Even if a font claims to be “hyper” legible or “for dyslexic people”, actual user testing does not show advantages over other fonts. It’s not generalizable. See Gareth Ford William’s summary, and his talk “Don’t Believe The Type!”.
One of the interesting aspects of being burned out is that you cannot really appreciate or draw energy from downtime. And that feeling sometimes makes you not want to take downtime at all, which makes things just worse.
Expertise is not to know everything. It is to know what is important. It is to know where to look up details. It is to mediate between concurrent needs. It’s to explain and filter the relevant information to others. It’s (especially!) knowing where its limits are.
After a few weeks off the new keyboard, I have switched back to QWERTY from Colemak. It is still an intriguing idea, but I am just not practising enough to make it happen.
Marco Arment explains how much of the Web is terribly over-engineered in the latest installment of ATP.
One of the nice things I have my students do is to watch one of my favorite talks and write a blog post about it. The goal is to broaden their understanding and highlight other voices. Here’s a great example that highlights @whalecoiner@indieweb.social’s 2018 Paris Web talk.
Tiny play.date console is tiny!
I’d like to sell some one-off remote consulting hours and would like for people to just be able to book them through my/a website. I had hoped I could use something like Paddle which takes care of international taxes and stuff for software. Haven’t found anything yet. Ideas?
Pedestrian friendly cities must, of course, also be accessible to disabled people. Accessible transport leaves space for individualized transport for those who need it. I’m sure we can do two things at the same time.
I’m super envious that there are awards for accessibility in video games but not really for websites. So much of our work is done behind the scenes and we’re not allowed to really talk about it. But I would love to see and create projects to share proudly.
Happy new year, microblog and Mastodon peeps!
Accessibility people: “Consistency is of the utmost importance!” Also, accessibility people: 🤷♂️ (Note: I worked on the main WAI website redesign, so this is also self-critique.)
W3C membership & inflation
It’s very interesting that a full W3C membership cost $50k/year in 1995 while it currently costs a maximum of 77K. Adjusted for inflation, the fee should be 93K. Of course there are many more members these days, but 77K for a billion+ company feels like a drop in the bucket…
New Doctor Who Teaser Trailer is Chef’s Kiss youtu.be/FtzRP0fyc…
I don’t know if these “hyper links” will catch on! front-end.social/@heydon/1…
Quick reminder, because family dynamics can be tough during this time of year: Not visiting family at this time of a global pandemic is a very valid decision. Stay safe and healthy. ❤️🎄😷
I always thought that 4000 Twitter followers is some pseudo-magical number for me, reachable but really tough to get to. A few months ago I crossed the line to 4000. And just a few days ago, I crossed it again – this time in the opposite direction. Both made me very happy. 🤷♂️
<vacation type=“christmas”>
This is awesome: An inclusive D&D kit (not widely/commercially available) nitter.it/dreamwisp… Edit: Hm. The nitter mirror apparently broke, so here is the Threadreader thread: threadreaderapp.com/thread/16…
“Hi Eric, how’s your December going?” — “Let me put it this way: It’s December 19th and I’m opening the first door of my advent calendar…”
Apparently I was way too optimistic for 2022. I won’t do the same for 2023. 🙂
The Do No Harm Guide: Centering Accessibility in Data Visualization report looks like an amazing publication from authors with a good reputation. Too bad that it is in PDF form. Its so much harder to link to it, reference or quote it that way. (Also meh for accessibility.)
Wow, looks like W3C and MIT are botching the transition to the US nonprofit. It really worries me that this hasn’t been prepared and agreed a long time ago. I hope it works out in the end.
Maybe Space Karen is just annoyed that the Streisand effect is not named after him… How would you make people more aware of your biggest competitor network (maybe not in terms of size but certainly in terms of how similar it works) than banning linking to it?
Reconsidering a lot of my choices where to spend my online time these days.