Friendly public service announcement to all corporations: Sponsorship of the #NFB19 convention is not a shortcut to the accessibility of your websites or apps. That sponsorship money would be much better spent on doing the actual work of making your websites and apps accessible to everyone.
Read Facebook’s Image Outage Reminds Us How Bad Social Media Accessibility Really Is by Kalev Leetaru

Facebook’s brief image outage earlier this week exposed the general public to just how bad accessibility really is in our modern visual-first social Web. While governments and the technology community are investing heavily in AI bias, they care little about accessibility bias.

I don’t use Facebook very much these days, so I heard about the media outage from the outside. And yes, while there have been improvements, and while I’m not placing blame on Facebook’s accessibility team, the accessibility isn’t great even when the AI so-called alt text functionality is working. The best alt text is text which exposes the context of the image being described, and this is down to content creators. This incident is a prime example of why accessibility advocates and consumer organizations should not be using Facebook as their primary distribution platform. If you must use something like Facebook, then you have a responsibility to make the content you host there as accessible as you can by learning how to add alternative text to your images and, (if you’re using Facebook Live), to transcribe that content and host those transcriptions somewhere else until you can make arrangements to use either a different third-party platform or your own platform, otherwise known as your own website.
Replied to A post from Greg McVerry by Greg McVerryGreg McVerry (quickthoughts.jgregorymcverry.com)

@cswordpress Wow, thanks for pointing this out! Was commenting at organizing meeting that we have a strong presence, especially among people who use screen readers. Would love to learn more about your voice and journey. Maybe make a section here: https://indieweb.org/accessibility?

I agree that there is a strong accessibility presence within the Indieweb community. The focus on semantic HTML is the catalyst for this in my opinion. The backbone of accessibility is semantic HTML, which at its heart means using HTML elements as they were intended to be used. Thanks for making me aware of the accessibility page on the Indieweb wiki. Adding some information there could be useful to others. I’m getting back into the swing of writing things on my own sites again, and I still have several Indieweb tutorials to finish. Tiny steps.
Read I Am Cookie Dough by Allie Nimmons

I was always told I had to go to college. I was “gifted” so learning came easy and I enjoyed it.  From ages 6 to 18, I went to competitive accelerated schools designed to churn out college students. It was a narrow path I’d been set on, without encouragement to explore beyond.

These posts are often times the highlight of my week.