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Tag: accessibility

Changes, losses, and hope

If change was a one-word summary of the past year or past few years, it would be an understatement. It’s the word that popped into my mind when I read Eric Eggert’s year-in-review post about 2022. He talks about some practical changes around his home and his mode of transport, but the community changes he mentions hit home. He calls them losses, which is a more somber change. I consider these changes losses, too. The accessibility community I feel like I lost the accessibility community, too, but that really started a few years ago. I used to tweet a lot about accessibility, particularly in relation to technical communication, my professional field. I was even involved with the W3C’s working group for the Authoring Tool Accessibility Guidelines (ATAG). (Yikes! 19 years ago!) However, my day job has never been directly about accessibility. Accessibility has been a passionate interest of mine for…

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The language of inclusion on a form

While surfing Twitter, I was drawn to this article because of its title: “Disability-smart customer service: handling difficult situations“. I clicked the link to get to the article, but I didn’t read it. I happened to scroll at the same time and ended up at the registration form section of the page. The form really caught my attention. After the usual name and email fields on the form, I saw a text box labelled “Adjustments”. Inside the box, placeholder text stated: Please tell us if you require any adjustments for this event e.g. dietary, access, assistance, alternative formats, interpreters or disabled parking I think using the term adjustments and the language of the placeholder text is neutral. This could be far less stigmatising than the label of “Disabilities”, “Accessibility”, or “Special Needs”, and much more inclusive. The article is on the Business Disability Forum website. The event for this registration…

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In which I rant about Twitter and quoted tweets

I am so annoyed with Twitter’s changes to the quoted tweet that I actually decided to write a blog post about it! I posted a mild rant on Twitter the other day about the change to quoting a tweet: What is with the new quote style on #Twitter iOS app? Is quoted tweet an image?? If yes, that’s bad for accessibility. If you view that link, you will see a long discussion mostly in Danish. From my other account, @accesstechcomm, I retweeted my mild rant. There, I got a reply from @patrick_h_lauke where he said it IS announced reasonably using VO (though getting some funky focus/context issues it seems), so not just image Funky seems to be an inappropriate word to use with a user experience. (VO is VoiceOver, the built-in (built-in!!) screenreader on Apple products.) It was a relief to find @aardrian’s blog post about the quoted tweet thing…

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