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)
Link o’ the Week: Accessible Text Labels For All – Sara Soueidan “On improving eCommerce experiences for screen reader users without breaking them for speech-input users”
The F-word, episode 10 in which Vadim and I ruthlessly interrogate Eric Meyer about joining Igalia, what’s coming, CSS Nesting and Cascading Layers
Form design “Best practice, research insights and examples”
The End of AMP – “Google announcing that sites with passing core web vitals will receive a ranking boost on mobile. However, there is another important item in the update – the end of special treatment for AMP pages.”
Web in Play with Bubblewrap – Learn how to transform your Progressive Web App into an Android package with Trusted Web Activity and Bubblewrap.
The end of Applets – This year we bade farewell to Flash, and Applet APIs are to be removed from Java. Interoperable open standards for the win!
Overlay Fact Sheet – Factsheet about deceptive accessibility “repair” overlays (signed by me and 300+ other people in the industry)
AccessiByeBye! – Chrome extension to block overlays like AccessiBe, EqualWeb, MaxAccess, and UserWay.
Survey of Web Accessibility Practitioners #3 Results – “Web accessibility practitioners have notably higher average salaries on average than those reported on the 2020 Stack Overflow developer survey.” Personally, I do it for the drugs, groupies and glory rather than the riches.
Technology sector trust decline deepens – ” the main reason for the trust fall is the increasingly “complicated” relationship between the public and technology — including the spread of misinformation, rising privacy alarm and bias in artificial intelligence.”
Is COBOL holding you hostage with Math? – “floating point math has blown lots of stuff up completely by accident.” why is it so hard to migrate legacy systems?
“Look, I”m fed up at people complaining about Facebruce allegedly “facilitating” genocide. Since we began, we’ve always been about connecting people–initially some nerds to chicks we rated as hot, but now it’s about connecting everybody. We’d like to teach the world to sing, in perfect harmony.
Unfortunately, not everyone wants to sing in perfect harmony. Some people, we are shocked to learn, aren’t actually very nice people. How were we at Facebruce to know what would happen when our algorithms repeatedly recommended members of The Hutu Machete Enthusiasts Club also join the Death To Tutsi Cockroaches group?
We’re not in the content policing business. There’s simply too much of it. And anyway, we’re just a platform. We already have thousands of servers running 24/7 to weed out pictures of nipples (women’s nipples, to be precise) so your Auntie Martha doesn’t clutch her pearls, because offending people in high ARPU markets leads to a drop in engagement.
So there was literally no way for us to know that the Death To Tutsi Cockroaches group was not simply a pest control company. I even went so far as to attempt to verify this, by walking around the HQ trying to find an African person to ask whether cockroaches are a problem, but there was no-one matching that description in the boardroom.
Facebruce is about building communities. We are very active in the GraphQHell community and the Reactionary community. In fact, only last week, we offered free afterhours use of a meeting room in our fifty storey gold-plated HQ to host a meeting of GraphQHell Engineers Against Killing Rohingyas, and even sponsored $100 of pizza for attendees. This shows that we’re taking real action and putting real resources into counteracting Hate Speech on the Facebruce platform.
So that’s cleared up then. Be sure to press “Like!” to demonstrate engagement.”
Next on Timeline: Why Covid is a hoax – evidence from the Protocols of the Elders of Zion!
Link o’ the Week: The Performance Inequality Gap, 2021 – Big Al’s update on devices, networks, browsers, and the new baseline scenario for web performance. A must-read.
Improving React Native Accessibility – “Since May, Facebook has spent that time thoughtfully reviewing and documenting accessibility gaps within React Native. So far the gap analysis has surfaced 90 issues, all of which have been translated to Github issues. Overall, we found that React Native APIs provide strong support for accessibility. However, we also found many core components do not yet fully utilize platform accessibility APIs and support is missing for some platform specific features.”
Launching the Facebook Map “Neighborhoods, parks, and social places are emphasized over “traditional” features like road networks … Our base map design with pale colors and no icons allows overlaid social layers that use more saturated colors to come to the foreground.”
Introducing the Framework Laptop – “the Framework Laptop, a thin, lightweight, high-performance 13.5” notebook that can be upgraded, customized, and repaired in ways that no other notebook can. We’re here to prove that designing products to last doesn’t require sacrificing performance, quality, or style.”
The Kilobyte’s Gambit “Can you beat 1024 bytes of JavaScript?” Combines an incredibly tiny (1.2K) chess engine with pixel art imagining The Queen’s Gambit as an MS-DOS game
The UX on this small child is terrible – “Not only am I VP of Reproduction for this household, but I’ve also been the end-user of this Small Child for over three years now. I’m going to give it to you straight. The user experience is terrible.”
Trusted Web Activity – “a new way to open your web-app content such as your Progressive Web App (PWA) from your Android app”. Basically, get your PWA in the App Store, create a feedback channel via ratings and reviews, use Play Billing.
The F-Word episode 9 – Vadders and I discuss Safari extensions, cascading layers of CSS, what’s new in WCAG 3
Tabula is a tool for liberating data tables locked inside PDF files. “Now you can work with your data as text file or a spreadsheet rather than a PDF!”
Spy pixels in emails have become endemic – “Hey’s review indicated that two-thirds of emails sent to its users’ personal accounts contained a “spy pixel”, even after excluding for spam.”
“Allow this app to personalize advertising for you?” – “Apple defines privacy in a way that benefits its own commercial interests and harms the commercial interests of its competitors. Apple has wrapped its arms around the open internet with a privacy bear hug that is designed to entrench and enrich its own closed ecosystem.”
Yesterday, I received my first Covid vaccine. I was expecting to be in the next group of people invited, as I have multiple sclerosis, which is a disease in which my own immune system tries to kill me, and many Covid deaths are caused by the body’s own immune system. My good chum Stuart Langridge wrote up his vaccination experience; here’s mine.
Out of the blue I received an SMS on Friday morning:
Our records show that you are eligible for your COVID vaccination. Appointments are now available at Villa Park and Millennium Point. Book here: https://www.birminghamandsolihullcovidvaccine.nhs.uk/book/
Your GP Surgery.
The website is on a legit domain, and linked to a booking system run by drdoctor.co.uk, which was a pretty crap experience (which I reported to them); top tip: you need to have your NHS number to book, and if you don’t, you might lose your chosen slot and have to start all over again. And that was that; a confirmation SMS came through:
Confirmation of your appointment: Sat 13 Feb at 4:10pm at Villa Park, B6 6HE. You appointment at Villa Park COVID Vaccination Clinic is confirmed at Villa Park, Holte Suite, Trinity Road, Birmingham, B6 6HE. https://www.avfc.co.uk/villa-park/travel-parking
Villa Park is the stadium for the worst Birmingham football team, so it was nice that something positive was going to happen there. As I approached in the car, there were plenty of temporary signposts to the Covid Vaccination Centre to help people find it.
I arrived 20 minutes early (I’m paranoid about missing appointments) and although the site had told me not to enter more than 10 minutes before my slot, it didn’t appear to be crowded so I went in. It was basically a big room with check-in desks around the perimeter and at least 20 vaccination stations in the centre. The bloke at the door told me to go up to checkin desk 12; the lady asked me for my reference number (I hadn’t been sent one), my NHS number (I hadn’t been told to bring it) and then my name and address.
After verifying that I had an appointment, she asked me to sit on one of the chairs placed 2 metres apart, facing her (so we weren’t all staring at people having their jabs while we waited, which was a thoughtful touch for those nervous of needles, like me).
A friend had been vaccinated the day before at an alternate vaccination hub and there had been a clerical error which meant too many people had showed up, so it took her 3 hours from entering to leaving, so I’d bought a book. But I only had time to take the selfie above before a man came up and asked me to follow him to a vaccination station where an assistant was finishing cleaning the chair. I sat down, confirmed my name, and rolled up my sleeve.
The syringe was bigger than a flu jab and while I honestly felt no pain at all as the needle went in, it was in my arm for a few seconds as there was presumably more vaccine in there than the flu jab, which is pretty much instantaneous. Then the syringe-wielder told me that I had to wait in another area for 15 minutes before driving, laughed when I asked if I could have a sticker, but gave me the best sticker I’ve ever received:
I asked which vaccine I’d received; it was the Oxford one. She gave me an info leaflet, a card with a URL and a phone number for booking the second jab and graciously accepted my gratitude. By 16:06, four minutes before my appointment, I was sitting in the waiting area, reading my book for 15 minutes.
The whole thing was brilliant; calm, professional, well-organised and reassuring. Today my arm has a slight soreness (just like my annual flu jab) but I feel fine. Actually, I feel better than fine. I feel optimistic, for the first time in a year.
Doubtless, the government will try to claim this as their triumph. It isn’t. It’s a triumph of science and socialised public sector medicine. The government gave billions to private sector cronies for a test-and-trace fiasco and for the last ten years have underfunded the National Health Service. Many leading Conservatives have openly called for its privatisation. Remember that when the next election comes around.
Thank you, Science; thank you, social health care.
Update as I approach my second injection
I had a slightly sore arm for two days after the injection (no worse than my annual flu jab) and may have been slightly more tired than normal, by which I mean I was yawning at 10 pm rather than 11 pm. But that might have been down to the gloomy Scandinavian series I was watching on Netflix. In short: I was fine, and you will be too!
Link o’ the week: Do accessible websites still need to support Internet Explorer 11? – TL;DR: Yes, because Edge (Chromium) doesn’t deliver a comparable experience for assistive technologies – especially JAWS, Dragon NaturallySpeaking and Zoomtext.(Graham Arnfield)
Prince 14 is out with CSS calc() support, Color emoji fonts and SVG fonts, Multipass formatting with JavaScript and New column and page float features. (Disclosure: I’ve done consultancy on PDF accessibility for them.)
A new history API, “app history” – ” This proposal introduces a new window.appHistory API, which is more directly usable by web application developers to address the use cases they have for history introspection, mutation, and observation/interception.”
Wix has 200 million registered users – like it or not, that’s a huge number of websites. I’d like to see Wix join W3C. (Disclosure: I used to work with Wix and have chums there.)
SmolCSS – “Minimal snippets for modern CSS layouts and components”
What’s Next For HTML Controls? -“In this episode, we’re talking about HTML controls. Why are they so hard to style, and how might that change in the future? Drew McLellan talks to Microsoft’s Stephanie Stimac and Melanie Richards to find out.
#accessiBe Will Get You Sued – Adrian Roselli’s magisterial post about the latest accessibility snakeoil salesmen. We should all buy him a pint as a thank you for researching this stuff in his own time. He’s like the Yoda of accessibility.
