Kind: Notes

short content: a post or status update with just plain content and typically without a title
Current status: Banging on the Twentytwenty theme with all the screen readers and helping @whiskeydragon1 set up his .org account because he’s also testing. #ScreenReaderTagTeam #AllTheProps #5FTF and we haz some patches coming.

It’s very nice to have someone in real time and not remote or chat-based to bounce ideas off of.

#WCUS I’m glad that @RianKinney asked that question regarding accessibility and other policies.

It would be so cool if we could treat as an “everything-is-awesome” moment and not as a must-do.

Problem with that approach was aptly illustrated by Gutenberg being released in an inaccessible state.

I’d like to say I’m surprised we’re apparently still doing this despite $31,000 worth of audit, but I’m not.

Yes, it would be totally awesome if we didn’t have to say “you must” with regard to accessibility, but unfortunately the makers of the web have consistently demonstrated that that is literally the only way anything gets done.

For the first few years of my career as an accessibility practitioner, I worked on a series of projects whose final reports heavily focused on only the positive, including asking testers with disabilities to talk about what they liked, even on seriously inaccessible sites.

That approach wasn’t just partially ineffective, it was one hundred percent ineffective.

Absolutely none of the sites reported on were fixed, or even improved.

Those sites are still broken.

That’s what happens when you spend your time objecting to accessibility must-dos because they’re must-dos instead of realizing that, yes Matt, there really are things that developers and designers have consistently demonstrated they will not do unless you basically force them to do those things.

All of this also goes for privacy and codes of conduct.

Why do we have to keep saying this?

#WCUS Question: Do you find it easier to read websites/pages that are multicolumn or single-column?

It doesn’t matter to me as a screen reader user, because everything is always a single column, but I’m thinking that if a page is one column, never-ending scrolling can become an issue.

On the other hand, there could be a reason that multiple columns could also be an issue for people who use their vision to read.

Thoughts?

Everybody’s new #WCUS selfies and headshots were making me jealous and agrevating the fomo, so I decided to bite the bullet and put some work into customerservant.com

I’m just focusing on a few simple things today because, well, I need some easy wins.

Right now it’s just a picture and some text on the website, cleaning up things that aren’t being used, and then later on after the State of the Word, some things I need to have my host handle.

I’ll do some more complicated work tomorrow during the contributor day.

But, starting is much better than planning and not doing, so I’m taking the easy wins for now.

Wow. Basecamp’s gotten a metric ton of accessibility improvements.

Finally, reasonably accessible project management.

I have a lot of catching up to do to get in line with the way everyone else manages their projects, but I suspect my life’s about to get a lot easier.

Mmmm fewer spreadsheets and fewer hacky internal applications.