, if there's still a children's book public industry left standing in the US, if there's still a US, we need to fight the censorial urges of companies like Scholastic anyway. The GOP is ginning up a culture war out of pure unadulterated awfulness, whereas Scholastic has only ever done it for profit, but that doesn't make it okay.

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it me adn should not have been counted

Fri, 21 Apr 2023 18:46:29 GMT

"average webdev fixes 3 accessibility bugs a year" factoid actualy just statistical error. average webdev fixes 0 accessibility bugs per year. Websites Georg, who lives in cave & fixes over 10,000 accessibility bugs each day, is an outlier adn should not have been counted

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alt is easier than people think

Mon, 10 Apr 2023 15:23:27 GMT

People are overthinking alt text. The guidance is pretty simple for normal images:

Have alt text on your images.
If the image is purely decorative, like a curly line, space-filler clip art, or redundant with text, then the alt should be alt="". But it should still be present.
Otherwise, briefly describe the part of the image that's relevant to sighted readers in the context in which you are choosing to post it. This is up to you; you are the one who finds this image interesting. This usually, but not always, includes any visible text on the image.
You don't need to say "image of".
If you need something very long (eg. for a chart or an infographic), put it in plain text somewhere, either immediately below the image or linked immediately below it. That helps sighted people, too.
Don't include information that's not available to sighted people looking at the picture. The alt is not a caption. Information like "generated with midjourney", "taken with a Canon 400", "me and elvis taking his Jet down to Las Vegas" are all captions, not alt. Put them in visible text near the image. (The exception is images of clearly identifiable objects which sighted people will be expected to recognize without more information: "The Mona Lisa", "The Eiffel Tower" are reasonable alt.)
Don't use it for punchlines! The alt has a purpose! (You can be witty, as long as you don't disrupt that purpose.)

There you go. That's it!

(It gets more complex for SVG and images/sprites placed with CSS, but the principal is the same.)

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Layer 3 (networking)

Thu, 16 Feb 2023 20:01:30 GMT

It is an odd realization, as I apply for jobs post-layoff, that nearly every job I've ever had has been found via networking, not cold-applies. That means, I suppose, that I should put myself out there, though doing so makes me uncomfortable on the 2023 internet.

So, here's my résumé, also my general portfolio page, and my GitHub: deborahgu. I can legally work in the US (and, I believe, in the UK, although my work hours, though somewhat shiftable, will be based on GMT -5).

In my most recent position I have been the Principal Engineer at a medical software company, primarily working in Python with Flask, also SQL (PostgreSQL), TypeScript, JavaScript, and ReactJS, in a Docker / Kubernetes environment on AWS. I pick up new languages and frameworks quickly, although Python is the language of my heart. I am a Full Stack engineer but I prefer working on the backend; in this position I focused on architecture and development of RESTful APIs, security, accessibility, and IAM (using Okta, Auth0, and privacyIDEA). I'm an accessibility expert, and have domain expertise in publishing, libraries, and archives.

I loved this last job because it was a collaborative (all-remote) team of folks who happily paired as necessary, and who collaborated to come up with best practices for architecture, standards, and code style. I really would like that again.

I'm primarily looking for remote. I'll consider a term-limited contract for the right position. I mostly just want a position that's not actively doing evil, where I can focus on writing interesting, high-quality, sustainable code with smart, collaborative teammates at a stable company that's a decent employer.

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the lessons we don't want to learn, alt text edition

Sat, 24 Dec 2022 02:08:28 GMT

I've been fascinated to watch, first as people discovered alt text at twitter and later at mastodon, how the one point I've seen people be absolutely resistant to learning is that alt text is for describing the image. It's not for:

punchlines
sourcing and credits
metadata
extra jokes
full newsy image captions
information repeated in a visible caption
excessive interpretation

Not to say alt text can't have flavor (which implies some interpretation). But folks are massively resistant to learning the two vital points about alt text: that its job is to describe the visual image, and that not everyone can access it so you never use it for information everyone should be able to read.

I don't mean resistant to writing alt text that follows that simple guideline. I mean, folks insist on arguing with blind folks and accessibility experts about the purpose.

I have at least some anecdata tying this stubbornness to these two sites with UIs exposing the alt text to sighted users. So this tool that I would have sworn a few years ago would improve alt creation, I think has made sighted image creators think alt is a toy for them.

I suppose I shouldn't be surprised. I remember the debates over userpic title and alt attributes here at dreamwidth. It took a lot of debate to get to the point where understood they were for different audiences and should be constructed differently. (Although, hmph, that seems to have been reverted at some point, I wonder why?)

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this is about the birdsite but also isn't

Sun, 11 Dec 2022 01:09:26 GMT

My extremely uneducated guess from reading some of the rules pertaining to US H-1B visas, is that DHS or USCIS could probably issue a rule regarding the length of time H-1B visa holders could be unemployed during during the next 12 months, which would be:

a decent thing to do when tens of thousands of tech jobs are going away
an excellent way to prevent American brain drain and a good exercise of soft power
a way to help the remaining employees of Twitter escape

(Yes, obviously the entire system is not fit for purpose. This is just one thing that the executive probably could do, and definitely won't.)

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all front end devs and designer should watch this video

Sat, 26 Nov 2022 18:37:52 GMT

From heydon, What Happened To Text Inputs.

I cannot yell loudly enough that (thoughtless, ill-considered) innovation and standing out are nearly always incompatible with usability, user experience, and accessibility. Web designers and front end devs who don't have a functionality-first attitude need a new career, or they need to do work on art projects instead of usable websites. Heydon yells this with the assistance of wolves and cursing, so maybe more people will watch and pay attention.

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Perl, yeah. I think I knew her once.

Fri, 25 Nov 2022 18:32:39 GMT

So tempting to see if I could back into the dreamwidth code base to see if I could add `instance.name.mastodon` to the username formatter tags.

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dessert toppings and floor waxen both agree

Sat, 19 Nov 2022 01:34:23 GMT

This exchange on twitter (via the Internet Archive for obvious reasons) made me laugh:

transcribed

Quoted Tweet from Zoë Schiffer (ZoeSchiffer):

Elon Musk is also asking for up 10 screenshots of the "most salient lines of code" from Twitter engineers

Quote tweet from Ed Zitron (edzitron):

anyone who understands coding (I do not): this is dumb right. This is a silly request? Why is it silly? please help me

Reply from Lemurdusa (lemurdank):

This is like asking a librarian for their favourite numbers in the dewy decimal system

Because I'm a librarian and a programmer, and yeah, my response to both questions is to look at you funny.

(As a programmer, because some of my best solo work isn't my lines of code, it's architecture of the system. And the lines of code I'm most proud of are either clever (clever code is often dangerous), or a convoluted and hideous hack to deal with a shitty system. Also who thinks of specific lines of code in complex systems? Probably any specific "salient lines of code" I could pick out are in silly personal side projects; half of what I write in a professional capacity is practically boilerplate. In the repository of all the lines of code ever written, the expertise of the programmer -- picking the right ones and putting them in order -- is what differentiates the programmer from GitHub Copilot.)

(As a librarian because, seriously, the Dewey Decimal System? Really? Library of Congress, obviously.)

(Also it's 398.2, obviously.)

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Still will I harvest beauty where it grows

Sun, 13 Nov 2022 22:28:58 GMT

I was looking over my older entries here and reread "A Goon is a being who melts into the foreground and sticks there", from four years ago about ideal Dreamwidth features. And in this little moment when so many of us are thinking about social media user experiences and the kinds of interactions and communities they enable (both lovely and toxic), I find I still agree with my assessment of the time. I would love DW to have a much nicer interface for posting and hosting media, but realistically large-scale media hosting would need to be paid features. (Remember that DW doesn't monetize its userbase at all.)

(Also, I stand by another post I made the same month, "Oh brave new internet, / that has such Nazis and MRAs in't!", in which I argue that DW is still a wonderful place because it is unpopular and high friction. The internet has made it trivially easy for bad actors game out how best to ruin every nice thing; DW is protected because it's quiet enough to be not worth it. Not to downplay the incredible work the DW Abuse team does. But they wouldn't be able to be successful over the long term if assholes didn't have easier and more popular targets.)

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There- my blessing with thee! And these few precepts in thy memory Look thou character.

Fri, 04 Nov 2022 14:07:08 GMT

If had a platform read by people in tech too young to have gone through a downturn before, here's what I'd say.

It sucks, and I'm sorry. Even if it's a good layoff for you, that works in your favor, and that you knew was coming, it still sucks. It's okay to feel some kind of way about it.
Keep up old the ex-old-job people social networks that aren't actively dangerous or toxic for you. I got my first post-layoff job when I went out to lunch with former colleagues from the position where I was laid off and they asked me to work at their new place. Every ex-old-job community is going to be full of people who successfully leapt to a new place which, by definition, is hiring.
Don't sign anything without a lawyer's eyes. When I got laid off the second time, a local labor lawyer gave me a free consult on the severance package. And really think about the math; especially if you have medical insurance from another source, the severance the offer you is often not worth the NDA, non-disparagement, and arbitration clauses.
You will get a good job again. You have skills and connections. It might be rough in the meantime, but you will.
There's still plenty of remote jobs. And contrary to what VCs will claim, most companies don't actually think you're smarter just because you live near them. If your needs, family, or support networks don't tie you to living in a place where the cost of living is unsustainable for you, you don't need to live there. The rent is too damn high everywhere, but you'd be amazed at how far a tech salary will take you in most parts of the country.
Every large company hires tech people, and bigger companies are often much better employers than startups. Companies that are great employers, especially for people from underrepresented groups, are often stodgy and boring, with no interesting vibe. Show me a company with an established HR department staffed by professionals and a risk-averse legal department, and I'll show you a place that nobody on social media thinks is interesting at all. Look for lists put together by polling actual employees, not by random PR departments.
If you're young and in tech, there's a reasonable chance you've been paid in Ludicrous Mode for your entire career, and may never really have struggled for cash. It's fine if that's you! Just know that there are skills you can learn. If you have friends on the other side of our economy's awful divide, they might have good advice. But there are plenty of little things you can do to save money. They can't move someone up a tier in our fucked up economy, but they can help you learn to budget. For example, the tech industry has taught you to buy subscriptions things that already existed free or cheaper, in some cases (eg. audible vs. the library).
Don't do a bootcamp to get more skills; many of them are ridiculously expensive scams that don't teach much. Look into your local community colleges, which often teach more for a fraction of the cost.
You don't owe the old place any loyalty. Leak to the press if it gives you satisfaction. Just, leak to someone with a track record of not throwing sources to the wolves. You don't want a rep and you don't want to paste a target on your back, especially if you're dealing with the world's richest man in the middle of a spite-fueled tempter tantrum.

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tech solutionism

Fri, 26 Aug 2022 15:33:50 GMT

Tech people really love going off into a corner and building some app to solve a social problem, but where they've misidentified the problem and haven't talked to domain experts to find out what would actually help.

Anyway something I'd love to see from the infosec and tech exec community is a good list of alternatives to Cloudflare for different use cases. Something like:

Do you need:

DDOS protection?
Use Company A

Speed?
Use Company B

A company that will protect you when trolls issue tons of false complaints against you for illegal activity, but that won’t protect sites that are actual festering pits of TOS-violating, dangerous, violently racist and transphobic, and illegal activity, and agrees with you that “allows fan fiction of underage characters” isn’t illegal?
Use Company C

Virtual private networks at scale?
Use Company D

Localization for compliance?
Use company E

Especially for smaller sites *cough cough* oh hai dreamwidth that are frequent targets of bored assholes but don't have a CISO or a big budget IT staff to research alternatives, it would be nice to provide that information. Much more useful than someone making one more app that will revolutionize! your! workflow! through the magic of making an all-React, blockchain-powered, data-harvesting, SaaS re-implementation of some native desktop tool.

(Yes, this is an acknowledgement that finding a company that will do the third one is hard. As Dreamwidth knows from Adventures In Keeping A Credit Card Processor.)

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never talk about work

Tue, 12 Jul 2022 22:23:41 GMT

An interesting side effect of being at the intersection of Epub standards, publishing, programming, librarianship, children's/YA literature, and open access is that I am absolutely positive that I have many colleagues who have always gotten along wonderfully with one another professionally and philosophically who nonetheless have vehement, diametrically opposed opinions about Hachette v. Internet Archive.

(Disclaimer: I wrote a package for the IA which (at least at one time) was part of their pipeline for making their scanned books accessible: abbyy-to-epub3. I don't know if they're still using any variants of that code.)

In any case while I have my own opinions about the case,^[1], I find it absolutely wild how many authors are defending the current library ebook-rental model, which is unsustainable, unaffordable for many libraries, and is not a massive royalty generator for most authors (in the US, anyway, which doesn't have a Public Lending Right). Regardless of the ethics and legality of the IA's model -- which is not at all an easy answer! copyright in the digital realm is hard^[4], as we all know! -- the current library ebook licensing model is awful for libraries.

[1]: Mostly that it's not cut and dried, but also most individuals who are angry at the IA should actually try the experience of checking out a book from the IA and they'll realize that it's hardly going to be anyone's first choice if an actual print book or ebook is available and accessible^[2] from the library or for sale. And in fact it does not seem to be anyone's first choice, in that sales appear to be unaffected.^[3] In general the terms of the program are even more restrictive than they were two years ago, when TechDirt wrote about how everyone misunderstands what it is.

[2]: It's worth noting that many of the IA's CDL books are out of print and have no ebook edition, and unless the reader has access to the NLS (in the US), the IA is one of the only ways to get a vaguely accessible Epub or DAISY copy, or a copy in your location at all.

(You're welcome. Or, I guess, I'm sorry, if you've seen the quality of the theoretically-accessible epub, which is the best you can do in an automated pipeline with limited budget, because accessibility costs money.)

There's no other way you can see my dad featured in this very out-of-print book from the Boston Children's Museum, unless you have access to one of the 145 libraries with a copy, that's for sure.

[3]:

Indeed, the publishers have not offered any evidence that Internet Archive’s digital lending, or anyone else’s, has cost them one penny in revenues . In fact, their overall profits have grown substantially, and sales of the works at issue in this case appear to have increased . Plaintiffs’ own witnesses admitted that their theory of harm is “speculative” and simply an “inference one could make.” And tellingly, Plaintiffs specifically instructed their expert not to try to measure any economic harm.

Hachette v. Internet Archive - Internet Archive's Memorandum for Summary Judgment

[4]: It's not clear what the repercussions to the rest of our online lives would be if the US government decided to rethink the First Sale doctrine, but it would certainly be extremely far-reaching to all of us.

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Gen X's literary upbringing

Mon, 21 Feb 2022 16:43:01 GMT

I would read the hell out of an academic treatise on those books of the late 1970's and the 1980's (when YA was forming as a discrete genre and was still predominantly problem novels) that were marketed to adults but overwhelmingly read by kids and teens. Think V. C. Andrews, Stephen King, Piers Anthony, Anne McCaffery. Probably a good 50% of fantasy, science fiction, and horror. Weird, unashamedly psychosexual drama we mostly hid from our parents. Come to think of it, all four of those authors have written at least one incest story.

Yes, I know there was plenty of adult readership for those authors, but I'd be really curious about the breakdown; I wouldn't be surprised if the teen and child readership numbers dwarfed the adult for some titles.

What changed in genre when people started being able to market a wide variety of genres to older kids and to teens, and sell them successfully? Wither the gleeful psychosexual incest thrillers? What did YA inherit from those books, and what did adult? Do teens still sneak the contemporary equivalent of Valley of the Horses home from the library or is that what porny fanfic is for?

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petition to children's and young adult authors

Sun, 27 Jun 2021 19:23:45 GMT

( Content note: mention of multiple genocides of the last century. )

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life imitates life

Sun, 02 May 2021 20:28:12 GMT

TinkerSec has a powerful thread here on working so hard he gave himself seizures, eventually getting a diagnosis of Functional Neurological Disorder, that rings so familiar (for all that what happened to him was neurological and what happened to me was... well, also almost certainly neurological, but presents as structural).

It all reads like my experiences, 20 years ago. The doctor who told him that his physiologically-caused overuse injury was depression and anxiety. The fact that he kept working through it whenever he could, until I kept going [until] I couldn't "push through" anymore... couldn't will myself to physically keep working. And then, this:

And to be clear, as folks are asking...

I'm not "better" per se.

I'm not back to where I was before this started.

I am at a place where I can work again, meaningfully. But I'm not certain I'll be back to where I was...

As Marines say, I'm "serviceable."
— Tinker (TinkerSec) April 30, 2021

Even the HackerNews tools who came out of the woodwork to tell him he was making it up feel familiar.

Yo, folks, I know somebody out there has told you that it's impossible to give yourself a serious injury unless you're a lumberjack. Meanwhile the list of things that has given just people I've met permanent overuse injuries includes: programming; working a cash register; scooping ice cream; being the parent of an infant or a toddler; and obviously warehouse work. Bodies are janky. Respect what they tell you.

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We'll kick out those dirty licenses

Tue, 23 Mar 2021 23:41:48 GMT

The weirdest thing for me about the continuing existence of the Free Software Foundation is that by one metric (the propagation of libre free software licenses as part of the global computer ecosystem) they've been wildly and completely successful, and yet by their own metric they've been so overwhelmingly defeated that the GNU fields have basically been sown with salt. And it's all their own doing, as well; if the FSF had spent the last decade or so being more than an 501(c)(3) vanity project to entertain RMS, then maybe they could have helped the actually useful organizations fight against the world of proprietary, closed, non-federatable systems, in which the actual threats have nothing to do with eeeeevil open source, non-libre licenses, but have to do with a massive world in which all that FLOSS software underlies surveillance capitalism and horrific concentration of capital. They could have fought more effectively against a world where instead of hooking up your libre RSS reader and your libre chat client, you have to install proprietary tools to do the simplest job, if they didn't think there were few greater sins than collaborating with someone using a *gasp* Apache license -- or worse, a proprietary software package a user is required to use to do their job.

Anyway, as I've pointed out before, RMS once said, when someone asked about accessibility in free software,

"the abolitionists did not seek to give people the power to make choices about freedom or slavery. They sought to abolish slavery."

tl;dr the FSF can eat my shorts, emacs sucks, and vim is great.

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Gatekeeping

Sat, 16 Nov 2019 01:17:45 GMT

I very rarely screenshot a tweet and save it to read and giggle over later, but this one from last spring I absolutely did:

My very dear Sarah:

The indications are very strong that YA Twitter shall find my post overnight—perhaps tomorrow. Lest I should not be able to write you again, I feel impelled to write lines that may fall under your eye when I shall be no more.

Our movement may be one of a fe
— Ruth Graham (publicroad) March 5, 2019

(I used to be indifferent to the fact that Kirkus reviews are anonymous. These days, I consider it a basic job requirement, having watched a YA author try to get their followers to doxx me — the reviewer of their book, that is — on twitter. YA twitter is a cesspool.)

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Character Tropes in Technology

Thu, 14 Nov 2019 00:05:07 GMT

The Color Specialist: The color specialist has no opinions about where to put the bikeshed, what materials to use, where buy the paint, or how to fund raise for its construction. The color specialist will never volunteer to help with construction, to leaflet the neighborhood about the bikeshed raising party, or to take minutes at the Bikeshed Design Group meetings. The color specialist will not buy the paint, drive someone else to the paint store, or look up the paint store's hours on the internet. The color specialist will, however, wait until the paint has been applied and then raise furious points of order about the use of eggshell over semigloss finishes.
The Serious Reader: The serious reader is up on all the terms. She reads the important bloggers and name drops them constantly. Sometimes she even reads print books and magazines, if she's old enough. She uses the vocabulary of her heroes' blog posts, whether or not it applies correctly or completely to the situation. The serious reader loves to rules lawyer any general philosophy or principle, turning a general guideline into an unbreakable rule. She disapproves of any technology that her heroes dislike, and loves what they love--unless they advocate against her favorite design pattern. Then she digs up some contradictory articles pointing out that they are wrong, wrong, wrong.
Émile: Émile has had a natural tech education, created by reading nothing at all. He learned on the job and is uninterested in any technology he's never seen before. If it has always worked before, it's correct, regardless of whether it's sustainable, accessible, or secure. Any thought of best practice is offensive to Émile; what we do here is best.
The Marginalized Apologist: The marginalized apologist jumps into conversations to tell other marginalized people they haven't experienced harassment or trauma. The marginalized apologist points to successful marginalized people as evidence that the harassment has never happened, while telling everyone else that they should get over it, be quiet, and take their complaints to private conversations. The marginalized apologist is an amazing gaslighter, saying things like "what do you mean a well-documented history of harassment?" about people who are on video being horrible at tech conferences for decades. The marginalized apologist just wants us all to get along and talk about the technology.
The Natural Born Expert: The natural born expert turns up out of nowhere in a small tech community, known to nobody in the community, suddenly running a consultancy or trying to replace an incredibly well-established spec. The natural born expert isn't trying to make change by learning the tech or networking or getting involved with the professional community. Instead, they are representing themselves to customers and the press as someone who knows what they are talking about. Actual experts, who can clearly see that they are lying, only sometimes make a dent in the natural born experts convictions and public positioning.
The Evangelist: Try telling the evangelist that she is as passionate about her religion in exactly the same fashion as adherents of the opposite religion. Try telling her that she sounds exactly like worshippers of That Other Founder, or The Enemy Product. She won't believe you. Then she will tell you she refuses to support your browser / operating system / assistive technology / car, because it's evil and bad, and also all the security problems with the product and people she perfers are irrelevant, because Reasons.
The Cat Herder Who Used To Be A Cat: The cat herder was a cat a long time ago, even though they spend all day herding cats these days. They are positive that they can tell actually cats how to eat kibble and meow and lick their own asses, but it turns out that former cats have forgotten how to do all those things. They keep lying down in the bowl of kibble and making a mess, then scolding the cats for eating their kibble wrong.
The Anti-Patternist: The anti-patternist has all kinds of words to tell you what you're doing wrong or what they're doing right. If they can link to a wikipedia page for that Absolutely Proves Their Unassailable Point, so much the better. The anti-patternist can happily explain how whatever your code is doing, it's bloat or creeping featurism or input kludge or not DRY or ignoring YAGNI or insufficiently KISS. If there's an acronym and it's obscure, it's great. If the anti-pattern has a very rude name (object orgy, code smell, cargo cult) that's best of all. The code doesn't have to be an example of the anti-pattern at all.
The Javascript Programmer: 'Nuff said.

It's been a long week.

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RMS has always been an utter tool. Thank you for coming to my TED talk.

Tue, 17 Sep 2019 04:45:56 GMT

In honor of Stallman leaving MIT CSAIL and the Free Software Foundation [1] , I'm unlocking one of the only posts on this journal I've ever made private. Nine years ago, my post "The FSF reminds me of PETA sometimes"[2] was an annoyed response to some comments RMS made about accessibility, in which he basically said that nobody at the FSF should cooperate with any accessibility solution which was not 100% pure and freed of all vile proprietary tools, which (then and now) completely left speech recognition users out in the cold. My post was discovered somehow, and was promptly brigaded by RMS groupies. I locked it down because ain't nobody got time for that.

I'm unlocking it now, because I want to remind folks that RMS has always been a complete shitheel. (I know, he has been a lot worse to this, to a lot of people, for an exceedingly long time. This was just the example I have in my pocket.)

Some gems I didn't call out in the original post include:

In response to a request that any FLOSS accessibility solution enable the economic independence of disabled people so they can choose free software willingly: "the abolitionists did not seek to give people the power to make choices about freedom or slavery. They sought to abolish slavery."

It would only be "ethical for you to use NaturallySpeaking if your main activity were working directly towards replacing it."

His claim "For several years I had bad hand pain and mostly could not type. I did not even consider using a nonfree dictation program, because nonfree software would take away my freedom", which completely glosses over his actual solution at the time: he paid a high school student to type for him. Silly me, relying on proprietary software all these years when I could just call up MIT and get them to pay a kid to type for me.

This entire message, which I urge you to read in full, especially if you want to hate Stallman with the passion of a thousand fiery suns but don't want to think about sex crimes.

And finally, I want to call out the most loathsome quotation from the thread, which I linked in the original post: responding to the comment about inaccessible computers, ""Can't use" is such a strong statement that I wonder if it is another exaggeration, Even if you have no hands, there are other ways to input besides dictation."

I'd also like to call out this comment Synecdochic made to the old post:

I comfort myself with the knowledge that one day he will go away, and the rest of us can get back to the task of making software.

Hear, hear, S.

Notes

Over comments he's made over the years regarding crimes such as Jeffery Epstein's that are frankly too stomach-churning to repeat. [back]

I no longer dislike Microsoft's ecosystem. Nobody else cares fundamentally about desktop accessibility. Microsoft gets countless things wrong but accessibility will always be my killer app. [back]

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speech recognition at last? I have so many questions.

Mon, 03 Jun 2019 22:14:17 GMT

At WWDC (the annual Apple developers' conference), Apple announced something which might be full command-and-control speech recognition for the Mac at last, for the first time.[1] None of the regular tech journalists are asking the questions I desperately want to know, however.

Most of my questions boil down to this:

How much did the Apple developers and designers of this product work with users of Dragon NaturallySpeaking for Windows (DNS), DragonDictate for Mac (DD), and Windows Speech Recognition (WSR)?

How much did they learn about what the speech recognition community already expects as a minimal baseline, as well as what speech recognition users have been lacking in our current tools?

Because how Apple answers that first question will inform the answers to all these details:

Will this allow complete hands-free command and control? In other words, will users be able to control their computer without a mouse, a keyboard, a virtual keyboard, a switch, or mouse emulation?

Will it give access to the menus, graphical icons, or any other aspects of the standard OS X desktop chrome, as long as the code is written using Apple standards?

How will it work with tools that are not natively enabled to use it? For example, if I install an application that runs in a virtual machine (eg. Eclipse or Slack), what aspects of this speech recognition will be available and what won't?

Will it require the cloud or network access to work?

Will it have a trainable voice model?

Will it have a configurable vocabulary?

Will it be programmable, either with simple macros or with complex third-party tools?

In what languages will it be available?

Will the mobile version require a physical trigger to access, as with the built in microphone-icon-to-dictate currently available on iOS? Can it be left on all the time?

How will the privacy be guaranteed for any always-listening aspects?

Does it integrate with Apple VoiceOver?

( For context, the answers to these questions for DNS and WSR )

What other questions do people have?

( Endnotes )

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A Goon is a being who melts into the foreground and sticks there.

Fri, 07 Dec 2018 01:03:48 GMT

I've been thinking a lot this week over what my ideal Dreamwidth UI would be. To be honest, it wouldn't be that different from what we have now, in many ways. This is possibly an unpopular position. 😉

Here's what I'd like to see on Dreamwidth:

General things

Accessibility remaining at least as good as the status quo no matter what features we add. Since our accessibility is pretty awesome, that's a nice high bar.
A site that works well on desktop and mobile, where all pages scale well on mobile. A solid, highly-usable mobile-friendly site is in many ways superior to an app (since, among other things, it doesn't put you at the mercy of Apple).
A posting interface that allows you to use rich text, markdown, or HTML, with easy-to-find help links describing how to use each of them.
A dynamically updating (AJAX) preview mode, in a side-by-side or in-page tab interface, not a whole new window.
No reblogs / retweets / shares. I think I was pretty clear about a small fraction of the reasons I think those are a bad idea.
No like / kudos / ❤️, though I feel less strongly about that than I do about reblogging.

Little things

Increased options in the "embed" link, specifically including the ability to use twitter's embed code (and then probably reformat into something that uses a Twitter-esque stylesheet but doesn't actually pull JS from their site).
A posting interface which lets you add images directly when posting.
A la carte image hosting increases for paid accounts.
An image upload page which integrates well with phone upload.
A general improvement in the image user experience, including integrating the view and manage pages, making it clear which bit of the image text becomes alt text, and having a better UI than "copy and paste this HTML into your post."
Scheduled posts
Making it much easier to choose an all-site tag search as well as a single-user tag search. maybe as a paid feature.
Tag and word blacklists (ie. "don't show me that post"), preferably with an indicator about the blacklisted post, along with some metadata, so you can make an informed decision about whether to read it.
A paid model for small video snippets. None free, but at least little Twitter videos. Heck, we could do six second videos and do Vine.
An optional way to generate a card snippet from a URL in a post (the way many sites turn a URL into the page title, an image, and a brief text snippet
More legal CSS, well document, and an easy way to create a user stylesheet you can use in your posts (as at the AO3)

I also have very mixed feelings about adding a "someone is talking about you" feature. Sometimes in a threaded conversation it drives me up the wall that if I say "It's like mark and denise said upstream," and yet mark and denise will be unlikely to see my comment. But on the other hand, on Twitter, it's clear how much people abuse at-mentions, to the extent that it becomes a form of harrassment. So I have no idea how to make it work.

I know I don't understand how roleplayers use the site, too; they have their own use patterns.

What else would you like to see?

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Oh brave new internet, / that has such Nazis and MRAs in't!

Wed, 05 Dec 2018 22:52:53 GMT

Every time some other social media site does something to drive away a large segment of its users, there's often an influx to Dreamwidth. This varies based on the userbase which is ticked off, of course; it tends to be the more female and more fannish users who are driven to Dreamwidth, while white supremacists and MRAs driven from reddit or Twitter are more likely to end up on sites such as 8chan or Gab.

This has two side effects: Dreamwidth users being excited that our platform is getting love and activity on a level that's been more rare since the great Tumblr + Twitter exodus of several years back, and new Dreamwidth users (and returnees) asking for some of the features which they loved at their old social media site. I am absolutely a fan of new people coming to Dreamwidth, and I undoubtedly agree with everyone that the UI is showing its age. It was not built in a mobile-first, multimedia-above-all world.

But it also true that the Internet is a more toxic place than it was in the heady days of Brad's garage in 1999, or in Mark and Denise's inspired 2008. Which leads me to the two hot takes I've been mulling over for several years:

Some of the features people want are products of the Toxic Internet, which has trained people to expect them
Dreamwidth's relative unpopularity is what keeps it great

Addiction and Anti-patterns

( Read more... )

In defense of unpopularity

( Read more... )

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On literary analysis, gaslighting, Mary Sues, truth and reconciliation, and the fantasy patriarchy

Wed, 29 Aug 2018 00:13:49 GMT

Kristin Cashore, author of the Seven Kingdoms series (Graceling, Fire, and Bitterblue), posted on her blog last week "Brother Cansrel, Father Leck."

Content notes, in Kristin's words: "priests, rape, suicide."

And secondly, two disclaimers: One, Kristin is my friend (I've never talked about any of this with her), so the objective close reading I think I'm bringing to this post is almost certainly bullshit. And two, I'm not discussing any authorial intent in my interpretation below (even where Kristin explicitly claims one in her post). Instead, I'm musing on places where her post has made me rethink my own interpretation of the characters.

This post is not about the horrible real world events. It's just about how that very personal blog post gave me a new way of looking at the residents of the Seven Kingdoms, especially (but not exclusively) the women and girls. But because of the subject matter, look here, a cut tag! 👉🏽

( 'Ware the content notes. Also, probably, spoilers. )

On a less serious note: fanfic about Katsa's, Fire's, and Bitterblue's conversations with their therapists would be rad.

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Beautifully accessible usability improvements

Mon, 16 Jul 2018 19:39:57 GMT

Dreamwidth's most recent code push included a wonderful change from allen. It's a clear example of enhancing usability for all while maximizing accessibility. Full Disclosure: allen asked my advice about the best way to make this feature accessible. But disclosure about the disclosure: I love that he asked me. When developers aren't sure about accessibility of new designs and features, especially for Javascript-reliant features, they should always turn to accessibility experts for advice! (Also, if anyone finds accessibility bugs in the feature, report them; I'll fix ASAP if I can replicate.)

allen's fix, reported in Code tour: 2017-05-01 to 2017-10-28, adds keyboard and touch shortcuts for advancing to the next or previous entry. The settings can be seen on the account settings page for a logged-in user:

Image long decription

The "Keyboard shortcuts" tab has the text "Keyboard and mobile (touch) shortcuts" and offers the following configuration options:

For Keyboard shortcuts: A checkbox labelled "Enables keyboard shorcuts," followed by two choices: "next" and "previous". Each has a text entry field in which the user can enter any character, and checkboxes allowing zero to three possible keybindings (Control, Alt, or Meta).
For Touch shortcuts: A checkbox labelled "Enables touch shortcuts," followed by two choices: "next" and "previous". Each has a choice to set a particular touch gesture, or disable that gesture.

This settings page presents options for all the keyboard shortcuts you can use on Dreamwidth, which, currently, are only shortcuts to skip to the next and previous entries. (It's unlikely that this list will get much longer. denise has some Very Wise Thoughts about decision fatigue, user experience, and a surplus of options.)

So, yay, keyboard and touch shortcuts to make pages faster to navigate! A clear usability win for many people, and perforce a clear accessibility win! But why is this more accessible than always-on, non-configurable settings pages? I'm so glad you asked.

Many assistive technologies set their own keyboard shortcuts. In fact, many browser add-ons set their own, as well. When these conflict with one another, there can be very unexpected behaviour. I set these keys to unmodified J and K, which work splendidly as easy-to-dictate and easy-to-type commands, but conflict with most screen readers out of the box. In fact, because of their broad adoption in many applications over many decades, they'll also conflict with many browser extensions out of the box. There's no such thing as a universally safe keybinding.

A few years back, when I was using Gmail for work, I had to disable every one of the keybindings! It turned out that on in my environment, something (I never tracked down what, exactly) was causing a conflict where sometimes characters typed or dictated in a text field were being interpreted as Gmail shortcuts. It made it impossible to send mail, for obvious reasons. Other webapps I've never been able to use at all, because their non-optional keybindings conflicted with accessibility settings I've set in my own environment.

So kudos to Dreamwidth for this beautifully accessible usability enhancement.

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