fredleblanc

Those Boston stencil jerseys are the Boston Marathon ones. Red Sox play a day game on the same day as the marathon each April. It’s a whole day of things for the city. The stencil approach mimics the days of spray painting down the finish line.

I live in New Hampshire, and though I've never voted on a computer where I'm touching a screen, I still feed my paper ballot into a scantron machine that seems to do all the counting. I’ve voted in maybe 20 elections (between local, state, and federal) in my lifetime, and it's always been done this way around here. Maybe we all forget that that's a computer, too.

All that said, I live in a town of less than 3,000 people. I don't know that the solutions that work for us here would work everywhere.

Oh, right, I do the subscription, so it's $15/mo for 1 audiobook, plus 30% off further purchases. I guess I don't "audio-read" that much, so that's a good deal for me. (I actually have credits saved up, which don't expire.)

I do this with audiobooks, too, but consider libro.fm instead. Same pricing last I looked, and part of my monthly subscription goes towards my local bookseller.

That said, a +1 to Prologue from me. Fantastic app.

Also worth checking out is the Lexend family: https://www.lexend.com/

I love seeing this push into legibility!

1) Not nearly enough. This has become more of a hot topic as of late.

2) IANAL and can’t speak to this.

3) The US lags many places in the world on its legal accessibility requirements. Depending on the country, you’re probably at HIGHER risk outside the US. Check out this really useful collection of laws and policies from around the world: https://www.w3.org/WAI/policies/

I’ve been making mint-tin tabletop games. I’m aiming for a new game every other month. Being a web person for like 20 years now, everything I make disappears in months-to-years. As someone I worked with once described it, we’re digital ice sculptors.

So as a change of pace, physical games! I’ve released 2 so far, next one coming in March.

One is a set-collection competition called Come to Call where players are royal PR people. You’re trying to win the favor of rich patrons without seeming too desperate. Your goal is to send the least interest delegate that will still steal the show. It’s a game of kings, queens, fools, and way too many butlers.

The second game is a push-your-luck dice-rolling egg hunt called Egg Roll! You’ve only got time to make 6 stops to find eggs. Roll the dice to find eggs. If you find some, you can move those to safety or roll to find more. Find nothing and score nothing for the round instead. Works well with kids and adults alike! And comes with 6 variants to change the game up.

You can see both at my little corner of the web, https://fredandfun.com

If you use the coupon codes on my site, I make less than 50¢ per game sold. I’ll never recover what I spent on art. But I dob’t care. As long as someone anywhere has fun with either of them, it’s all worthwhile.

Absolutely! Low literacy and illiteracy effects about 2 billion people in the world, and can include everyone using your primary language as their secondary language. Even if they’re getting by with running your site through Google Translate or whatever, the less you write in complex concepts, jargon, or regional idioms, the more likely they’ll be able to accurately comprehend your message.

And Microsoft’s toolkit is wonderful. My favorite part of working in accessibility for [big company] is that we don’t have business rivals in the a11y space. Everyone is in it to get better together.

Good accessibility is too often a competitive advantage in web products, when it should be the standard.

Absolutely, because not all disabilities are permanent. They can broken into lifelong disabilities, acquired, temporary, situational, and chronic (potentially among others). Just think of how many people who can hear still use captioning on their TVs. Or how easy your website is to reading on a phone during a bright, sunny day. Or how usable your stuff is for someone holding a child in one arm. Accessibility (and thus, WCAG’s success criteria) helps everyone.

I don’t think it’s unusual that creators who have thought about accessibility have also thought a lot about UX, etc. So there may be some correlation there. But as others have posted, while there are some criteria more targeted at those using assistive technology (like screen readers), there are just as many things helping everyone else.

Besides all that, none of us are getting younger, and with age comes reduced mobility, dexterity, sight, hearing, etc. You never know what tomorrow brings. Someone who self-identifies as having no disabilities today may have a different experience tomorrow.

But then again, web accessibility is what I do for a living, so of course I’m a bit biased. :)

The first time I got to 4 green letters, iOS Safari crashed on me. Wasn’t sure if that was the adversarial part, but laughed hoping it was.

I think its much funnier, but also completely different. It’s a sketch show, not a narrative.

But I tend to watch it the whole series every month or so. It’s fun to put on in the background.

I feel like the brain surgery sketch is very close to the perfect sketch. It’s a simple joke, you can see where it’s headed before it gets there, but it’s still executed well.

Anyway, worth it to me.

I’ll second this. Got one for Christmas last year and have used it twice a week all year. It makes the process feel foolproof, and is the easiest appliance to clean in my kitchen.

Never made a bad batch of rice, and have accidentally left rice on keep warm for hours and hours and everything was perfectly fine.

And, yeah, it’s solid. I highly recommend.

Nope.

For preparation, put it on a chicken roasting pan, and "painted" it with melted butter. Sprinkled on some salt, pepper, fresh sage that grows in our yard, rosemary, and some garlic powder. I stuffed lemons and onion pieces in the middle.

I used an always-in thermometer in the thigh. Baked it at 325°F with the foil on until the thigh hit 135°F — about 3 hours for our 13-pound bird — then removed foil, drizzled a bit of an olive oil/garlic powder/salt mix over the top, and then let it continue to bake until the thigh hit 165°F. At that point the breast was 175°F.

Took it out and let it set for about 45 minutes before carving. I think that's the important part. Juices thicken and settle in the meat instead of running everywhere.

I think the two key things was constant temperature monitor (over-cooking means dry) and letting it set (early-cutting loses juices).

I don’t have answers, just thoughts. I’m always impressed how some people can take something I thought was either obvious, common knowledge, or nothing interesting and intrigue so many people with it. You might know something that most don’t, and you might be more interesting than you realize to the right people. And hey, you know the internet! That’s where most of the people are!

I believe that everyone has a niche, but they might not realize it, or people might assume it should be bigger than it is. When I started doing web stuff and “making things,” I dreamed of changing the world. That was like 25 years ago. Now I’m making the things that I like, putting it out into the world, and hoping that somehow the right people find it. I don’t want to change the world anymore, I’m just hoping to accidentally change a couple people’s worlds in tiny, beneficial ways.

Small steps. All we hear about and witness are the big leapers. We’re not all big leapers, and that’s so perfectly OK. I’ve come to rather make a single person very happy, even if only for a few minutes, than make 1,000 people kinda happy.

Maybe it feels like staring out at the ocean and feeling completely insignificant. But maybe it’s really that you’re just not meant to do anything with the ocean.

I’d love to hear more about the ins and outs of technical writing. You probably have learned a lot more than you realize about do’s and don’t’s, tips and tricks, etc.

Look small. Don’t expect to make waves. Do things because you enjoy them. If you feel like sharing that with others, do it! Don’t focus on what they want, focus on you enjoying something. Whether that’s learning something in front of people, trying something new, reviewing a YouTube documentary, or whatever.

Or, you know, don’t. :) Just be, and enjoy learning and watching YouTube and know that those things aren’t damaging the world, and that’s a hell of a lot more than many people can say.

An example of this challenge appearing elsewhere: in the US, long-haul effects of COVID have recently moved under the Americans with Disabilities Act umbrella. The problem, however, is there’s not a single easy, testable way to determine if someone has it or not.

Accessibility can mean two things: affordances that people need to have an equal experience, but also affordance that people would like to have a more pleasurable experience. And in the entertainment business, people experiencing pleasure tends to be good business.

As noted in many introductions to accessibility, these features help more than just the stereotypical example you may think of when hearing that word. There are many forms of accessibility: lifelong, acquired, temporary, chronic, and situational. Between those 5 forms, these features really help everyone.

It’s all about context, consideration, dignity, but mostly, letting the challenge be the puzzle itself instead of the structure of the scaffolding holding the puzzle in place.

I mean, that’s one solution to WCAG 1.4.1, but not the only one. Per WebAIM’s recommendations[1] on the matter:

- Color is not used as the sole method of conveying content or distinguishing visual elements.

- Color alone is not used to distinguish links from surrounding text unless the contrast ratio between the link and the surrounding text is at least 3:1 and an additional distinction (e.g., it becomes underlined) is provided when the link is hovered over and receives focus.

Lots of options in there besides just slapping underlines on things. Could be bold where other text isn’t. Could just be a color that stands out enough against your text. Etc.

[1]: https://webaim.org/standards/wcag/checklist

I completely agree. I've had quite a few people ask me "how do I turn that on in Google Meet," to which I then have to explain, "it's waaaaay more complicated than you'd expect."

I'm surprised "simple overlays" aren't a thing in any of the video conference software yet.

As I mentioned in another comment — I used jQuery, and chose not to share anything because I don't need everyone's feedback on how old and dumb that makes me. :)

But basically, anything you can render in a browser can happen on the screen. Get JavaScript to show your current time in a browser, then pull in that URL into your OBS scene. The background will be transparent.

I think it's using Blink to render things underneath, that's what it seems like at least.

It does it at lunch times too, adds a little fork and knife, dropping the word "LUNCH" underneath. :)

My code isn't public because it uses jQuery and I don't need the feedback about how old I am because I like jQuery. :)

But generally speaking, if you can get JavaScript to display the current time in a browser, you can pull in that file via a browser source (using a file:// protocol) and show it on the screen. From there, it's a matter of doing anything else you can get JS to show in a browser. Or, if you have a local server running, you can display entire websites along side your face.

At that point, it's an interesting shift in mindset — you're not designing stuff for the browser, but to be displayed next to you.

I’ve got a within-the-last-18-months MacBook Pro, so yeah, your mileage may vary. A dedicated graphics card helps tremendously. I’ve got a gaming PC with a recent NVIDIA card and it does even blink at it.

My favorite OBS feature is that you can bring in transparent browser windows all over the place. As such, I have my work conferencing set up so my time appears in the upper-right corner. I’m on the east coast and everyone I work with is on the west coast. It’s a nice way to remind them of my current time. (It also passive aggressively animated to purple with a moon when its “after hours,” a/k/a 5pm for me.)

I also have shortcuts to pull in live weather conditions, our company stock price, crypto prices for fun, a 1- and 3- and 5-minute timer, as well as a countdown of days until important work events.

It’s fun, and all just a bit of HTML and CSS and JS. (And PHP/cURL/cron to pull stock and weather prices in the background.) All this for free with OBS.

Easily a top 5 app for me.

I generally tell people that alt text is one of the few places where accessibility can be as much art as it is science. As other commenters noted, context is important. Images will most likely be consumed with its surrounding context. If the image is bringing nothing new, consider marking it as decorative.

But if it isn't, express the intent of the image along with its content. Let's say you're back in the office, and describing a photo to someone sitting at a desk across from you. How would you describe it? It the point of the image that it's art? Is it the structure and layout of the scene? Is the point just to identify what a chrysanthemum looks like?

I'm often reminded by a colleague that if you get too wordsy with alt text, or it doesn't seem important or valid, a screen reader user can easily skip past the image and move on.

At the end of it all, the two most important bits seem to be: making any effort is better than not trying at all, do your best and you'll get better at it over time; and remember that even though a screen reader (or some other mechanical assistive technology) will parse the text you write, you're doing this for the person on the other side — they love to laugh, smile, have fun, learn, and understand things just like you do. :)

I have a similar story I’ve posted about before. Cut sugar, made myself do 30 minutes of brisk activity each day, lost about 70 pounds.

Mind you, it got harder to do brisk activity as it went. What started as walking for 2 miles ended up being running for 5 miles. (5 miles became the target after a while so I stopped with 30 minutes. It would take 38-40 minutes at my best.)

Also got hit with COVID gain, so I’m back at it. Bought me a treadmill and am doing at least a 5k every day, training back up to at least 4 miles.

I found a lot of it was consistency. It felt like weight loss had an inertia to it. Took a while to really start losing, but once it started it was easy to keep dropping a pound per week. Even after stopping running for a bit, the weight stayed off for quite a while.

Anyway, good on you (us!) for regular exercise! It really can make all the difference.

It really is “just enough computer: the OS.”

Yeah, that part sucks. She started on Loki (not that she knows that) and I upgraded things to Juno and that was enough for me. Luckily, her life on the computer is a printer driver and a browser window, so there wasn't much that needed re-configuring.

The thing about her using Elementary is that these things haven’t come up in the years she’s been on it. I’m sure I just jinxed it now though.

The printer support really blew me away. Maybe I still have PTSD from trying to get any peripheral to work with anything that required a driver when I was younger, but that you can just plug and play anywhere these days (on Linux or Mac or Windows) still makes me smile.

I know, but “I’ve converted my regular visits to SSH tunnels” doesn’t go over well with moms. :)