morning reading

[jazzfish]

Data: "Every time during that 7 days I ran into a particular kind of inaccessibility, I wrote to the owner/relevant authority and asked them to fix it. I aimed for short, factual, informative request letters." ... with the results you might expect if you took two minutes to think about it. Useful to have for shooting down the "disabled people need to just ask for accommodations, then they’d be given them" theory.

Researchers discover original bacteria of the Black Death: "Our next goal is to sequence the entire DNA." I can't think of anything that could possibly go wrong with this plan.

Mr. Nobody: How Children Use Metaphor to Get to Sleep, Cope, Grieve and Grow: as the title says. Wow.

Actual content later.

Comments

[rbandrews]

Not to mention, this is why the "just make a better screen reader" argument falls over. Webrat is not going to use a screen reader, it's just going to ignore your ugly Flash blob. Guy from 2026 isn't blind, he just has Chrome version 93, which doesn't support Flash on his 512-core machine.

[jazzfish]

ha, yes. Exactly. From a technology perspective, there is literally no reason for websites to be that inaccessible. (Restaurants and companies with Flash websites were inaccessible to me eight years ago, but that's because I'm a plain-text guy at heart and I do not want to sit through your slow-ass animation.)

(Speaking of websites, I'll be looking at the game this evening. Needed to disable brain this weekend.)

[rbandrews]

Fair enough. I've been trying to keep mine busy enough actually. Spent most of the weekend playing Picross 3D.

Restaurant websites uniformly suck, and there's a simple reason why: people who run restaurants don't know shit about websites. They make decisions about them based on what looks coolest when they first see it, rather than what's actually going to accomplish their goal (get people into the restaurant). So, Flash. It's Flash now anyway, in the 90s it was animated GIFs everywhere.

Not just restaurants either; designing software is as much a technical skill as implementing it, but for some reason idiot suits think they can do it.

[firecat]

I think it's more heineous than that: It's because whoever it is that makes restaurant websites is telling them to do it that way (probably because if they code a fancy flash web site they can charge more) and the restaurants are all copying each other because restaurants are desperate not to stand out among other restaurants in a way that might turn customers off, which also is why they all offer the same menus.

[rbandrews]

I figured the menu thing was because they all order food from the same restaurant suppliers (which probably also supply recipes). I've noticed definite trends in Chinese places; most Chinese restaurants are one of about five different types. Very occasionally I'll find one that's unlike any other place I've been in before, and those I'm willing to drive across town for.