Just another one

The last attempt didn’t work so trying again and then just going to walk away and wait…

This is literally just about a bug

I’ve been having a problem getting my blog posts to show up. Site admin thinks it may be temporary files being created by the text editors I use causing conflicts.

So, what had been working consistently is just…. copying a file from Obsidian directly to the blog CDN. That’s what this is.

what do we think? Will it work?

I really like Blot so really want it to work again, especially since have been wanting to (and actually doing) write more.

But like… I give it 50/50 at best…..

Permalink: Https://blog.angrybunnyman.com/Just-testing-a-bug

Blowing up my task manager

IDK about you but when I feel entirely lost when trying go figure out what to do, I ignore it until something else comes up and shakes a bunch of cogs loose.

That’s only mostly true. I’d been feeling off at work the last few weeks. There’s a few things going on, not the least of which is that I’ve got a number of folks that have really stepped up and taking over some big swaths of my responsibilities after being backups for a long while, but the most recent that sort of jolted me out of the vague something is off-ness of all of it was taking a new¹ role. It’s been just over a week but I’ve gotten 3 new projects and my productivity system fell apart². I found myself stressed to remember the new things which is 100% a sign that I’ve lost trust in my system.

So what ya doin’, buddy?

Trying to remember everything you need to do does not a good system make. I’ve been a good GTD³ monkey for years so I’m familiar how you set and execute the tooling to be productive. Task execution is like the fun part, right? You do the interesting things. Check list items up. Dopamine.

But. I’ve been alternately great and terrible at what is probably the most important piece of the system - the review. I don’t think I’ve done a solid review in months and adding a bunch of new projects really highlight how lost in the weeds I’d gotten. Anything I needed to replace it with was going to need to make reviews easier and better integrate with my calendar. And bonus maybe use tagging well enough that I can filter my task views for certain situations. Like a smart list that shows me tasks I wanted to do at home over the week that didn’t necessarily require me to do task review on Saturdays….

Then: I blew everything up.

Steps to destruction

So first, I made a Shortcut⁴ that swept through all my tasks and pull out the list it was on and the title and dropped it into a note in Apple Notes. I then deleted literally everything I had in Reminders. All of it.

I had about 2 dozen project lists and 195 tasks. About 20 of those were template tasks so were’t “active” and a bunch were on a someday list. But that’s still a lot. 195 tasks is too many tasks for a reasonable adult to actually get anything done. So that was probably a good part, right? Task bloat.

Second I created 3 shell lists. 1 for life and 1 for both of my major areas of ownership at work (Accessibility, Info Security). My goal was to NOT⁵ add more lists and instead use the Reminders Kanban-style project lists so I can more fully see all the active projects. My thought was going through as few lists as possible even with a lot of projects would make reviewing and selecting tasks for the day far easier.

Third, I went through every single task I exported to Notes. Stuff that didn’t matter: deleted. Stuff that I still wanted but would do later: someday project in the correct list. Actual stuff that needs active work: add to/create a board for the project in the correct list. Eventually, the note was lank⁶

Fourth, I did another review of everything after I got it out of the note.

What it looks like now

I ended up adding a few other lists -one for meetings because I have enough that I own that need a place to capture topics and easily find them. I’d not been able to get tags to handle those.

I’m down to about 100 tasks across an inch of active projects. Definitely too many projects still but now I actually know how many I’ve committed to?

Conclusion

Do your reviews. Weekly reviews keep things tidy and having o do this mass purge and review is a bad situation. It took about 3 hours to get through everything. But my review today was only about 15 minutes.

Footnotes

On hyperlink rabbit holes

Social media just makes me, at best, morose while I just scroll for hours through algorithmic brain bait or, at worst, overwhelmed at the scale of The Suck¹ happening on the daily. But I am more overall healthy and stable today than in previous years and have had better ability to pop myself out of it. Donc, I’ve been on a quest for more old style blogs² in an attempt to find a certain kind of thing… again. Not like a “capture my youth” sort of thing but more finding people in a different media create something more about thinking than just attention.

How I do the thing

I am still a staunch lover of RSS having never gotten over the untimely demise of Google Reader and had been hopping through all the things that have tried to replace it. Right now, I mostly use Reeder 5 to aggregate things which, when I first moved to it³, was powered by Feedly but now I have been using it essentially exclusively. Any time I find something even remotely interesting online that seems to have some sort of regular presence, I grab an RSS feed for it and put it in Reeder.

I have a “Trial” folder. Anything I find myself reading regularly graduates to the “Good Ole Blogs” folder and maybe to the “Morning Breakfast” folder that I read over coffee nearly every day.

How do I choose things?

OR logic between these rules but AND means they have a better chance at success…

1. They have to come from sources I like.
2. They have to be actual people⁴.
3. They need to exist outside of X, preferably Mastodon.
4. They need to write on more than 1 topic⁵

Bonus if they think in footnotes.

Sources.

Today’s bounty of new feeds, and what inspired capturing⁶ this came from a bunch of b logs I sudden found at Bear which has a Discover page to find popular or chronological feeds of blogs hosted on its site⁷. I have read through each unique blog on the list today (Apr 14) adn added nearly all of them. There’s a trove of interesting folks waiting there.

I also mine Mastodon and Bluesky (Maybe Threads a little but that is getting enshittified⁸ pretty quickly….) for people writing in the accessibility and design space, plus the occasional Apple thing. I literally go through tags to see what I can find. Or use the following list of people I already follow to look for things they find interesting. That has also shown a number of really neat things.

So what neat things have you found?

I’m glad you asked. In no particular order, here are blogs and specific posts that got me to add these people to Reeder

• Posthuman.blog⁹, specifically this post about Reddit bots that broke my brain: https://posthuman.blog/this-reddit-post-fried-my-brain/
• Megan’s writings, specifically this post about what to share on line. Which.. same. I’m leaning into the “Fuck It, let’s go” mentality: https://magmacranes.bearblog.dev/i-dont-know-how-vulnerable-to-be-online/
• Chuck Wendig, with this post that a resonate with so strongly I’m annoyed I didn’t write it: https://terribleminds.com/ramble/2025/04/09/what-it-feels-like-right-now/
• Waldo Jaquith, on working in the open. Because I also think out loud to.. uh.. inconsistent effect: https://waldo.jaquith.org/blog/2025/03/work-open/
• ě because I so viscerally dislike the idea of one big text file per year but absolutely adore how she writes about it and her processes: https://ellanew.com/2025-04-14-obtf-start-here
• Hi, this is Ava with this posit on writing while bored. But also the random poetry app is pretty neat: https://blog.avas.space/damn-phone/

The internet isn’t entirely dead. You can still find some good stuff out there if you Go rabbit chasing.

Footnotes

Landing pages

I keep forgetting that angrybunnyman.com no longer has anything on it. I used to host all my stuff when I was doing more business-y things on Square Space which included landing pages for as many domains as you wanted. So I took advantage since I was paying anyway. Unfortunately, I can’t seem to find captures of them in the wayback machine. Seems as if Square Space may block archiving?

Whatever. The point? I’m making another because I am apparently going to sit on that domain forever. It was the name I chose at 14 and, at this point, it just does not feel right to chuck it…

Angrybunnyman dot com in the year of or lort 2025

It’s not live yet because I have to wait for DNS routing to do its thing but this is probably what it’ll look like.

ETA: Got one to load!

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

Permalink: https://blog.angrybunnyman.com/why-write-when-you-can-redesign

External validation

I don’t get a lot of external validation in my day to day job. It’s m left to my own devices which is a sign of trust, sure, but there’s little feedback coming from bout side the core group of colleagues. Being surrounded by people who care as much as I do and understand my experience is lighting up my brain.

Thinking over sleeping

Sleeping is hard at conference hotels. The ideas all rolling about aren’t helping that. The result is some sort of melancholy over having to leave an environment where I feel like I matter in a meaningfully different way here than when I’m back home.

That seems not good? Or im just frazzled from all the stimulus.

Something to pick apart there. Maybe writing this down will help me get back to sleep,

Look a wild distraction!

Here is my note graph to distract everyone from the melancholy so i dont have to think about it more.

A colorful array of nodes in s radial pattern that look like neurons

Microaggressions vis-à-vis atmospheric changes

It’s been a rough couple of weeks for anyone, like me, who works in a DEI-related area. Though not often recognized as part of the DEI umbrella, accessibility is a part of inclusivity just with a focus on getting to inclusivity, to equity. The atmosphere is very, very different now.

I shouldn’t be surprised. The overall feeling in the air is far different today than last week, than last month. With the administration change comes the dark cloud of “meritocracy” (where merit is “you look like me and/or you pay me”) permeating approaches to non-profit-oriented industry. So where before the grander air was very pro-helping diverse people find equity and inclusivity, that’s not there.

When larger things, powerful things, change their air, it gives people cover to rally against anything they see as frivolous or lacking merit. It’s raining, so everyone should get under the right umbrella… I always encountered pockets of cultural resistance. The pockets have been getting smaller over the years as my tenacity has swayed the beast that is my job, but recently those pockets have been sort of galvanized in ways I thought we had gotten past.

The funny thing (very much not in the ha-ha way) is that the resistance isn’t purely vocal. Like people will ask why we need to make our software accessible, but rather than be swayed by the righteous argument like they used to, it’s almost like people can just shrug it off? People seem empowered to ignore the requirements, ignore the advocates, and just keep working beyond it.

Put your finger on it

I’ve been trying to put my finger on it. Microaggressions isn’t exactly right. It’s like micro-pressures? Little eddies of turmoil in the atmosphere. It’s a weather change that affects literally everything, even if those effects aren’t super obvious.

Microaggressions are statements or attitudes encountered daily that undercut the perceived equity or value of a person associated with a minority group. Making jokes at the expense of a group is a microaggression because it reinforces the outsider status of the joked-about group. Using words of identity as a pejorative - that looks gay - attributes a negative quality to gayness. “Physicians aren’t blind” is pure ignorance that is easy to believe because, obviously, you need full vision to see anything in the medical field (you don’t).

So I think what I’ve been feeling are these micropressures which are a shift in attitude that’s unspoken but understood. They are aggressions in that they are deployed to others and minimize the equity of outsider groups but don’t have that obvious expressed content.

It’s expressed in behaviors.

You don’t have to speak it, you can just do, or not do, the thing. You can ignore a fix request for a screen reader interaction. You can deprioritize simplification efforts that improve cognitive accessibility. You can release it and “come back to that later” and then just… not.

Micropressures are shifts in behavior in alignment with microaggressions without the outspoken elements.

The Insinuation of Stasis

Screen shot of my yearly templates

Well… 2021 is ending and it’s been a really tough year for me. The lack of momentum from 2020 and the glimmer of hope before resurgence all lead to a year of… stasis. I’d go so far to say that the Stasis full replaced my original yearly theme of “reinvigoration” such that, were I the sort to grade my efforts toward a year theme (I’m not, they aren’t pass/fail things) I’m pretty sure I’d flunk it.

Like.. I didn’t even read a full book? The pandemic lockdown mindset insinuated itself into everything in 2021 and became an excuse to just… not. Very little writing, art, exercise, house & home build, and pretty much anything. I don’t think I even got much large work stuff done where I feel I had considerable more focus.

But these themes are about direction setting, not specific goal accomplishment. So I may have been more stasis-minded than reinvigoration-minded, but that’s ultimately ok and nothing I can change now. There’s only setting myself up for the next year.

Pictured above is the template I use for yearly planning. The idea is to set directions in increasing levels of specificity to help guide where I go in the year. I’ve included the template text below the line for folks that are interested.

This is how I use it.

The Sky

The sky is the largest, biggest thin that matters in your life. Vocation. The thing that generates your energy, that rallies you, and the thing that insinuates everything that you do. For me, this wasn’t something I really figured out until I’d been doing these yearly preps and review things for a number of years.

So, if you have no idea what you’d say is The One Big Thing that matters to you, don’t stress it. And really, it’ll refine or change over time. It should. You grow. What matters to you should grow and change with you.

Flight plan

Each level increases in specificity to help refine what you want your year to resemble. I start with a single word to define the year. Incidentally, these become the titles for my yearly printed journals. 2020: The year of Community (lol)

My theme journals going back to 2012

• 2019: The year of Cultivation
• 2018: Refinement
• 2017: Self-improvement
• 2016: Loss
• 2015: Virtue
• 2014: Self-discovery
• 2013: Order
• 2012: Metamorphosis

Honestly, the more vague, the better. I think there’s actual value in having to think about what the word means when you review things. The word may take a whole new meaning. Cultivation was going to be about building relationships. It turned into a year of permaculture gardening and nature.

I answer some questions about the theme trying to help put some historical perspective and motivation but, again, don’t stress the content here. I don’t want the word to take too specific a meaning.

40,000 foot view

I trying to organize the things I want to focus on into broad areas. But I’ll tell you a secret… I occasionally do this last and group the projects or other ideas into areas at the end.

Scandalous….

30,000 foot view

Cruising altitude

This is the scaffolding for progress. What projects, focus, skills, or thing to do you want to do in a year. They should be bigger than “clean the garage.” But cleaning the garage could be part of a larger “get my physical space better organized.”

These are probably the most concrete thing to come from this thinking process and can be the Stuff What I Work Towards in the year.

In my case this is the Virtue and Project tracking work I do day-to-day. I have found, through the 2015 virtue project, that they become a really helpful engine for all the other things I want to do in a given year, month, or week.

I also try to start linking these things to the areas defined above. This is more about seeing where I’m spending my time. Maybe I only have one regular thing going for “increase overall health” and too many things in “organize spaces” and want to adjust the quantity of things you’re doing for an area.

20,000 & 10,000 foot view

Concrete things you want to do, like cleaning the garage (20,00ft), the steps to accomplish (10,000) and the related stuff from above. You may or may not have a lot here yet. It’s fine if you don’t. Just start.

Bringing it together

I ultimately build check-ins and reviews of each level in a time frame that makes sense for each. I review my projects weekly, partly because this includes stuff at work and I need to stay atop those of I want to HAVE a job, but also because the projects and tasks are the most dynamic.

The areas and cruising tools are every month or so. Probably not less than quarterly. Right now, the structure for the review is pretty free-form except for the daily task stuff I do at work. I kinda want to build better strategies for this review to be better about progress so that’s probably something I”lL try to do in the next few days while I work on the rest of the template stuff.

Like sticking the discrete stuff into a set of text files and can I manipulate with iOS Shortcuts to step me through the more concrete review parts - like run a shortcut for the quarterly that grabs all the stuff defined at the higher levels and asks me questions about them?

The End

IDK, something like that… Maybe gather the individual projects and tasks that work towards that out of my task manager? That would probably require some extra stuff logged in my daily procedures so I can dig that out quickly.

Something something over-engineering….

But any way you slice it, the last two years have been less than ideal and I’d like to change that. But “like to change” is very different than “actual change.” The latter needs active effort.

We start here.

The Sky

A Vocation

Ideally, this stays similar or refines over the years.

Last Year’s sky

Flight plan

50,000 foot view

The single word or idea to guide the year

The Year Of….

SUMMARY IMAGE?

Related quote

In summary….

A very short summary statement

Why this?

What brought this on?

What is it about this thing that you trying to accomplish?

Why now?

Did something trigger this?

40,000 foot view

The areas of focus for the year Like life, health, creativity, or whatever

Area 1 - brief definition

Area 2 - brief definition

30,000 foot view

Virtues where you should spend most of the time {Virtue list}

20,000 foot view

Specific projects to accomplish for the year

Project - virtue - area

Project - virtue - area

10,000 foot view

Actions, Items, low-level concepts to work

• Item - project - due
• Item - project - due

Where am I starting?

Where would I like to be at the end of the year?

Are there problems you’re trying to solve?

Permalink: Http://blog.angrybunnyman.com/the-insinuation-of-stasis

Accessibility starts with empathy. If you don’t or won’t care about people there’s nothing I or society can do for you.

Permanent link: Http://blog.angrybunnyman.com/Accessibility-starts-with-empathy

Connected thinking

I am taking to Obsidian.md pretty well.

Graph view of linked notes

I started this week being more deliberate with actually capturing thoughts. I added to my daily morning processing, all accomplished by Shortcuts, a templates daily note. I’d already been running through all my events and tasks for the day so it was fairly easy to compile that into a note to write in for the day. The other looks something like this:

Date

Events

• Meeting 1
• Meeting 2
• Time block for task 1
• Lunch
• Etc Notes/Thoughts New tasks to add

The idea being anything I think of that I want to remember or maybe do something with later, it goes into this note now.

Before, let’s say an email came in asking of X control or workflow or whatever needed to do Y to be keyboard accessible. I’d write my response, double check my assertions with a few sources, and send the email.

This week, I’d capture that response, the sources, and related ideas into a daily note. At the end of the day, I look through the note and move any new tasks that I didn’t already do go into my task manager and then do something with that note.

Take 8/4’s note:

Example of a rendered note

So I did some research on HTML roles that I wanted to capture. So I wrote it down and at the end of the day, turned that into a NEW note and embedded it back into the daily note.

So the actually note looks like this:

Example of actual note text

The !Text is the transclusion link to the now-separate-but-linked note on the Role attribute.

So this is… kinda revelatory. The top most image is the start of my interlinked notes nodes. I’ve imported allllll the writing I did at Wrestling With Franklin over the years and am pulling out useful concepts and creating the links. I’m doing the same with accessibility-related writings that I’ve got all over the place. You see some of the central nodes starting to form.

More complex days include meetings that become their own notes in a meeting folder that includes notes and tasks and other links out to things. So it’s an ever growing network of stuff outside of my head that I can now manipulate and expand.

It’s a second brain made manifest. In the future, when I have an idea I can add it here and add links and wander those links to generate new ideas. Neat, right?

Permalink: Http://blog.angrybunnyman.com/connected-thinking

Starting with obsidian

Of course the first ting you do with a new system is find or create the most obnoxious 80s style theme.

Permanent link: Http://blog.angrybunnyman.com/starting-with-obsidian

Flip the internal narrative on loss

I’m not egotistical enough to claim everyone should feel blessed I was in their lives, but please be happy of the legacy I leave behind. Even if it is dad jokes and bad blog posts. Be happy you had something and not sad it’s gone.

Then it suddenly hit me. This is exactly the opposite of what I have been doing about working from home. I have been moping around and morning the loss of WFH instead of being happy that I had the opportunity to experience it for more than a year. I had no right to work from home, but had an excellent experience that I was lucky to have. An experience, during a pandemic, that many did not have and their lives have changed for the worse because of it.

Source: Be Happy It Happened, https://www.gr36.com/2021/07/27/be-happy-it.html

I’m guilty of this for sure. I definitely think work in America is pretty messed up but, at the end of the day, I don’t control the decisions of my employer and being miffed about it isn’t solving anything.

Am I glad to be back in the office? Not entirely. But I get to see some friends regularly again and my office itself is pretty done.

Does working from home work well for me? In the majority, very much so.

Do I want 💯 % WFH? Mo, I don’t think I actually do anymore. But having a day or two a week where I could very specifically target more long focus, creative work for the home days would be huge. Right now, I effectively do that by just disappearing somewhere on campus.

We’ll see what Delta brings but I will start looking back at a good experience I was pretty lucky to have.

Permanent link: Http://blog.angrybunnyman.com/flip-the-internal-narrative-on-loss

Because if they care about the knobs…

You’ll always have to pay up front for knob feel.

True knob feel cannot be mass-produced or outsourced. Knob feel requires attention and care. There’s no recurring revenue to attract investment in knob feel.

Source: Zach Phillips, https://little.zachphillips.blog/2021/04/18/knob-feel.html

Any thing made where the maker sweats the details - material texture, mechanism resistance, the shade of orange on the power button - it’s probably going to be a good thing. All those details add up.

Just don’t get lost in the weeds. You probably don’t need to care about every detail but many, many, many of them matter.

Permanent link: Http://blog.angrybunnyman.com/because-if-they-care-about-the-knobs…

Take that corn hat off Melvin

According to The Hog Book by William Hedgepeth, the most common call is “SOOO-o-oeeyyy,” but in parts of the lower Midwest “Who-o-eyyy” is a common variant. It should be noted that while certain contests champion extra-vocal creativity, such as the wearing of costumes and the bearing of props, other contests frown upon such accessorizing.

Source: https://goneoutdoors.com/hog-calling-contest-rules-5937871.html

Just a little fun. I encountered the pig call/heavy metal mashup and wondered if calling contests had rules. They do. Of course.

Permanent link: Http://blog.angrybunnyman.com/take-that-corn-hat-off-melvin

On being a better kind of man

[Ted Lasso] is a sprightly, well-constructed, enjoyable comedy about sports, sure, but it’s also about men who—like the many good men I have known (even in Hollywood!)—take responsibility for the example they set, for their emotions and for the actions they take. Ted Lasso will remain deeply valuable into next year and beyond, because it is also about a bunch of very different people who display fulfilling, conscientious confidence and leadership—not the bullying, toxic, arrogant, violent, condescending domination that has, in this country, has too often masqueraded as “leadership” and “confidence.” In evolving and supporting each other through those changes, these characters form friendships and communities that are truly meaningful.

Source: https://www.vanityfair.com/hollywood/2020/12/bring-ted-lasso-energy-into-your-life

First, Ted Lasso is one of the best TV shows I think I’ve ever seen. It is already in my top charts following closely behind The West Wing and Stargate. Second, it models so well what I want to be as a Good Man it’s nearly painful to watch.

Permanent link: Http://blog.angrybunnyman.com/on-being-a-better-kind-of-man

Equivalent facilitation is ableist

70s style header replicating the post title

I’ve been noodling on the idea of “equivalent facilitation” [EF]. Regulatory definition below but, in short, a specific thing needn’t be accessible of there exists something else that is and provides access to the same thing. So, a front door doesn’t need a wheelchair ramp if there’s a side entrance to the same building that does. In the case of technology and example would be screen readers users can get the same information from a table when a graph isn’t directly accessible.

I’ll talk mostly about screen readers below but understand this is about access and not about screen readers and software.

Equivalent facilitation is ableist.

Definition

From Section 508 of the ADA 36 CFR appendix A§ E101.2 Equivalent Facilitation: The use of an alternative design or technology that results in substantially equivalent or greater accessibility and usability by individuals with disabilities than would be provided by conformance to one or more of the requirements in Chapters 4 and 5 of the Revised 508 Standards is permitted. The functional performance criteria in Chapter 3 shall be used to determine whether substantially equivalent or greater accessibility and usability is provided to individuals with disabilities.

I like definitions. My world works better in words so I use them a lot in writing.

Here’s an example of a feature for my own job. Genetic and family relationships can be organized in a tree-like structure called a Pedigree:

Caption: a family tree showing three generations that includes visual indications of related traits passed between each generation

Aside from showing a person’s family, one of the cool things in Pedigrees is a semi-standardized visual notation that allows for rapid review and search for specific traits across a family tree. From there, you can understand heritability of certain things and, if in a medical context, potentially help understand the symptoms stemming from a genetic anomaly.

Reference: Duke University standard pedigree symbols - PDF

It’s freaking cool. If you can see.

But what if I can’t?

At my job, we have a process that allows various stakeholders to apply for an equivalent facilitation override on a project where the nature of it either cannot be readily made accessible, in some particular accessibility mode, or there are equivalent functions in the software that can stand in for it.

All the information available in the Pedigree is available in a separate activity that is accessible to screen readers. So what we did for this was redirect screen reader sets to the more accessible version of the data. That version was, essentially, a table that included all the same information

Good, right? Everyone gets what they need?

When you tell a person that they can do the thing, they just need to go elsewhere to do it, it creates two separate spaces and states for people. “Separate but equal”. But is it really equal?

Separate, but unequal

Noted above, the visuals of the Pedigree can greatly increase a user’s ability to track traits across families. The data appearing in the Pedigree is often easy to structure in tables - a row is a family member, a column is a trait or other descriptor for that member like parent or sibling.

Tables are well understood concepts. They’ve been around for a while so most screen readers know how to handle them and, subsequently, most screen reader users do as well. So presenting a user with a table does, in fact, grant them access to the specific facts held within relatively quickly. For example, screen reader users can read the full row or columns contents from current selection, the row or column contents up to the current cell, the content from the current cell to the end of the row or column.

Pretty much anything listed in those linear dimensions can be quickly noted. But is that equal to the tree? How would a screen reader user trace a trait across families quickly? How would they swap focusable traits?

It may be accessible, but it damn well isn’t equivalent.

So WTF is equivalent then?

No one knows.

(One of) the problem with EF is that it was written primarily for physical access to locations and not technology. Literal, physical access to services. Because, once you’re in the building, there would be no more barriers to access, yes?

Lol, hardly, but that’s the underlying assumption with EF. Once you’re in the building, everything is peachy. It’s missing the trees for the forest. And further, equivalent facilitation provides no method for evaluating the equivalence. How do we even begin to create an equivalent experience if there’s no rubric?

Making a Pedigree accessible and making an accessible experience equivalent to the new one is tough. It requires designers to understand both what it is they are creating that offers the innovating experience for the new tool but also the way to offer those same innovations to users with low or no vision.

Are there ways to do that? Absolutely. Any problem can be solved.
Is it easy? NO.

But… The goal here is not to talk about what it would make to create an accessible version of a Pedigree. We can do that later - it’s a really engaging design problem. What matters is that “equivalent facilitation” creates two worlds. One world with the glitz glamor of new features and one world of flat data tables and no innovation. No one knows how to make that glamor translate to the accessible experience.

Equivalent facilitation creates a separate but equal world for people with disabilities even when it was supposed to offer the same level of service. But that’s not where we get, practically, when all the incentives in the world are stacked against doing the hard work of making the new thing accessible, of making the front stairs.

Ask all the people

If you shipped it to the world (or even showed it to a colleague) it might be because you liked it. You made it for yourself.

But if your music, your graphic design, your website–whatever your work is–isn’t resonating with the market, it might be because you forgot to make it for them.

Source: “Well, it seems great to me” by , https://seths.blog/2021/03/well-it-seems-great-to-me/

The first ship, the one for yourself, is a foundation. Designing for all types of people makes your product soar.

Permanent link: Http://blog.angrybunnyman.com/ask-all-the-people