Monica

words that exclude

Mon, 27 May 2019 03:08:37 GMT

At work, one of my teams uses a web page, a "dashboard", to coordinate activities for each release. When we start to work on a new release, a (specific) member of the group creates a new dashboard for that release. This dashboard is mostly populated by tables of features, bugs, and other tasks. Each table has several relevant columns, like title, priority, who it's assigned to, and status.

We've been doing this for a while and the dashboards keep growing, so before doing the current one we had a conversation about what we do and don't want. We identified some sections we could get rid of, and I also brought up that the two-column format we were using does not play well with font zoom (which is also obvious in meetings) and could we make it one column? No one objected to that, and the dashboard person published the new one.

A week later he quietly switched it to two columns. Not only that, but the tables were wider and in both columns now so it even more did not fit for me. I said words to the effect of "hey, what happened to the single column we had?", and he said he didn't agree to that and he prefers two columns. When I reminded him that this is an accessibility issue and not a mere preference for me, he said something that's far too common: "oh, you can just..." -- in this case, "oh, you can just make your own copy with one column". He dismissed my need with a "solution" that let him keep his preference without having to make any changes himself.

Yeah. That is not a solution.

I responded that the team resource needs to be accessible to everybody and I was not going to maintain my own copy (and have to track changes to the other one). I also explained to him that as someone with a visual disability I already have to either work around or give up using quite a few resources that are designed for people with perfect vision, that's really tiring, and I should not have to face such stumbling blocks at work from my team. He made a second copy "for people who want this version". A more enlightened approach would have been to fix the "standard" version and then, if he wanted, "just" make his own, but I wasn't going to push that.

That happens a lot, and I don't just mean to me. When someone who isn't part of the default majority finally gets any sort of accommodation, we count is as a victory and don't push for the correct, inclusive change, the one that says "you are equal to me" instead of "I will accommodate you". We know that if we push for what's truly right, we run the risk of being marginalized even more, of being labeled as "whiny" or "needy", of not having the support of our peers and superiors. (And sometimes people do cast preferences as needs and get whiny, muddying those waters for the rest of us.) Thoughtful, informed allies matter, and we don't always have them -- not that people have ill intention but rather that this, too, is a thing that has to be learned.

It's a thing I've had to learn in areas that don't directly affect me. I assume we're all still learning. I cringe some when thinking about an SCA event I ran about 30 years ago and how the site wasn't completely wheelchair-accessible but there were "only" three steps at the front door and we could "just help so-and-so into the hall", right? Yeah, I cluelessly said that, not realizing how many barriers so-and-so faced every day, how this one more thing was one more obstacle. I hope I've gotten a little less clueless around the mobility-impaired, and I'm sure I'm still missing some important clues (there and elsewhere).

I mentioned that I already have to work around or abandon a lot of things because of vision. Let me give you two examples. First, web sites -- there are lots of bad patterns there (I think the UX people call them "dark patterns"). Font zoom is usually the first thing I reach for, but often it's more complicated -- poor contrast (whoever thought light gray text on white backgrounds was a good idea?), layouts that don't work after you zoom a couple notches, that sort of thing. Each time I encounter this I have to ask myself: is this web site really necessary? If it is, I have to invest in writing custom styling and sometimes go begging people to write userscripts to fix these problems, and often those styles and scripts are fragile. ("But can't you just learn web programming/JavaScript/jQuery?" That's not a small thing.)

I've got a ton of these kinds of modifications for Stack Exchange; the site is important enough to me that I don't want to walk away, but good heavens, accessibility is not their strong suit, and they have sometimes been pretty uncaring about that. I had to basically throw a fit to get a fix for something that prevented me from moderating, and then it was a fellow moderator, not an SE employee, who helped me out with a script. (They might be getting better about stuff like this; jury's still out. They did fix another moderation barrier; I had an actual meeting with the product manager about it.)

Here's an example from the physical world. Back before I kept kosher, I went to fast-food places fairly often. These are the kinds of places that post the menu behind the counter. Paper copies of the menu? Why would we need that? Any time I went to such a place, I had to decide whether to ask somebody to read me parts of the menu -- was I willing to both inconvenience someone and embarrass myself? -- or just order blind ("they have cheeseburgers here, right?") and possibly miss out on something I would have liked more but didn't know about. My friends probably thought I ordered the same thing almost every time because I particularly liked it or was in a rut; no, it was because I had learned from past visits something that each restaurant had, so I just went with that most of the time. Nowadays I have fewer choices in restaurants but there are still menu-behind-the-counter places sometimes. Do you know how liberating smartphones are? Now I can take a picture of the menu and use that to order -- not an option that was available in my student days!

People "self-accommodate" by opting out, like I used to with fast food, all the time. The wheelchair user might decide it's too hard to visit that store, city park, or friend's house. The hearing-challenged person learns to fake the less-important conversations to conserve the "could you repeat that?"s for things that matter more. The person who can't afford that restaurant but who doesn't want to be ostracized orders a side salad and a glass of water and tells people "I'm not very hungry". The person whose gender doesn't match outward appearances learns to hold it instead of using restrooms in certain places. The religious-minority student has to decide what to do about the mandatory Christmas pageant. And all the while, people are saying "but can't you just..." -- mouth the words, use the "right" (for the speaker) restroom, commute on a bike to save the cost of the bus pass so you can go to restaurants, learn to read lips, shop online.

I do think it's incumbent on those of us with limitations to do our share of the work. The world doesn't owe me paper menus at the counter if I can take a picture. Web sites don't owe me bigger fonts if I can zoom without breaking the site. But when we've done what we reasonably can do and we still face barriers, we need to be able to get our needs met without a fuss. And those of us in the default majority (as most of us are about something) need that to be second nature, not an "oh sigh, I guess, if you insist, but next time we go with my preference..." sort of thing. I don't know how we learn to do that, but one ingredient in the solution is awareness.

A couple weeks later we used that dashboard in a meeting (distributed team), and the person driving the display pulled up the two-column one. As usual I asked for some zoom, which broke the view, and then I said "let's use the one-column one" (which I had proactively linked to from the agenda page). The same person who had edited the dashboard said "can't you just pull it up on your end?". As a matter of fact, I couldn't. But it shouldn't have even been a question.

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bad IT day :-(

Thu, 29 Nov 2018 02:37:58 GMT

Because of corporate changes (spun off from one company and merged with another), we have to remove our last dependencies on the old company's IT infrastructure. In this last round, they move our email and our (Windows) login accounts to a new domain. My migration was today.

They've sent lots of email about this over the last few months, but they left out some important details. A coworker who's been through it alerted us that they would be uninstalling and reinstalling Office, for no particularly good reason that I can see. (I mean, there's a good reason if you were on the wrong version or something, but I moved from 2013 to 2013.) The only hint they gave was telling us that we'd need to update our email signatures. Yeah, a bit more than that... maybe most people don't customize Outlook much, but I have to for accessibility. So a couple weeks ago, after finding no way to export all my client settings, I walked through all the configuration panels taking screenshots. Today I reapplied them all -- and there's a critical thing that's still broken and I haven't found a solution. I started customizing the web interface instead to see if that can meet my needs, but am feeling the lack of keyboard shortcuts. Maybe that's userscriptable. Dammit, Outlook is a PITA sometimes but it was working and now it's not.

They also created new user profiles for us. They said they would move "your files" over, but coworkers warned that this was incomplete. My browsers are very important to me, so I did my best to save bookmarks (easy), tabs (reduces to bookmarks), and session state. Chrome came through just fine. I was quite surprised, when launching Firefox post-migration, to be staring at the default configuration -- it didn't occur to me that I might lose about:config settings, add-ons, and other UI customizations. Frantic, I dug around in Users/me/AppData, found a Mozilla directory under Local, and copied the profiles therein. No effect. Eventually I went to Google to find out how to put things back the way they were (and sighing deeply about the customizations that don't sync, which I'd have to reconstruct), when I found something that pointed out how to ask Firefox where it's reading profile data from. Aha! Under AppData there is also a directory named "Roaming" (WTF is that?), and it was under there. Once I copied that directory I had my old browser state back. Whew! (Also backed that up for safekeeping.)

The actual migration process (not counting email, which they moved overnight) took about six hours. A chunk of that time was spent blocked and waiting on hold with IT. (An hour on hold the first time, 1:15 the second. Sheesh.) Because I knew the hold times would be long, as soon as I smelled a potential problem the first time I placed the call while I continued to work on it. Alas, the second blockage was a surprise error from their tool. By the way, they helpfully offered links to the FAQ and "contact support", both dead. At least they also displayed a phone number (which I'd secured in advance so I didn't need, but some would).

They moved most Windows settings over; for example, my large fonts, desktop icons, custom colors, and classic taskbar styling were intact. But, I discovered, they didn't move environment variables -- and I have no idea how to get those, since I can no longer log in with the old profile. I discovered this when Emacs didn't read my configuration -- it depends on HOME. So I reset that one, but I wonder what else I've lost.

Tomorrow I get to find out what else broke. I know the main doc tool will need intervention; the domain change confuses the license. I haven't tried git yet.

My laptop is getting on in years. On the one hand, this would have been a good time to replace it, given that there's going to be a lot of disruption anyway. On the other hand, it would come with Windows 10, which hasn't been making friends on my team. Also, I brought in a Windows 10 tablet to use during the migration, and yesterday when I was testing some stuff it announced that it couldn't start and I would have to reinstall the OS (!). I hadn't done much on it so I didn't lose a lot (had to reinstall the VPN and the browsers), but...really? In all my years of computer use, I've never once gone from "works fine" to "start over" in a span of hours. I wonder if I accidentally picked up that ~~virus~~ latest OS update, the one that was damaging data because it didn't check to see if there's enough disk space before starting. Every time that tablet asks me if I want to install updates I say no, but maybe something slipped through?

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tech overflow

Mon, 19 Nov 2018 00:12:41 GMT

I guess, in retrospect, it makes sense that I had three active computers on my desk today.

At work we are in the end stages of an acquisition. In this last step, they move us off of the old employer's domain. That means email migration and new login credentials for our PCs. The latter is being implemented as: create new account, copy files from one profile to another, leave the end user to clean up the resulting mess. They're doing this in waves, so I already know from people in earlier waves that there will be mess and I'm going to lose at least a day to this, maybe two. (For reasons unknown, they are uninstalling and reinstalling Office, even though it's the same version, so I recently spent an hour or so taking screenshots of all the various settings pages so I don't have to figure it all out again. No, I found no "export client configuration" option, and I do override a lot of defaults in pursuit of accessibility.)

So, one of the things a coworker warned about is that browser state did not survive the transfer. Since it's a company machine that requires multiple logins before you could even make use of the information, I allow Firefox to store most of the various credentials I need for work sites. Yes I keep notes about passwords (reminder hints, not actual passwords) and user names, but it'd still be a pain. Plus there are all the tabs I keep open all the time; I want to preserve that session state. And bookmarks are important, though probably the easiest part of this to protect.

All this pointed to Firefox sync. That sounds like a backup, right? Sync your history, session state, etc to another device -- perfect. I created a Firefox account using my work email address. (Gotta prevent collisions with my other account and machines, after all.) Well, it turns out Firefox doesn't view it as a backup; you can't do anything until you connect two devices. Hmm, I thought -- I don't want to entangle any of my personal devices. But wait! I have a seldom-used company tablet++ (the packaging calls it a computer; it's basically a small tablet with a detachable keyboard running Windows 10). Perfect.

This afternoon I pulled it out to set up the other end of the sync. After I logged in, Firefox said "click on the confirmation link we just emailed you".

Oh. Great. So I pulled out the work laptop, waited for it to slowly boot, waited for Outlook to slowly start up (I wonder if I can access the web version from a personal machine? gotta check that), eventually found the email in the spam trap, was reminded how much I hate trackpads, and finally completed the circuit with Firefox. But that didn't sync either; that enabled sync. So I had tell Firefox on the work machine to start sending data.

The tablet got bookmarks and probably credentials (I'll need to install a VPN client on it to confirm, which I'll do at work), but it didn't get tabs. Was it supposed to? I used Google on the machine I'm typing this on, the one with a real keyboard and mouse, to find out. Apparently there's a setting. Ok.

Chrome will be easier; I don't store as much state there. I'll just need a few tabs, and if I have to do that the old-fashioned way (emailing links to myself), so be it.

All of this is contingency planning, but it sure would suck to lose that data.

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mixed messages

Mon, 12 Nov 2018 22:44:48 GMT

It's benefits-enrollment season at work. The web site is predictably slow and flaky, but after having key pages time out several times, I've finally got a stake in the ground. You can make changes up to the deadline so I figure "choose something now, review in more detail later" works better than being part of the last-minute crunch.

My costs for the main health plan and for the dental plan are both doubling (comparing apples to apples as much as possible). On the other hand, the long-term-disability insurance I pay for now will be covered in full next year. I, um, don't know what message they're trying to send there -- getting sick is more expensive but if you get really sick we'll cover you? Probably not what they intended.

(I assume that their actuaries simply optimized for the lowest corporate expenses traded against offering benefits employees won't rebel over, and there is no deeper meaning. But oh, the subtext!)

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a testing memory

Tue, 12 Dec 2017 04:55:20 GMT

My high school was solidly mediocre, which meant it had basically nothing to challenge me. I don't say that to say "hey look how smart I am" but rather to say that the school lacked the means to challenge students at a variety of skill levels, so if you were at the wrong ones, high or low, you lost out. Everything was calibrated for the C-student, pretty much. Aside from having the option to take algebra/geometry/trig instead of "math 10-12", and a couple optional science classes, there were no choices for the college-bound. (There was a strong vo-tech program, and there was a "business track" to train secretaries. I kid you not.)

So anyway, when I was in, I think, 10th grade and we were offered the chance to take a national aptitude test just to figure out where we were actually stronger or weaker, I took it. It reported results in six broad categories. In five of the six I was 99th percentile, so that didn't help and I don't even remember what the categories were.

In the sixth category I was fourth percentile. The category was "clerical speed and accuracy". The test consisted of pages and pages that looked like this:

CCCOCCOCCCCCCCOCCCCCCCOOCCCCCCCOCCCC

Line after line after line, no spaces. The task was "count the 'O's" and it was a timed test. The score depended on both how many you got right and how many blocks you got through. (Just to be clear, this was a paper-and-pencil exercise. No search. :-) )

I thought of this today during one of my most-loathed tasks for our team's documentation releases: the "production check". Everybody on the team is given a slice of our (very large) HTML documentation set to "proofread" before publication. The instructions actually say "proofread", like I could possibly read all that in a day or even two. (And have I mentioned that our team is half the size it was a year ago?) I scan each page looking for anything that jumps out, like weird formatting or bad headings or suspicious syntax blocks. I spend more time on parts that have been heavily modified since last time (I can haz source-control logs), but it's still scanning. Meanwhile, my wrist is unhappy because the navigation requires lots of mouse-clicking, and I wonder how I could make it more keyboard-driven but never solve that. (There's a multi-pane focus-grabbing thing I don't know how to solve.) But mainly, my eyes start to glaze over after a while. And all I can think of is that this isn't so different from "CCCCCOCCCCCOOOCCCCCOC" after a few hours.

Fortunately this only happens four times a year, for a day or maybe two. The rest of the time I can get out of the fourth percentile. Maybe even into the 99th.

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Ow!

Tue, 31 Oct 2017 21:45:10 GMT

My employer, like many other large ones in the US, assesses a higher fee for health insurance if we don't cough up certain statistics for them. I don't know how much of this is snooping and how much is forcing us to at least get certain tests annually. Distasteful as the former is, we established several years ago that I can be bought on this if the price difference is high enough.

Many locations have on-site "clinics" where you can show up, let them prick your finger, fill out paperwork, and be done. My location is too small for that, though, so we have three choices: go to your doctor, go to a lab where they'll do it, or order a do-it-yourself kit. I didn't want to pay for an office visit just for this and the lab sounded like a hassle, so I ordered the kit. I mean, it's just a pin-prick, right? Even with my needle-aversion I can handle that. I did this through my doctor last year and through an on-site clinic at my previous employer, so I figured this'd be ok.

I will never, ever do that again. Their damned lancet hurt, and I had to do it twice to get enough blood (answering the question of why they sent two while providing instructions using one, I guess). It left bruises on my finger. Hours later it still hurts if I'm not careful when typing with that finger. And the puncture marks are bigger than I expected. This...did not happen with my past experiences.

Nope, not doing that again. Grr. What they learn about my blood sugar better be worth it.

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