Rainy weather means lap cats

Minuet doing what she does best: making mouth noises on my lap

Using words well

There are very few people whom I trust enough to let them convince me not to say somethings.

Mid-ish last year I started a meeting for all the accessibility folks at my company. It is mostly an opportunity to disseminate news, projects, and interesting ideas. It is, also, a chance for me to speak in public. I very much enjoy it. I like inspiring and motivating. I also like putting words together in interesting ways.

Sometimes, I start writing something and then decide to change direction. Or I write something and decide it would be better used elsewhere. Or I sometimes write something and people suggest that I don’t say that thing either with those words or with that {emotion} I’m so obviously feeling.

Here’s a speech I did not give the meeting after the 2024 election after some trusted folks suggested I not. I do not regret the choice.

This is mostly unedited from November.

Untitled thoughts on community

I’ll preface this by saying this is me speaking as Me and will not say I’m speaking for any aspects of the company.

I’ve not had a great week. I imagine many of you had similar. I was not relishing the idea of another four years of chaos but that looks Ike what we’re getting so I wanted to take a minute to talk about it and what it means to me. That we are here again is just…

I’m very disappointment in my demographic, honestly, the white, cisgendered demographic that seemed to get us here? We have a lot to reconcile with our country, our friends, our family, and ourselves. That we are here again is just fucking wild.

In 2016, It felt unimaginable that racism, misogyny, homophobia, transphobia, and what have you would win. When it did, it was like a trapdoor opened under me and I feel into quicksand. I spent the first few months very depressed, despondent, distressed, numerous other D words not directly related to democracy. When you get like that, it is incredibly hard to pull yourself out of it.

I didn’t do it by myself. I couldn’t do it by myself. What saved me from suffocating under the weight of it all was this: community.

Tyranny relies on division. Isolation. Hopelessness. Hate and anger directed within the population rather than at the sand pouring over you. If we let it seep in, we get stuck while havoc is wrecked around us.

Community is a direct act of defiance in the face of tyranny. The best people, the best humans I have ever worked with are in this room and they very much kept me going. This is all of you. It is trite, maybe, but I think of you as a community. We are all here because accessibility - the ability to access and interact with the world - is important to us.

I want you all to know that the steering committee, that I, am here when you need us. There’s nothing but uncertainty in the future and itt is going to get rocky. Really rocky. The work we do and both the people WITH and FOR whom we do it matter. Accessible software means a person isolated because of disability still has a lifeline to job, a paycheck, a community.

It’s easy to think that “saving lives” with software is an empty platitude but I think in times like this it is very true and very real.

So. The work we, all of us in this room and the developers on our teams and leadership at tis company, do is important. The work we do is an act of defiance. Staying connected with each other is an act of defiance. Standing up for it is an act of defiance.

I don’t regret setting this aside then; I’m glad I found it now while doing some noter cleanup. It may be more important now that we are very much immersed on even more chaos that we could have expected.

Why write when you can redesign

As is my pattern, I saw a website that I really liked and, rather than writing, I redesigned my blog CSS to do something like what I saw.

Brutalism, neo-brutalism

I <3 brutalism. I appreciate the aggressively minimalistic aesthetic paired with the idea of using simple, readily available materials. Brutalism applied to web design is all about using the basic basic elements and making a website from them with few bells/whistles. In some cases, the designs will take that aggressive minimalism and express it in HUGE letters with hard lines and text.

This blog post has some neat examples of brutalist web design: https://blog.hubspot.com/website/brutalist-website-design

Neo-brutalism takes those ideas and inverts some of the minimalism by adding visual interest, flair, and way more color. Usually, they maintain the use of simpler HTML elements and CSS to achieve their goals and eschew some of the over-complicated scripting that too often clutters a page.

Another list: https://elements.envato.com/learn/what-is-the-neubrutalism-web-design-trend

What I especially like

Brutalist web design, putting the emphasis on core HTML usage, results in a far more accessible experience. I write about these ideas here: Bruta11y.com. Basically, assistive technology can access all the core content of a brutalist web page without losing fidelity, fonts are easy to read by any user, and color is minimal and not distracting.

It’s just good web design if you believe that web design is about presenting web content clearly for as many people as possible.

The site is dark-preference aware and will adapt theming according to your settings (assuming your device and browser exposes that). But the main idea is readability with a little color flair. I’m using Atkinson Hyperlegible which is a free web font designed for maximum readability created by The Braille Institute. It’s my favorite font.

References

• https://www.brailleinstitute.org/freefont/
• https://elements.envato.com/learn/what-is-the-neubrutalism-web-design-trend
• https://blog.hubspot.com/website/brutalist-website-design
• Https://bruta11y.com

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