I’m doing some accessibility testing on a React Native codebase that uses Expo during development. If you’ve done something seriously wrong in a previous life and karma has condemned you to using React Native rather than making a Progressive Web App, Expo is jolly useful. It gives you a QR code that you can scan with Android or iOS to ‘install’ the app on your device and you get live reload of any changes. It’s like sinking in a quagmire of shit but someone nice is bringing you beer and playing Abba while it happens. (Beats me why that isn’t their corporate strapline.)
Anyway, I struggled a bit to set it up so here are some random tips that I learned the hard way:
If your terminal yells “Error: EMFILE: too many open files, watch at FSEvent.FSWatcher._handle.onchange (internal/fs/watchers.js:178:28) error Command failed with exit code 1” when you start Expo, stop it, do brew install watchman and re-start Expo. Why? No idea. Someone from StackOverflow told me. Most npm stuff is voodoo magic–just install all the things, hope none of them were made by in Moscow by Vladimir Evilovich of KGB Enterprises, ignore all the deprecation warnings and cross your fingers.
If you want to open your app in an iOS simulator, you need xcode and you need to install xcode command line tools or it’ll just hang.
Scrolling in iOS simulator is weird. Press the trackpad with one hand and scroll with other hand. Or enable three finger drag and have one hand free for coffee, smoking or whatever other filthy habits you’ve developed while working from home.
If you like CSS, under no circumstances view source of the app running in the browser. It is, however, full of lots of ARIA nourishment thanks to React Native for Web.
Kangen water is a trademark for machine-electrolysed water, owned by Enagic. Similar water is also variously known as Electrolyzed Reduced Alkaline Water, Alkaline Water, Structured Water, or Hexagonal Water. It’s popular among new-age influencers and their followers, because it raises the vibrational frequency of their chakras and kundalinis, thereby energising the Qui so that Gemini shines in their quantum auras, or something. Of course, none of these are verifiable –because they’re all fictional.
Enagic itself is careful not to over-promise; their website says that their water can be used for preparing food, making coffee, watering plants, washing your pets, face, hair – who knew?! It rather confusingly tells you “Take your medicine with this water” (Archived web page):
Kangen Water® is intended for everyday drinking and cooking rather than for drinking with medication. The Japanese Ministry of Health, Labor and Welfare gives the following directions: Do not take medication with machine-produced water. (Archived page)
Alkaline water’s health benefits
As for health benefits, Enagic simply claims that Kangen water is
perfect for drinking and healthy cooking. This electrolytically-reduced, hydrogen-rich water works to restore your body to a more alkaline state, which is optimal for good health.
The mechanism by which it makes your body more alkaline is not explained, nor why a more alkaline state should be “optimal for good health”. In its article Is alkaline water a miracle cure – or BS? The science is in, The Guardian cites Dr Tanis Fenton, an adjunct professor at the University of Calgary and an evidence analyst for Dietitians of Canada:
Fenton stresses, you simply can’t change the pH of your body by drinking alkaline water. “Your body regulates its [blood] pH in a very narrow range because all our enzymes are designed to work at pH 7.4. If our pH varied too much we wouldn’t survive.”
Masaru Emoto and Water memory
The swamps of social media are full of people selling magic Water to each other, making all sorts of outlandish unscientific claims, such as water has “memory”:
This hokum was popularised by Masuru Emoto, a graduate in International Relations who became a “Doctor” of Alternative Medicine at the Open International University for Alternative Medicine in India, a diploma mill which targeted quacks to sell its degrees and was later shut down.
(The idea that water holds memory is often cited by fans of homeopathy. They agree: there is none of the actual substance remaining in this water because it’s been diluted out of existence, but it does its magical healing because the water *remembers*. Cosmic, maaan.)
Mr Emoto’s results have never been reproduced, his methodology was unscientific, sloppy and subjective. Mr Emoto was invited to participate in the James Randi Educational Foundation’s Million Dollar Challenge in which pseudo-scientists are invited to replicate their results in properly controlled scientific methods, and get paid $1 million if they succeed. For some inexplicable reason, he didn’t take up the challenge.
Hexagonal water hydrates better
It’s also claimed that this magical water forms hexagonal “clusters” that somehow make it more hydrating because it’s more readily absorbed by cells. This is nonsense: although water clusters have been observed experimentally, they have a very short lifetime: the hydrogen bonds are continually breaking and reforming at timescales shorter than 200 femtoseconds.
In any case, Water molecules enter cells through a structure called an aquaporin, in single file. If they were clustered, they would be too big to enter the cell.
Despite the promotion of the alkaline diet and alkaline water by the media and salespeople, there is almost no actual research to either support or disprove these ideas. This systematic review of the literature revealed a lack of evidence for or against diet acid load and/or alkaline water for the initiation or treatment of cancer. Promotion of alkaline diet and alkaline water to the public for cancer prevention or treatment is not justified.
It was demonstrated that degradation of the electrodes during functioning of the device releases very reactive nanoparticles of platinum, the toxicity of which has not yet been clearly proven. This report recommends alerting health authorities of the uncontrolled availability of these devices used as health products, but which generate drug substances and should therefore be sold according to regulatory requirements.
In short: machine-produced magic water has no scientifically demonstrable health benefits, and may actually be harmful.
Living structured water?
So why do people make such nonsensical claims about magic water? Some do it for profit, of course. Enagic sells via a multi-level marketing scheme, similar to Amway but for Spiritual People, Lightworkers, Starseeds and Truth-Seakers. (Typo intentional; new-age bliss ninnies love to misspell “sister” as “SeaStar”, for example, because the Cosmos reveals itself through weak puns, and —of course— the Cosmos only speaks English. You sea?)
But it’s not harmless. The same people who promote magic water also bang on about “sacred earth“, claim Trump won the 2020 election, Covid is a “plandemic” and show a disturbing tendency towards far right politics. The excellent article The New Age Racket and the Left (from 2004 but still worth reading in full) sums it up brilliantly:
At best, then, New Age is a lucrative side venture of neoliberalism, lining the pockets of those crafty enough to package spiritual fulfillment as a marketable product while leaving the spiritually hungry as unsated as ever. At worst, though, it is the expression of something altogether more sinister. Rootedness in the earth, a return to pure and authentic folkways, the embrace of irrationalism, the conviction that there is an authentic way of being beyond politics, the uncritical substitution of group- identification for self-knowledge, are all of them basic features of right-wing ideology…
Many New Agers seem to feel not just secure in but altogether self-righteous about the benevolence of their world-view, pointing to the fact, for example, that it ‘celebrates’ the native cultures that global capitalism would plow over. To this one might respond, first of all, that celebration of native cultures is itself big business. Starbucks does it. So, in its rhetoric, does the Southeast Asian sex-tourism industry. Second, the simple fact that New Age is by its own lights multicultural and syncretistic is by no means a guarantee that it is safe from the accusation of being, at best, permissive of, and, at worst, itself an expression of, right-wing ideology. The Nazis, to return to a tried and true example, were no less obsessed with Indian spirituality than was George Harrison.
Conclusion
Kangen water and its non-branded magical siblings are useless nonsense that wastes resources as it requires electricity. Enagic gives contradictory advice about whether it’s safe to use it to take (real) medicines with. Water machines might make the source water worse because the device releases very reactive nanoparticles of platinum. Most people who extol its virtues want of your money, and they might also be an anti-scientific quasi-fascist.
Chromium spelling and grammar features – “My first project has been implementing the new CSS spelling and grammar features in Chromium”. A deep dive that might help answer your question “How hard can it be to implement [my pet feature]?”
URL protocol handler registration for PWAs – Let installed PWAs handle links that use a specific protocol for a more integrated experience. Further steps to enhancing the capabilities and UX of web technology.
What’s New in Android Accessibility – TL;DR: Samsung and Google now collaborate on Talkback; You can now talk to Talkback. For deaf people: live transcription of conversations in 80 languages; an app to amplify certain frequencies of sound in real time (eg, a hearing aid); teachable app that can monitor environmental sound and alert you, eg of fire alarm/ dog barking/ your doorbell ringing. Lots of technology (crypto, surveillance, Facebook) makes the world worse, but the liberating tech on devices is a massive boon for people with disabilities.
Apple accused of breaking UK competition law by overcharging for apps – “The tech company has been accused of deliberately shutting out the competition in the store and forcing people to use its own payment processing system, generating “excessive” profits for itself in the process.”
TL;DR: I’ve forked the splendid but dated Tota11y accessibility visualisation toolkit, added some extra stuff and corrected a bug, and my employer has let me release it for Global Accessibility Awareness Day.
A while ago, my very nice client (and now employer), Babylon Health, asked me to help them with their accessibility testing. One plan of attack is an automated scan integrated with the CI system to catch errors during development (more about this when it’s finished). But for small content changes made by marketing folks, this isn’t appropriate.
We tried lots of things like Wave, which are great but rather overwhelming for non-technical people because they tend to cover the page being analysed with arcane symbols, many of which are beyond a CMS content editor’s control anyway. Then I remembered something I’d used a while ago to demo heading structures, a tool called Tota11y from Khan Academy, which is MIT licensed. Note, this is not designed to check everything. It aims to give content authors and editors insights into things they can control. It’s not a cure-all.
There were a few things I wanted to change, specifically for Babylon’s web sites. I wanted the contrast analyser to ignore content that was visually hidden using the common clip pattern and to correct a bug whereby it didn’t calculate contrast properly on large text, and reported an error where there isn’t one. False positives encourage people to ignore the output and this erodes trust in tools. The fix uses code from Firefox devtools; thank you to the Mozilla people who helped me find it. There’s loads of other small changes.
Khan Academy seemed to have abandoned the tool, so I forked it. Here it is, if you want to try it for Global Accessibility Awareness Day. Drag the attractive link to your bookmarks bar, then activate it and inspect your page. The code is on GitHub–don’t laugh at my crap JavaScript. It was also an “interesting” experience learning about npm, LESS, handlebars and all the stuff I’d managed to avoid so far.
Feel free to use it if it helps you. Pull requests will be gratefully received (as long as they don’t unnecessarily rewrite it in React and Tailwind), and I’ll be making a few enhancements too. Thanks to Khan Academy for releasing the initial project, to my colleagues for testing it, to Jack Roles for making it look pretty, and to Babylon for letting me release the work they were nice enough to pay me for.
Since Stuart Langridge and I released Which Three Birdies, it has taken the web by storm, and we’ve been inundated with requests from prestigious institutions to give lectures on how we accomplished this paradigm shift in non-arbitrary co-ordinates-to-mnemonic mapping. Unfortunately, the global pandemic and the terms of Stuart’s parole prevent us from travelling, so we’re writing it here instead.
The name
A significant advance on its predecessors was achievable because Bruce has a proper degree (English Language and Literature with Drama) and has trained as an English Language teacher. “Which” is an an interrogative pronoun, used in questions about alternatives. This might sound pedantic, but if a service can’t make the right choice from a very limited set of interrogative pronouns, how can you trust it to choose the correct three mnemonics? Establishing trust is vital when launching a tool that is destined to become an essential part of the very infrastructure of cartography.
The APIs
The mechanics of how the service locates and maps to three birds is extensively documented. Further documentation has been provided at the request of the Nobel Prize committee and will be published in due course
Accessibility
The Web is for everyone and anyone who makes sites that are inaccessible is, quite simply, not a proper developer and quite possibly a criminal or even a fascist. Therefore, W3B offers users the chance to hear the calls of the most prevalent birds in their location, and also provides a transcript of those calls.
Given that there are 18,043 species of birds worldwide, transcribing each one by hand was impractical, so we decided to utilise –nay, leverage– the power of Machine Learning.
Birdsong to Text via Machine Learning
Stuart is, by choice, a Python programmer. Unfortunately, we learned that pythons eat birds and, out of a sense of solidarity with our feathered friends, we decided not to progress with such a barbaric language so we sought an alternative.
Stuart set about learning R, but the we hit another snag: we couldn’t use the actual sounds of birds to train our AI, for copyright reasons.
Luckily, Bruce is also a musician with an extensive collection of instruments, including the actual kazoo that John Cale used to record the weird bits of Venus In Furs. Here it is in its Sotheby’s presentation case:
Whereas the kazoo is ideal for duplicating the mellifluous squawk of a corncrake, it is less suitable to mimic the euphonious peep of an osprey. Stuart listens to AC/DC and therefore has no musical sense at all, so he wasn’t given an instrument. Instead he took the task of inhaling helium out of childrens’ balloons in order to replicate the higher registers of birdsong. Here’s a photo of the flame-haired Adonis preparing to imitate the melodious lament of the screech owl:
After a few evenings re-creating a representative sample of birdsong, we had enough avian phonemes in the bag to run a rigorous programme of principal components analysis, cluster analysis and (of course) multilinear subspace learning algorithms to learn low-dimensional representations directly from tensor representations for multidimensional data, without reshaping them into higher-dimensional vectors.
All known birds can now reliably be transcribed with 94% accuracy, except for the Crested Anatolian Otter-Catcher. We suspect that the reason for this is the confusion introduced by the Turkish vowel harmony and final-obstruent devoicing. In practice, however, this exception doesn’t affect the utility of the system, because the Crested Anatolian Otter-Catcher is now very rare due to its being extensively hunted in the 19th century. (Fun fact, the bird was once so famous and prevalent that the whole region was known as the Otter-munch Empire.)
Hopefully, this in-depth breakdown of how Which Three Birdies? works will encourage other authors of revolutionary new utilities to open-source their work as we have done for the betterment of all humanity. We’d like to thank the nice people at 51Degrees for commissioning Which Three Birdies?, giving us free rein, and paying us for it. The nutters.
The project offered a simple HTML template to be downloaded, the graphic design of which could be customized by any web designer, but only with the help of cascading styles and one’s own pictures. The goal of the project was to demonstrate the various possibilities of CSS in creating visual web design. The CSS Zen Garden gallery exhibited hundreds of examples of diverse web design, all based on a single template containing the same HTML code.
I too designed a theme, which never made it to creator Dave Shea’s official list, but did the rounds on blogs in its day. For a long time, it languished rather broken, because Dave had rejigged the HTML to use HTML5 elements and changed the names of the classes and IDs that I had used as selectors for styling. To mark the occasion, I spent a while reconstructing it. You can enjoy its glory at Geocities 1996 (Seizure warning!). (You might want to use Vivaldi browser which allows you to turn off animated GIFs).
After I tweeted the link on Saturday to celebrate CSS Zen Garden’s birthday, a number of people noted that the site isn’t responsive, so looks broken on mobile. This is because there weren’t any mobile devices when I wrote it in 2003! Sure, I could rewrite the CSS and use Grid and all the modern cool stuff, but that wasn’t my intent. Apart from class and ID names, the only things I changed were the mechanism of hiding text that’s replaced by images. Tt’s now color:transparent as opposed to floating h3 span off screen, as Dave got rid of the spans. The * html hacks for IE6 are still there. (If you don’t know what that means, lucky you. It was my preferred way to target IE6, which believed there was an unnamed selector above the html element in the tree, so * html #whatever would select that ID only in IE6. I liked it because it was valid CSS, albeit nonsensical.)
It’s there as a working artefact of web development in the early 2000s, in the same way as its “exuberant” design is a fond homage to the early web aesthetic that I first discovered in 1996. And what better accolade can there be than this:
As the former Sr Community Coordinator at Geocities, I salute this!
Dave’s project opened the eyes of many designers and sent a message across our then-small community of Web Standards wonks that CSS was ready for prime-time. I’m told by many that the Zen Garden is still used by educators, 18 years later. Thank you, Dave Shea!
Progress Delayed Is Progress Denied – Do App Store policies harm developers? Is the web a credible alternative? A look at the data from the Dr Caligari of web standards, Big Al
Finger spelling uses your webcam and machine learning to analyze your hand shapes so you can learn to sign the American Sign Language alphabet. Made by American Society for Disabled Children; “We believe that deafness is not a disability, but language deprivation is.”
Seeing the wood for the trees: demystifying markup in 2021 – Ian Lloyid’s HTML De-crapulator will at least allow you to scrutinise the ringpiece of the HTML produced by your framework, without the oozing haemorrhoids of its endless data-, class and onclick attributes.
The talent race is also an ethical race – “good candidates are increasingly dubious of Big Tech’s ethical credentials … technologists know the industry intimately and recognize that toxic companies can blight a résumé” by Cennydd Bowles
You don’t change the world by sitting around being a good person. You change the world by shipping products and making money.
As I wrote in my seminal management book Listen to me because I’m rich, white and clever, IBM wouldn’t have made a shitload of money in wartime Europe if they’d engaged in endless navel-gazing about politics. Their leadership told the staff to Stop Running in Circles and Ship Work that Matters, and get on with compiling a list of people with funny names like “Cohen” or “Levi”.
So here at Brucecamp, we’ve decided that it’s best if our productbots (formerly: employees) do not discuss the sausage machine while we push them into the sausage machine. As I wrote in our other book It doesn’t have to be full of whimpering Woke retards at work, “if you don’t like it, well, there’s the door. Enjoy poverty!”. And that’s all we have to say on the matter. Until the next blogpost. Or book.
In other news, Apple are wankers and I bought a sauna.
Browser Standards Rampage: Can We Have Nice Things? – JS Jabber talk with Jake Archibald about Portals, iframes, App Cache, Service Workers, HTML, Browser History and more. Wouldn’t it be lovely if all podcasts have transcripts?
Space Jam – an analysis of the original 25 year-old site and its replacement: “Although connection speeds and devices keep getting better and better, the web is actually getting slower. We see the increasing bandwidth as an invitation to use more and more stuff in our websites. More images, more videos, more JavaScript.”
They Hacked McDonald’s Ice Cream Machines—and Started a Cold War – “Secret codes. Legal threats. Betrayal. How one couple built a device to fix McDonald’s notoriously broken soft-serve machines—and how the fast-food giant froze them out” – A surprisingly interesting article.
At Facebruce, we strongly disapprove of the recent data leak of 50 million account details. There’s nothing more important to us than your data. Really, nothing. Have you any idea of how much we could have charged people for the information about you that is now out there, available for free, on Torrent sites and on Russian servers?
We had a deal almost signed to show messages to all people who fast during Ramadan, saying “Want some free money? Just send us your home address!”, paid for by “Patriots for the Second Amendment and Jesus”. Of course, it isn’t the money that drives us, it’s that Facebruce is facilitating community by introducing two groups. At Facebruc, we love spreading love and connection, so need to raise a little money to run the service.
So, please, trust us with your data, and click ‘Like’ to keep our engagement figures riding high as our share price!
Next on feed: LGBT+ folks! Send us your address to get a free Rainbow Pride t-shirt! (sponsored by Westboro Baptists)
