deborah | Entries tagged with technology

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.)

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.

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.)

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.

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.

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.

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]

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 )

I'm seeing a lot of people post about how, in light of current political shifts, everyone should increase online security. A few points on this:

Yes.
This is always true.
Most of the advice going around is a mix of good, reasonable, difficult, and bad. (eg. One list going around says Gmail is totally safe because it won't get hacked. Google (and Facebook, and Apple, and others) explicitly cooperates with the CIA, the NSA, and other governments around the world.
There is a conflation of different concepts of online security: protecting your data from theft, protecting your data from government abuse, protecting your accounts from hacking. There's no point in getting paranoid about Internet security if you don't know which of these dangers is most important to you, how much you can assess risk, and what measures specifically apply to that danger.

Don't take the advice of activists about security. Take the advice of professional Internet security experts (I am not one). Start with Brian Krebs (

briankrebs) and Bruce Schneier (

schneierblog). A lot of what they have to say is aimed at security experts and you can ignore it; focus on the pieces that are obviously relevant to you, such as Brian Krebs' Tools for a safer PC. If you are the kind of person who likes to look for the work of women and people of color when you are looking for expert opinions, don't hold your breath when you are looking in research for computer security. That is not to say that there are not security experts who aren't white men, but infosec has notoriously always been so misogynist and such a cultural cesspool that it appalls even the rest of the tech industry.

When it comes to protecting your accounts and your own devices from hackers, the tips you get from experts are only somewhat inconvenient and a great place to start.

However, when it comes to protecting your information from the panopticon, whether corporate or government, I've got some bad news for you:

If the advice sounds easy or socially convenient, it's false.

Cloud services put you at risk. (Twitter, Gmail, Facebook, and technically Dreamwidth, though the scale of Dreamwidth allows many of us to have a relationship of trust with the site.)
Credit cards put you at risk, whether or not you have ever purchased something online in your life.
Using an email address in multiple places put you are risk.
Having ever given your telephone number, email address, or Social Security number to a business puts you at risk.
Having friends who know your email address or your phone number puts you at risk.
Not knowing the underlying tech infrastructure of the online services you use puts you at risk.
Browsing the web puts you at risk.

If you are going to be engaging in the kind of activism that will put you in a government's crosshairs, and you have a sincere, evidence-based belief that you are going to be targeted by a government because of your activities, and you want to protect yourself, you need to do some serious, hard-core curation of your available information online. You are not going to fix your problems by installing Tor and using two-factor authentication on your Gmail account. You are not going to fix your problems by any tip sheet that is currently being circulated around Twitter. And you are not going to fix your problems easily. It is difficult to address this kind of situation without a major life change. For most of us, resources would be better spent on lobbying the companies we do business with to mitigate the damage from these kind of practices writ large. That is to say, not necessarily helping ourselves, but trying to diminish the surveillance state as a whole.

Here's a very brief summation of the problem. ( Okay, not so brief. Be Afraid. )

tl;dr

If you are seriously worried and have good reason to be exceptionally careful:

Encrypt everything.
Only use cloud services where you explicitly trust the host and know their policy about government requests for information, third-party vendors, and their third-party vendors' similar policies.
Only use throwaway cell phone numbers, email addresses, and credit card numbers to do business.
Never, ever use social media.

For the rest of us, well. Here's what we can do.

Take a deep breath and acknowledge that any reasonably competent government and sufficiently well-off corporation already knows anything about us that it wants to.
Protect our devices and our accounts from explicit hacking.
Lobby for institutional change in the surveillance state and the industrial panopticon.
Stop panicking.

And seriously, folks. Install 1Password, KeePass, or some other locally hosted password manager, and switch to unique and difficult passwords for every account you have. And then install Ghostery on your browsers.

And don't panic about this. Be concerned, and be careful, but panicking is counterproductive; the cat is so far out of the bag for most of us that there is not even cat hair left. We have a lot more to panic about than whether the government can find us.

New project DictationBridge will make screen readers play nicely with dictation software: speech-to-text working well with text-to-speech! So excited about this. The first revision will be NVDA and Windows Speech Recognition, followed by Dragon NaturallySpeaking, and eventually other screen readers.

It's being billed as for blind and VI people with RSI, but as a sighted RSI accessibility programmer I am going to love this. Also since I have a cordless headset I might become a person who full-on computes while cooking.

I dislike using ad-blockers, in general. I know investigative journalism and online fiction are both expensive to produce, and I want to support all of those content creators. To that end, I wish there were an ad broker that worked closely with the maintainers of Ad Block Plus and Ghostery, and committed to only providing ads which were guaranteed to (within reason):

Contain no malware
Contain no trackers
Contain no data scrapers or other hostile code
Not require risky tech (eg. Flash) to run
Not move

I know, that last one is unusual. That's an accessibility thing more than anything else; animated ads tend to use scripting rather than animated gifs for their movement (thus ignoring browser animation settings), frequently ignore WCAG, and -- my reason for loathing them -- are often a migraine trigger for me.

I used to browse with NoScript everywhere, but these days that breaks more of the web than not. Instead, I browse with Ghostery to make myself safe; I had to whitelist a few websites which break with Google Analytics off, and had to whitelist some of the A/B testing platforms and video CDNs, but otherwise that leaves the web fully functional. But I still have to use ABP to block two things: obtrusive animations, and links to clickbait sites which are disguised to look like links from the host site, and which frequently redirect to dangerous, malware-infested pages. (Actually, Ghostery catches most of those, too.)

I would be fine with ads plastered all over websites as long as they weren't highly likely to be malicious or dangerous to me! If ABP makes enough of a dent, I suppose, perhaps there'll be demand for it.

I'd kind of like to put some non-JS tracking code in my company's site to see how many hits we get with Ghostery on or JS off (though we're non-functional without JS, sigh.)

Marco Zehe writes "Apps, the web, and productivity" about his experience with improved accessibility/usability of native apps over web apps on mobile. My experience in many ways mirrors his, although I would go further and say I have found the same thing on desktop.

For example, I honestly did assume that once I was forced by a job to use Gmail, that I would discover features of Gmail that outweigh the power and accessibility of a mail application. I understand that I am a change-averse Luddite, and suspected that using Alpine my primary mail reader in this day and age was indicative of a slight flaw in my character.

But now that I have been using Gmail with some regularity, it has become abundantly clear to me that no webmail client I've used (Gmail, roundcube, web Outlook in accessibility mode or in rich mode) has the speed, power, and accessibility for me of using the dedicated mail application.

Marco boils his reasons for switching to native apps down to less clutter and latency . I'd say both of those are issues for me as well, just as much as simply saying "accessibility" -- although they are both inextricably tied to accessibility for me.

A cluttered screen -- especially a screen with one of those damn non-scrolling JS banners taking up screen real estate -- is one that requires more scrolling, which is inherently difficult to do without a mouse. Even on desktop, my monitors are smaller and my fonts larger than they used to be, and the design of web apps has gotten less streamlined, substantially, over the last few years.

Meanwhile, the annoying wait-till-it-loads aspect of the web app is a lot more annoying when I am waiting for mouseless browsing to see all of the page elements so it can put actionable links next to them. It's a lot more annoying when I can't start interacting with the page until it is fully loaded, unlike a mouse user who can start to move the mouse towards the expected area of the page.

Ultimately, it comes down to a combination of both spoons and basic UX. Like a lot of computer users with disabilities, the extra cost of using the computer is high enough for me that every aggravation that gets thrown in my way is one more blocker that possibly prevents me from being able to work at all. And as for basic UX, well. Like a lot of techies, I'm used to the power and speed of the keyboard-based environment. I honestly have no idea how people used to a powerful, lightning-fast, terminal-based mail application become comfortable with the clunky latency of webmail.

interesting side effect of my own adaptive tech with the adaptive tech I am currently using to test websites:

For myself, I am using Dragon NaturallySpeaking. Also for myself, I have the "hey Siri" functionality enabled on my phone. (Hey, Apple, thank you so much for that functionality – it is really making a major difference in my life.) And I'm currently testing a website with the screen reader NVDA.

End result, sometimes me, my computer, and my telephone get into some really unexpected conversations.

In the general pool of "people who have something to say about Web accessibility," the only reason I don't call myself an expert is because I have a deep aversion to calling myself an expert anything. I am sitting here right now trying to come up with jokes about where I do have expertise -- napping? reading? cat snuggling? -- and I am actually talking myself down from all of them.

I implement and explain the accessibility standards. I test for accessibility on all spectra except cognitive. I write accessible HTML and JS, and debug other people's code. I teach and present on the the bureaucratic, technical, and content aspects of creating an accessible web. I know where my weaknesses are (cognitive accessibility, legal aspects, mobile, etc), but I know where to turn to complement those weaknesses. All in all, I have always been confident in my knowledge in any room full of accessibility professionals.

Then I got involved with the W3C.

Now that I'm co-leading the accessibility folks for the Digital Publishing Interest Group, I'm basically floored every day my how much sheer knowledge there is on the team. Sure, I have a lot in the can about straightforward web accessibility, but there's so much more regarding the interactions between accessibility and digital publishing, and my colleagues know it.

Happy Global Accessibility Awareness Day! I'm very excited about the presentation I'll be giving tonight (that's grown from this one) at Fresh Tilled Soil's Boston GAAD event. I'm looking forward to the other speakers, as well; I've been reading Kel Smith's book, actually.

I want to give a very brief overview of how I use technology, since enough people have asked. I'm including the various technologies (hardware and software) I use, as well as some of their perks and frustrations. Part one is my non-mobile experience: Windows, Linux, Mac.

For context, I used to be about 99% hands-free, and now I am more like 80% for actual coding/writing and maybe 50% for just dicking around online. Hooray, vast improvement! But I still have 100% hands-free days, and I need to be able to control the computer completely. I'm a programmer in my day job, and in my free time I sysadmin, code open source, write book reviews, and spend a lot of time on social media. In other words, I'm on a device the vast majority of my waking hours.

( Operating Systems, Software, Hardware: Cut for length )

(There's some non-screenreader friendly text in here, because the nature of the documentation I'm pasting in includes very long alphanumeric hashes. When you get to them just skip over them.)

Sometimes, because you are not looking at two different branches or a pull request or something such as that, you don't have access to the "compare" options from the github UI. However, you can build the URL manually. The documentation gives it as

http://github.com/USER/REPO/compare/[START...]END

Where USER and REPO are obvious, and START and END are branch names, tag names, or commit SHA1s specifying the range of history to compare. If is omitted, the repository's default branch is assumed.

So https://github.com/dreamwidth/dw-free/compare/08d335399862f0557311caa4ccd530b17c1a18b3...HEAD

Can get me to a diff view of everything from the commit with SHA1 08d335399862f0557311caa4ccd530b17c1a18b3 as its label (this is the long string in the URL of any commit) to the HEAD revision, which is to say, the current revision.

Fun times!

Free Government Infomation's Best. Titles. Ever. is back! It's now a tumblr, it's hilarious as ever, and it's managed by the amazing Aimee. Come for the lulz, stay for the muskrat meat. Thanks, GPO and Pueblo, Colarado.

This mab of the London Tube is rendered entirely in CSS! It's hasn't taken advantage of that for accessibility, but it'd be easy: a positioned off-screen header before each line, some text to announce junctions of two lines.

In response to "Of 3,200 children’s books published in 2013, just 93 were about black people":

Christopher Myers: "The Apartheid of Children’s Literature" in the NYT.

The mission statements of major publishers are littered with intentions, with their commitments to diversity, to imagination, to multiculturalism, ostensibly to create opportunities for children to learn about and understand their importance in their respective worlds. During my years of making children’s books, I’ve heard editors and publishers bemoan the dismal statistics, and promote this or that program that demonstrates their company’s “commitment to diversity.” With so much reassurance, it is hard to point fingers, but there are numbers and truths that stand in stark contrast to the reassurances.

And père. Walter Dean Myers: Where Are the People of Color in Children’s Books?

Simple racism, I thought. On reflection, though, I understood that I was wrong. It was racism, but not simple racism. My white co-worker had simply never encountered a black chemist before. Or a black engineer. Or a black doctor. I realized that we hired people not so much on their résumés, but rather on our preconceived notions of what the successful candidate should be like. And where was my boss going to get the notion that a chemist should be black?

Tressie McMillan Cottom isn't a techie; she's an academic specialising in "education, inequality, and organizations". I've been fascinated by her blogging on her research topic: for-profit education. Tressie has worked in both for-profit and non-profit, so she has a bigger grasp of the distinctions than many of us who are advocates for one side or the other.

Anyway, today -- presumably not for Ada Lovelace Day; Tressie's not, as I said, in tech -- she coincidentally posted: "One of These Things is Not Like The Other: Speaking While Black."

On the trip from the ballroom to the lounge I was stopped by three black hotel staff workers. I’m used to this. They are often older, but not always. Either way, they’ve worked in places like the Hilton for many years and they have rarely, if ever, seen someone who looks like me — like them — on the stage. They want me to know they’re proud of me. I’m a good southern girl so I mind my manners and my elders. I say yes ma’am, I’m in school. Yes, sir, my momma sure is proud of me. Thank you for praying for me.

Even my colleagues make a point of telling me that they are proud, of acknowledging my existence. A loquacious, entertaining, generous senior professor from Illinois bee-lined towards me as I found an empty seat. He didn’t even bother with introductions, as family is liable to do. He just started in with, “i sure did like seeing you up there.” I know what he means but he wants me to be clear. He goes on to tell me how long he has come to events like this and how rarely he has seen a brown face at the front of the “big room”

He asked what, by the end of the day, I was asked about half a dozen times: “how did that happen?!”

We're making excellent (if slow) inroads into getting more female representation of speakers at tech conferences. I hope we're ready to make similar inroads with the vast racial disparity (at least at every tech conference I've ever attended, in the US and in Europe).

Tressie's post is illuminating. She's a model for me, even though our fields of interested don't overlap at all.

Happy Ada Lovelace Day, everybody.

And, hey, just to make this an official Ada Lovelace Day post, here's to Kimberly Bryant, founder of the amazing Black Girls Code. I don't know that much about her that I haven't read in press for BGC, but that's impressive enough:

Kimberly’s daughter, who is currently in middle school, has been interested in technology and an avid gamer since the age of 8. Several years ago, after realizing her daughter would frequently get bored with videogames, Kimberly wanted to show her how to make one and enrolled her in a summer game development program at Stanford. “It was a great experience for her,” explains Kimberly. “But there were only about 3 girls out of approximately 25 students and she was the only person of color enrolled.”

As a result of these experiences, Kimberly decided to launch Black Girls CODE, a nonprofit that encourages young minority women to pursue a career in technology by providing them with workshops and after-school programs focused on a wide range of tech-related topics. “Our goal,” Kimberly explains, “is to address the gender and diversity gap in technology and to feed girls into the STEM pipeline as early in their development years as possible.”

--"Kimberly Bryant, Black Girls Code"

For a project at work (CIDER) we're using git pretty extensively, with an adapted version of the git-flow model. For all that I'm finding myself becoming a release engineer all over again -- not a career I intended to move back towards, but what can you do? -- I'm really enjoying our development model so far.

Our model is that people do all their work on spot branches, except for ongoing subtle improvements to template toolkit files, which has been happening on a single long-lived branch. When a fix is made the developer makes a pull request. One of the other two of our three core developers -- in practice always me -- does a quick code review, and tests it in our development environment just by doing git checkout --track origin/[branch] (or, in the case of the long-lived branch, git checkout [branch];git pull and running the Web server against the new contents of the directory. When it's tested in the development environment, we just accept the pull request and do a git pull in the production directory.

It's nothing fancy or unusual -- basically git-flow without continuous integration. But over the years of using CVS, RCS, subversion, and perforce, only perforce has given me anything close to as much satisfaction in the release management, and perforce wouldn't work for our current model (where one of our developers is a remote contractor).

Of course I also like using the same environment and tools for work and for dreamwidth, because it takes away the cognitive cost of switching when I come home and decide to work on dreamwidth.

I'm used to thinking of myself as having an invisible disability, because out in the real world, I do. It just occurred to me that in the Internet, where nobody knows you a use a wheelchair unless you tell them so, my disability has a tendency towards the visible. I probably let through about 5% of my dictation errors in blog posts but 40% of my dictation errors in online chat; people who regularly interact with me chatting online have learned to decipher the bizarre word salad that sometimes comes through. If I'm communicating (chat, Twitter, e-mail) on a mobile device, my recognition errors get even weirder, because the mobile recognition has its own strange features.

So to people with whom I communicate online, I have this big obvious disability. But in person, I pass for able-bodied. Sure, I'm usually carrying this very strange bag around my waist, and I'm usually not clicking away with my laptop in public, and sometimes I'm wearing one of those Bluetooth headsets that has a big flashing light in order to make you look like a jerk who spends all day on a Bluetooth headset. But I don't look not able-bodied, I just look strange.

It's just odd that most people pass on the Internet, whereas for me, the Internet is one of the only places I don't pass. (Technically I could pass if I proofread better, but proofreading is really difficult in IM/IRC.)

On an entirely unrelated note, I just registered for my first ALA Annual. It seems terrifyingly large, but I'm required to go for the Odyssey committee. (Odyssey Committee FTW!) Booking my flight on Egencia was a wonder of accessible web design, where even the seat selector was fully keyboard accessible. The ALA Annual scheduling website, however... Not so much. I suppose it's no surprise. Every few years ALA redesigns all of their websites to be worse than they were before. :(

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Gnomic Utterances. These are traditional, and are set at the head of each section of the Guidebook. The reason for them is lost in the mists of History. They are culled by the Management from a mighty collection of wise sayings probably compiled by a SAGE—probably called Ka’a Orto’o—some centuries before the Tour begins. The Rule is that no Utterance has anything whatsoever to do with the section it precedes. Nor, of course, has it anything to do with Gnomes.

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Ramblings on Librarianship, Technology, and Academia

The Australasian Journal of Me

Entries tagged with technology

this is about the birdsite but also isn't

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

tech solutionism

never talk about work

life imitates life

Character Tropes in Technology

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

Notes

the power and the danger of WAI-ARIA: speech recognition edition

Protecting ourselves online in a hostile age

DictationBridge

Advertsing: I want to be a good citizen and also safe

Native apps, applications, and web apps

Software interaction

My pond has just gotten exponentially more knowledgable

hands-free computing part 1: non-mobile

fun github trick I just figured out

A little linkspam

Intersectionality, conferences, gender, and race: Ada Lovelace Day

I haven't drunk the Kool-Aid, but I do admit it is brightly colored and tasty looking

visibility, disability, other things that rhyme with bility

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