Bruce Lawson's personal site

Hello, you cheeky strawberry! Here’s this week’s lovely list ‘o’ links for your reading pleasure.

• Firefox blocks third-party tracking cookies and cryptominers – Yay.
• Scroll-To-Text using a URL fragment – link to, and scroll to, arbitrary text in another webpage, even if there is no id on the element. Implemented in Chrome behind a flag, with a single #. Shut up and take my money.
• Logical Operations with CSS Variables by Ana Tudor
• Analytics, logs and metrics Uncle Remy compares Google, Netlify and self-hosted GoAccess analytics
• Automatically compress images on Pull Requests – “Calibre’s new GitHub Action allows you to compress raster images with minimal setup automatically. Never ship unoptimised graphics again”
• How to build a voice assistant with open source Rasa and Mozilla tools – “build an assistant that runs locally and ensures the privacy of your data”
• Stalking cheap Chinese GPS child trackers is as easy as 123… 456 � because that’s the default password on 600k+ of these gizmos – “It’s 2019 and, like, duh, insecurity comes as standard”
• Police hijack a botnet and remotely kill 850,000 malware infections
• Sex lives of app users ‘shared with Facebook’ – “Some period-tracking apps are sharing intimate details with Facebook, says Privacy International.”
• Google’s ‘secret web tracking pages’ explained – Brave and Google are having fisticuffs. Google denies naughtiness. Irish Data Protection Commission will decide.
• On “AI�� replacing jobs and humans
  – “in order to get the damn autonomous cars to work we human beings will be excluded from even more public spaces: Some autonomous car experts are already asking for sidewalks to be basically cages with defined doors that open only when the traffic lights are green so the world becomes simple enough for cars to “understand��
• You Only Need 50% of Job “Requirements�� – “You’re as likely to get a job interview meeting 50% of job requirements as meeting 90% of them … for women, you’re as likely to get an interview matching 40% of the job requirements as matching 90%. Note also that, as we’ve seen in previous analysis, women in general have higher interview rates than men”

There won’t be a reading lost for a few weeks as I’m writing this from a train to London, commencing a 3 week jaunt around conferences in Japan and Europe. Until next time, hang loose and stay groovy.

I use the free version of the excellent Mailchimp for WP plugin to allow visitors to this site to sign up for my Magical Brucie Mail and get my Reading List delivered to their inboxes.

When I did my regular accessibility check-up (a FastPass with the splendid Accessibility Insights for Web Chromium plugin by Microsoft) I noticed that the Mailchimp signup form fails two WCAG guidelines:

label: Form elements must have labels (1) WCAG 1.3.1, WCAG 3.3.2

This is because the out-of-the-box default form doesn’t associate its email input with a label:

<p>
	<label>Email address:</label>
	<input type="email" name="EMAIL"  required />	
</p>

I’ve raised an issue on GitHub. Update, 6 Sept: the change was turned down.

Luckily, the plugin allows you to customise the default form. So I’ve configured the plugin to associate the label and input by nesting the input inside the label. (This is more robust than using the IDref way because it’s not susceptible to Metadata partial copy-paste necrosis. (I also killed the placeholder attribute because I think it’s worthless on a single-input form.)

You can do this by choosing “Mailchimp for WP” in your WordPress dashboard’s sidebar, choosing “Form” and then over-riding the default with this:

<p>
	<label>Email address: 
	<input type="email" name="EMAIL"  required />
	</label>
</p>

<p>
	<input type="submit" value="Sign up" />
</p>

And, yay!

(Last Updated on 6 September 2019)