My debut album is out, featuring 10 songs written while I was living in Thailand, India and Turkey. It’s quite a jumble of genres, as I like lots of different types of music, and not everyone will like it – I write the songs I want to hear, not for other people’s appetites.
You can buy it on Bandcamp for £2 or more, or (if you’re a cheapskate) you can stream it on Spotify or Apple Music. I am available for autographing breasts or buttocks.
I wrote a couple of short blog posts for Open Web Advocacy (of which I’m a founder member) on our progress in getting regulators to overturn the iOS browser ban and end Apple’s stranglehold over the use of Progressive Web Apps on iThings.
TL:DR; we’re winning.
Here’s a YouTube video of a talk I gave for the nerdearla conference, with Spanish subtitles. Basically, it’s about Safari being “the new IE”, and what we at Open Web Advocacy are doing to try to end Apple’s browser ban on iOS and iPads, so consumers can use a more capable browser, and developers can deliver non-hamstrung Progressive Web Apps to iThing users.
Since I gave this talk, the UK Competition and Markets Authority have opened a market investigation into Apple’s iThings browser restriction – read News from UK and EU for more.
Recently, “Stinky” Taylar and I were evaluating some third party software for accessibility. One of the problems was their sign-up form.
This simple two-field form has at least three problems:
U Nagaharu was a Korean-Japanese botanist. Why shouldn’t he sign up to your site? In Burmese “U” is a also a given name: painter Paw U Thet, actor Win U, historian Thant Myint U, and politicians Ba U and Tin Aung Myint U have this name. Note that for these Burmese people, their given names are not the “first name”; many Asian languages put the family name first, so their “first name” is actually their surname, not their given name.
Many Afghans have no surname. It is also common to have no surname in Bhutan, Indonesia, Myanmar, Tibet, Mongolia and South India. Javanese names traditionally are mononymic, especially among people of older generations, for example, ex-presidents Suharno and Sukarno, which are their full legal names.
Many other people go by one name. Can you imagine how grumpy Madonna, Bono and Cher would be if they tried to sign up to buy your widgets but they couldn’t? Actually, you don’t need to imagine, because I asked Stable Diffusion to draw “Bono, Madonna and Cher, looking very angrily at you”:
Imagine how angry your boss would be if these multi-millionaires couldn’t buy your thingie because you coded your web forms without questioning falsehoods programmers believe about names.
How did this happen? It’s pretty certain that these development teams don’t have an irrational hatred of Indonesians, South Indians, Koreans and Burmese people. It is, however, much more likely they despise Cher, Madonna, and Bono (whose name is “O’Nob” backwards).
What is far more likely is that no-one on these teams is from South East Asia, so they simply didn’t know that not all the world has American-style names. (Many mononymic immigrants to the USA might actually have been “given” or inherited the names “LNU” or “FNU”, which are acronyms of “Last name unknown” or “First name unknown”.)
This is why there is a strong and statistically significant correlation between the diversity of management teams and overall innovation and why companies with more diverse workforces perform better financially.
The W3C has a comprehensive look at Personal names around the world, written by their internationalisation expert, Richard Ishida. I prefer to ask for “Given name”, with no minimum or maximum length, and optional “family name or other names”.
So take another look at your name input fields. Remember, not everyone has a name like “Chad Pancreas” or “Bobbii-Jo Musteemuff”.
My Work Bezzie “Stinky” Taylar Bouwmeester and I take you on a wild, roller-coaster ride through the magical world of desktop screen readers. Who uses them? How they can help if developers use semantic HTML? How you can test your work with a desktop screenreader? (Parental discretion advised).