Ramblings on Librarianship, Technology, and Academia

"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

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?)

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.

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[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.

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.

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Notes

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


2. 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]

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?

tl;dr: Use ARIA, and use it wisely.

This spring, I gave a tutorial at Ebooklib, "WAI-ARIA In Practice: E-Books That Are Dynamic, Beautiful, and Accessible". My whole session basically boils down to "look at all these awesome things you can do with WAI-ARIA, but look at all of these terrible things you can do with WAI-ARIA, so please use it, but pretty please with sugar on top only use it mindfully -- read the documentation!" (Powerpoint slides with notes, PDF reading list.)
( aria-roledescription, speech recognition users are not screen reader users, and button labels )

Jason McIntosh (JmacDotOrg) interviewed my household about the way we play videogames: "Play of the Light #11 - The Freaks on group-playing single-player RPGs." This is vaguely connected to accessibility, just because we touch, somewhat, on how we play in a way that doesn't use my hands, although that's not the focus.

first she had on her own checkered cap, then a bunch of gray caps, then a bunch of brown caps, then a bunch of blue caps, and on the very top a bunch of red caps.

Apologies to Esphyr Slobodkina

(For those more in the loop of

1. obscure fairy lore or
2. Dungeons & Dragons baddies based on obscure fairy lore than on
3. 76 year old picture books

the allusion was to me being a person who chooses to wear many hats. Any implication of being beleaguered by monkeys is purely coincidental.)

After several happy years at Safari Books Online working with Python, I'm moving on to other projects. For now, I'm moving on to a variety of open source projects. I hope to have the chance to talk about the bigger ones soon. As for the smaller ones, well. Expect pull requests from me soon!

Seriously, though. I'm trying to talk myself out of adding (imagine Allie Brosh-style self-insert here) Fix All the Accessibility Bugs! to my todo list. That seems like a Poor Life Choice.

Much love to all my Safari Co-Workers who've been mentors in my journey into Python Infested Waters. I'm sure I'll see most of you in my new spaces as well. Liza will be sad that I'm looking forward to having time for Perl projects again -- though probably happy to know that I'm a convert to the Python culture 100%, if only partially to Python-as-language. (You'll pry regexes out of my cold dead fingers, Liza. Well, pretty easily; you've seen my fingers. But out of my metaphorical fingers.)

W3C work isn't going away, especially not since my W3C colleagues have been making noises about increasing their demands on my time, you know who you are. And there's likely to be more children's and YA lit in my life soon, as well! More details will be forthcoming if that happens.


Further up and further in!

It's a good thing I don't live near DC, because I would apply for this job in a hot minute.

Department: Executive Office of the President
Job Title: Accessibility Officer

( Duties )


Step one: teach the people running the job board that you don't use all caps for headers, you use regular capitalization and style to caps with CSS if that's what you want. :D

Do people in jobs like this get fired when the administration turns over?

...Now I'm imagining the accessiblity officer in the Trump administration.

Yet another pass through the cycle that periodically afflicts me.

• Follow professional colleagues on twitter.
• Be relatively quiet and well-behaved on twitter because it's a professional forum.
• Follow more social justice folks on twitter because that's where they are.
• Tweet more about politics because these issues are important.
• Get stressed about tweeting about politics because I'm inexplicably followed on twitter by my boss, my grandboss, my great-grandboss, and my CEO.
• Get equally stressed about tweeting during the workday because see above, even though I'm responsible about when I check it.
• Hope they have me muted.
• Follow lots of people using twitter as a long-form platform because the New Web is weird, y'all.
• Start to long-form tweet because I pick up the languages of cultures I'm immersed in far too quickly.

With a soupçon of "I have all these blog topics half-drafted; why do I never finish them or reply to comments?" and a dash of "I seem to be so destractable and irritable lately."

I did eventually figure out that one of the reasons I was doing long-form tweeting is my perception that more people will read a storify than a blog post (unless it's on medium, *snort*). Which, (a) aargh, whatever, this is not a productive of my focus, and (b) I'm not widely read anyhow. [footnote]

I also keep running into the situation where I'm capable of being ridiculously diplomatic in situations where I believe it's called for (basically, any situation which has already become fraught), but in pretty much any other situation I am my father's daughter. I call that "assuming that in any non-politicized situation everyone is an adult and is willing to speak frankly with each other and hear frank and open opinions", though I suppose my father probably would have called it "not having time for assholes". To be fair, he also would have said something to the effect of "you're your father's daughter, and we're both assholes."

(Sometimes I miss the hell out of my dad. ♥♥♥♥♥)

This has led to the odd situation where some people believe I am incredibly diplomatic and can be called on to moderate awkward conversations, and some people think I am a bull in a china shop and should not be allowed out in public. Both of which are actually situationally true! But twitter, in any case, is one of the situations where it will not occur to me to be incredibly diplomatic, even though almost by his very nature it is already fraught.

It was at this point that I recalled I could disable Echofon notifications on my phone.

I'm hoping this will stick.


Footnote:
Certainly I'm not widely read in the accessibility community, where I'd like to have some influence. On the one hand this is deeply frustrating, because I do have a lot to add to that conversation with respect to technology, usability, and standards. On the other hand, that arguably means I can burn bridges freely.

Which, as I watch (as I have over the last decade) women, people with disabilities, and people of color get shunted to the side in accessibility standards making, accessibility voices cited, and people in the field given credit for their work, is something I have been considering more and more lately. If I'm not going to be allowed to help improve the accessibility of the web as a whole, why not focus on improving the accessibility of individual websites? I am too practical to bang my head against this particular wall forever.

Also, today was my first real mansplain! (Since its coinage.) I mean a For Serious dude in my mentions Calmly Explaining Me Things, when it became clear via three separate threads that he had no idea what he was talking about, and I, who had assumed he knew more than I did because he was so confident about it, was the more more knowledgeable of the two of us.

I was grimly thinking last week about the great day in the future when I will be able to burn all of those aforementioned bridges and speak a truth or too about the way things happen in the accessibility community, when I remembered the also aforementioned "the accessibility community doesn't particularly value my voice." Which again, means I can be tactless enough to make a post such as, say, this one, without even worrying about ticking people off. I could even link to it from twitter, honestly, although that would arguably be counter-productive for my own mental health.