busybee fluffy rambles Notes

Fluffy, I’m curious if you have time to do us all the kindness to deliver a 15-20 minute keynote on the topic of your choosing for the upcoming IndieWebCamp East 2020 on Saturday, November 14, 2020 some time between 10 and 11 am Eastern? Given the online nature of the camp it will take place via Zoom to an international audience and, as usual, will be recorded for posterity.

Oh, wow, thank you for the invitation, but I’ll have to decline, as the timing doesn’t really work for me, between traveling that week and also being in Pacific time.

I could possibly record something in advance instead, if that’s okay, although I’m spread a bit thin right now and I don’t think I could commit to that either.

Manuel Matuzović shares a thought-provoking experiment: the sample page accompanying his article “Accessible to some” has been optimized for screenreader software only, making it a hellish experience for users using the visual interface with a mouse.

The example website would be a clever illustration, except that it doesn’t actually work with VoiceOver on macOS (on Safari it just reads the visible text, and while Firefox does a bit better it stops after reading the first chunk of text and doesn’t proceed), nor with the built-in screen reader in macOS Safari.

Using aria labels to override the text is a poor approach to making plain text documents screen-readable; a better approach would have been to do all of the obnoxious stuff purely through CSS, which would also allow this page to work in, say, lynx | say or the like.