Right now I am incredibly grateful and thankful for the extensive accessibility improvements to the WordPress widgets screen, because today I learned that there is at least one developer on this planet who actually worked to not support accessibility mode.

Is there a legitimate reason to do this other than pure unadulterated ableism? That’s not a rhetorical question.

If it weren’t for all the accessibility improvements to the main widgets screen, I would quite literally be prevented from completing this project.

So whoever did all this work, (and it was probably done in very large part by Andria Fercia), thank you so much, I owe you a ton right now. If it wasn’t all Andria, or if it was completely someone else, please get in touch so I can edit this post to ensure that you are publicly thanked by name or names.

I would be totally screwed right now if it weren’t for all your hard work.

Read Accessible Death – Songs by Joe O’Connor

I’m putting together this play list for my wake and writing about my life while I am able. Time will come when I won’t have the strength. I want to make sure that my daughter Siobhan ( born with severe intellectual disabilities) understands what is happening and that she feels included in the process. I’ve used some songs she will recognize. In this way she’ll hopefully feel included.

I’ll update this post later once I can manage to get my thoughts together so that the words I’d like to say while Joe is still with us are in some kind of order instead of a jumbled mess mixed with grief and swearing.

I’ll try to do it quickly. Hopefully there’s enough time.

If you don’t know who Joe is, he’s one of the original gangsters of WordPress Accessibility.

Through this connection he is someone very dear to me.

Read NORMS OF COMPUTER TRESPASS by Orin S. Kerr

This Essay develops an approach to interpreting computer trespass laws, such as the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act, that ban unauthorized access to a computer. In the last decade, courts have divided sharply on what makes access unauthorized. Some courts have interpreted computer trespass laws broadly to prohibit trivial wrongs such as violating terms of use to a website. Other courts have limited the laws to harmful examples of hacking into a computer. Courts have struggled to interpret authorization because they lack an underlying theory of how to distinguish authorized from unauthorized access.
This Essay argues that authorization to access a computer is contingent on trespass norms—shared understandings of what kind of access invades another person’s private space. Judges are unsure of how to apply computer trespass laws because the Internet is young and its trespass norms are unsettled. In the interim period before norms emerge, courts should identify the best rules to apply as a matter of policy. Judicial decisions in the near term can help shape norms in the long term. The remainder of the Essay articulates an appropriate set of rules using the principle of authentication. Access is unauthorized when the computer owner requires authentication to access the computer and the access is not by the authenticated user or his agent. This principle can resolve the meaning of authorization before computer trespass norms settle and can influence the norms that eventually emerge.

Read Scraping A Public Website Doesn’t Violate the CFAA, Ninth Circuit (Mostly) Holds by Orin S. Kerr

The Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals has handed down a groundbreaking decision today on the federal computer hacking law,  the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act (CFAA).  In HiQ Labs v. LinkedIn, the court held that scraping a public website is likely not a CFAA violation.
Under the new decision, violating the CFAA requires “circumvent[ing] a computer’s generally applicable rules regarding access permissions, such as username and password requirements,” that thus “demarcate[]” the information “as private using such an authorization system.”  If the data is available to the general public, the court says, it’s not an unauthorized access to view it—even when the computer owner has sent a cease-and-desist letter to the visitor telling them not to visit the website.
This is a major case that will be of interest to a lot of people and a lot of companies.  But it’s also pretty complicated and easy to misunderstand.   This post will go through it carefully, trying to explain what it says and what it doesn’t say.

This decision is critical to maintaining an open web, at least in the United States.
Read Why I Have a Website and You Should Too by Jamie TannaJamie Tanna

A persuasive look at the many reasons why you should have your own website, and some of the benefits it will bring you.

This post has a lot of takeaways for non-developers and even non-technical people. You don’t need to be a geek to have a website.

Personally, I think it’s vitally important, for example, to use a website to maintain a record of all the free accessibility testing you do as a person with disabilities. While I’d rather that the “f*ck you, pay me” approach be adopted instead of every organization and its brother jumping on mailing lists and social media asking for free work from persons with disabilities, maintaining a record of all the free work you do that can be used later to complete the experience section of your resume is the next best thing.