Reading list
Shortform reading
This is an incomplete list of the shortform reading (and listening and watching) I’ve been doing lately.
I worry our Copilot is leaving some passengers behind
But if we’re giving one of the world’s major corporations our money, in exchange for this tool that’s supposed to make us better…shouldn’t it be held to some standard of quality? ... Copilot is now responsible for a large and ever-increasing percentage of the code being run on devices all across the planet. How can we possibly find it acceptable that this tool is unreliable at best, and actively harmful at worst?
Meet the first-ever accessibility engineer at The Washington Post
It is definitely stressful to be the first in this new role. I feel deep down like I need to justify its creation with every step that I take.
Day 156 and Social Accommodations
Julie Fredrickson writes about the positive difference digital asynchronous communication has on her ability to manage her energy while living with chronic illness. She linked this post in a response to a tweet I retweeted, about if and how people are helping accommodate interviewees with panic attacks or other anxiety issues.- O'Dell writes about how it seems that hearing people go through the exact same basic learnings about Deafness over and over again, and that hearing people are not doing enough to work towards learning and allyship with the Deaf community.
- Smilges talks about how LGBTQ Pride is so often inaccessible to them and their disabled friends for various reasons—"they're too loud, too crowded, and too filled with unwanted or accidental touch, as well as planned without basic accommodations, like ramps, sign language interpreters, and food/drink alternatives for people with specific dietary needs". They talk about the commodification of Pride, and how it is built around serving those who are wealthy, not disabled, gender-conforming, and white. They also talk about how they are rethinking the emotions around disability and queer pride.
Five ways to include d/Deaf users in your designs
DiTullio gives a list of five ways to improve online experiences for d/Deaf users: including visual indicators of audio cues, providing text equivalents of audio content, providing sign language, writing with d/Deaf people in mind, and testing designs with d/Deaf people.The Mobile Performance Inequality Gap, 2021
Russell discusses the current baseline for mobile device performance, and how frontend developers are creating poor experiences for many users by building single page applications and other web experiences that are much heavier than what these devices (and networks) can support. "When we construct a digital world to the limits of the best devices, the worse an experience we build, on average, for those who cannot afford iPhones or $800 Samsung flagships."Your first attempt at making anything accessible will be awful
Byrne-Haber explains that making websites accessible is very difficult, but that that shouldn't be an excuse to avoid doing it. I particularly like point 3: "Even people with disabilities can't represent the needs of everyone with any disability", and the takeaway: "98% of websites are completely inaccessible. You couldn't possibly do any worse than they are. The starting point is giving a damn." Something is better than nothing.Covid Vaccine Websites Violate Disability Laws, Create Inequity for the Blind
Nearly all vaccine websites across the country do not meet standards required by disability rights laws, and have prevented some blind and visually impaired people from signing up online for vaccination appointments. Blind people are at a higher risk for COVID-19 because they are often unable to distance from people, due to needing assistance with things like grocery shopping.- Review of research on characters that are easily confused with other characters, and what typeface changes (for example, serifs) have been shown to increase peoples' ability to distinguish them. Also discusses the existence of "infant characters", a term I'd never heard: "Infant characters, a, g, l, q, y, I, J, 1, 4, 7, 9, are characters specifically designed for people around 6 years old." Goes into some detail about how different visual impairments cause different effects (for example, tunnel vision vs. blurry patches vs. poorer vision at the center of one's field of view). Some of the recommendations in the article were surprising to me: "Sans serif or bracketed serif was preferred over serif. It appears that a slight degree of serif which accentuates the characters ends without distracting from the simple form actually increased legibility."