Monica

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.

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.

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.

We went up to Cooper's Lake on Sunday to help with Pennsic camp setup. It sure is weird to not have the house in camp. But we're only going to be there for a couple days (middle Sunday and Monday), because we have other plans for that vacation time later in the year.

There is now a solar panel on the pantry roof in our camp. It has begun.

Earlier this summer I finally read Pangaea, a shared-world anthology that also has an overall story. It includes a story by mabfan, which is how I became aware of it in the first place. I quite enjoyed it and wrote a post about it on Universe Factory. A second volume is due out later this year.

I picked up the first three books in Jody Lynn Nye's Mythology series (the first book is Mythology 101) in a Story Bundle a few months back. I almost didn't get it because I see Story Bundle as a way to get exposure to new authors/series/concepts, so having three of the ten (? around ten, anyway) books in the bundle be from the same series was counter to that. But I've now read them all and bought the fourth separately, so that turned out to be a win. The books revolve around an eccentric college student who finds out that the Little Folk are real, and living under his college's library. Antics ensue.

In June my employer sent me to a conference (to work, not to attend) in Las Vegas. Now I know, from TV and general media, that Las Vegas is larger than life. And I was still surprised. I was also not prepared for it to take a long time to get anywhere within the hotel complex, because of course they need to route you through the casinos that are everywhere. Casinos are not smoke-free, so I hurried through. Also, my hotel room -- the base room type, nothing fancy -- was larger than my first apartment.

No, I did not play any casino games. Casinos have two kinds of games: games of chance that favor the house, and games of skill that I'm not good enough at and that favor the house. I don't like those odds.

I've been with my current employer for a bit over two years now and I'm still loving it. My coworkers are great, I get a lot of control over what I work on, and I can tell that even though I am the single remote member of my group, I'm still able to teach and mentor and inspire. I think I know a thing or two about technical writing in the software world, and I am glad that I can flex those muscles and impart some of what I've learned. And they appreciate me (including tangible demonstration of same), and that matters too.

FiOS has finally come to my neighborhood, years after many others in the city. The installer is here now. It sounds like a big production; I hope there aren't too many surprises. One surprise already: my "HD" TV package won't actually deliver HD signal unless I pay to rent a fancier box. This was not disclosed. The guy I called about it today offered me three months of movie channels but I'd have to remember to call and cancel that or they'll start charging me; not interested in that. I only got the bundle with TV because (for the next two years) it's cheaper than just getting phone and internet, so in that sense it hasn't particularly harmed me, but it still leaves a bad taste.

If you've been caught up in the "AOL/Yahoo email addresses not playing well with mailing lists" problem, or if you haven't but you've heard something about it, you might want to read this summary of the problem from siderea. I guess some people assumed that mailing lists don't matter any more and everybody does web fora, or something.

Last week was Shavuot. There's a tradition of staying up all night studying torah; we have a community-wide study that runs for three hours (from 10PM to 1AM) and then several local synagogues take it from there, for those who want. The community one has 6-8 classes in each 50-minute slot, so there are choices. There seems to be a tradition of giving them not-very-informative names; I went to one called "speed torah" just to find out what it meant, and it turned out the rabbi leading it had prepared several very short texts to look at in small study groups (ideally pairs, but people seemed to want to do trios), moving groups every 3-4 minutes and moving on to the next text. So "speed torah" in the "speed dating" sense, but without the scorecards to keep track of who you'd like to meet again. Cute. There was also one on social media, which the rabbi had expected to be populated primarily by teenagers. He did get some teens, but mostly us older folks. He did a credible job of adjusting his plans on the fly.

I started a new job a couple weeks ago. It's a good group of people; I'm looking forward to getting past the administrivia and initial-learning phases and doing work that really contributes. My manager (who's not local) spent a day with me here, during which he observed that I needed a better monitor or two (because of vision) and no of course he understands about things like Shabbat and Jewish holidays. (Pro tip: if you observe Shabbat, try to never start a job in Standard Time -- let them see that you're good before you start disappearing early on Fridays. But we were talking about Shavuot and why I needed to take a day off so soon after starting.) This week I got email from him: the 24" monitor I wanted (key features: 16:10 aspect ratio, can rotate) wasn't available, so would I accept the same monitor in 30"? Yeah, that should work... (Getting one now, and after checking it out we'll decide what to do about the second one.)

I recently read the first two of Rick Cook's "Wiz" books (Wizard's Bane and Wizardry Compiled). They're great fun, even if they feel a little like geek-flavored "Mary Sue". A programmer from our world is whisked away into a world that has magic -- for reasons unknown, and the guy who summoned him is now dead. While there he figures out that magic spells can be implemented in a way akin to programming; he doesn't understand magic, but he understands programming. So... The books have some nods to programmers that others might not pick up on, but they don't seem like they'd get in the way for those who aren't. They're quick reads, and I was looking forward to continuing on with the third one, until... brick wall! Baen published the first two as ebooks and has published the rest as ebooks but not currently, and they're not to be found in ebook format now as best I can tell. (If you know otherwise, please help.) I don't expect free (I happily paid for one of these); I do want to read them on my Kindle -- because yes I read paper books and ebooks, but I'm finicky about keeping sets together. (I don't even like mixing hardbacks and paperbacks in a series because it messes up the shelving.) There's not even an explanation on Baen's site; just "not currently available" where the "buy" button should be. Drat.