“Designing a game to be welcoming for players who are hard of hearing might not be as complicated as you think, but it does take a bit of education. Learning how to take the information that’s often provided exclusively through audio and present it through other means has its challenges.

“The video above, from Game Maker’s Toolkit, does a good job of discussing some of these obstacles that might not be immediately apparent to most players or developers.”

(This is your tweet about TweetDeck adding support for alt text.)
“If you use TweetDeck, you can now add descriptions to images to help blind Twitter users!

“You may need to enable a setting first: https://help.twitter.com/en/using-twitter/picture-descriptions

“Bonus tip: If you follow the bot @PleaseCaption, it’ll automagically remind you if you tweet a pic without a description. 💫”

(If you should ever need to off some fruit flies:)
“I have an easier one: about an inch of apple cider vinegar in a small glass, drop of dish soap, mix it up, put it near the flies. they will DIE.”

(This is a pretty decent way of offering to help while doing one’s best to avoid mansplaining.)
“do you want to know how to make a trap I do not mean to flysplain you”

(Apparently this is a thing?)
“Hunt was open to the idea of getting the videos captioned.

“He quickly enabled the option for community contributions for all the videos.”

“Jeff Bezos is the richest man in the world thanks to his ownership of Amazon—an online book store that morphed into a company that replaced Walmart, disrupted grocery stores and builds cloud computing for the CIA. It is typically held up as a paragon of what a business should look like, as it lost money for years while investing in itself. However, this is more of a reflection of how our national conversation is dominated by the investor class, rather than proof of Amazon’s ability to run an admirable business. Silicon Valley titans have more power than most world governments have ever had, but with less oversight—and Amazon is no different.”

Never mind the text here (since the Nyquist board listed doesn’t come with keycaps), but the keycaps shown in the picture look rather nice. Apparently they’re GMK 9009?

“This is why we don’t use ‘simply’ or ‘easily’ in the documentation.”

“SurveyMonkey has teamed with Paradigm, a diversity consultancy, to create a belonging and inclusion survey template that they believe will help them better understand the lived experiences of their employees. They’re also making the survey template public, so you can better understand yours, as well.”
(via https://twitter.com/_sagesharp_/status/1018537501760184320)

“Fwiw, if you’re not certain about your descriptions or want to verify they’re on the image, you can always tag in one of the many alttext bots like @get_altText in a reply to your image and it will respond either with the description or let you know the image lacks one. :3”

“The smartest people I know use simple words, not fancy ones. They make complex things easy for anyone to understand.”

This is that video about applying loose powder with a powder poof.

In case your iPhone ever gets stuck in split-view mode when in landscape orientation, this may be worth a look.

“What is Chaptering
Using our SKIP technology, we will create additional SKIP points in a recording that allow you to SKIP from one interesting point to the next; e.g. skip to Curry drop a 3pt for down town! Use the SKIP key to skip to the next interesting point and SKIP over a commercial breaks. The idea is to get you to the interesting points of the content without having to watch the entire recording. Kind cool, right?”

Perhaps one could use this to display arbitrary info on the TiVo display?
“Ever since I heard that some cable companies had supported displaying incoming calls Caller ID on their DVR I have wanted that feature on my TIVO.

“Thanks to the power of IFTTT, I now have that capability.”

“The tech entrepreneur gave a hefty check to a PAC dedicated to maintaining Republican control of Congress”

“The new San Francisco font has a monospace version ‘SFMono-Regular’. It’s beautiful. But it’s not a true system font - it’s only available in Apple’s Terminal application and/or other custom applications via XCode. On macOS, you can manually install SFMono-Regular using some hackery so it can be used in CSS, but no such trick exists for iOS. Until Apple clears this up, it’s not going in the font stack.”

“New San Francisco Monospaced font is gorgeous! Unfortunately, it’s only available inside Terminal.app (and Xcode.app).

“This Atom package imports the ‘SF Mono’ font directly from Terminal.app, which allows you to use this font in Atom.”

“The real difference is that comedy shows or segments that are legitimately funny always punch up. Instead of wasting their time going after people who are typically in the minority, they go after people with tangible power that’s being abused. A basic tenet of humor — and I mean real basic, we’re talking ancient Greece here — is that your best stuff will come from going after people bigger than you.”

“White privilege doesn’t mean your life hasn’t been hard.

“It means that your skin color isn’t one of the things making it harder.”

“All right It’s Friday
“Fuck This Week
“Here Are Some Netflix Shows I Have Been Enjoying”

“A beermosa is insanely easy to make—about as easy as, say, a mi-mosa. Beer, pale; orange juice, cold. Add the former to the latter. Sip. Repeat.

“Sometimes the simplest route is best. I have had my share of beermosas that were as simple as they were satisfying. (They were very satisfying.) But they don’t have to be that easy. Why needlessly overcomplicate something? Why take what already works and add a bunch of stuff? Because it is my nature, that’s why; for better or for worse, I like to add things, and try things, and change things. And because sometimes, when you make shit more complicated, you wind up with something delicious.”

“Can You Separate Art From The Artist? Should you boycott films, books, or art from problematic creators? Should you stop watching films from Harvey Weinstein, Kevin Spacey, Roman Polanski, or Johnny Depp?”

“I think it might be helpful to those of us who are planning to make our own individual custom layouts to share our ideas somewhere. I’ve made a first draft of a layout that I’d like to implement, and I’m presenting it here in case anyone is interested. No doubt I’ve made some choices here that won’t work out, and possibly some that are downright nonsensical. Everyone who is so inclined should fee free to offer suggestions and/or criticism.”

“The user name takes over half of the total reading time and is difficult to understand because it must be spelled out as J-A-N-I-Pulsating heart-P-L-Small Latin Letter Capital U. You’ll also note that a few letters are missing as VoiceOver attempts to speed things up. Looks can be deceiving.”

via @_katie_lane: “I don’t want you to be intimidated by contracts! So I’m creating the Contracts for Creative Freelancers series of classes over on @skillshare. Lesson One is all about fixing bad contract terms, https://skl.sh/2NxGIjp, and Lesson Two tackles work for hire https://skl.sh/2IzPZ6Y.”
(via: https://twitter.com/_katie_lane/status/1017794236383576064)

“Tap-dance keys are general purpose, multi-use keys, which trigger a different action based on the number of times they were tapped in sequence.

–

“To not interfere with normal typing, tap-dance keys have two ways to decide when to call an action: they either get interrupted, or they time out. Every time a tap-dance key is pressed, the timer resets, so one does not have to finish the whole tapping sequence within a short time limit. The tap-dance counter continues incrementing until one of these cases happen.

“When a tap-dance key is pressed and released, and nothing is pressed on the keyboard until the timeout is reached, then the key will time out, and trigger an action. Which action, depends on the number of times it has been tapped up until this point.

“When a tap-dance key is pressed and released, and another key is hit before the timer expires, then the tap-dance key will trigger an action first, perform it, and only then will the firmware continue handling the interrupting key press. This is to preserve the order of keys pressed.”

“I honestly expected underlines and strikethroughs to be completely ignored by most applications, but I was proved wrong. Except on Adobe apps. Not only with typography, functionality in general between Adobe software is highly fragmented. They have been working to remedy that with the Creative Cloud suite, especially now with experimental support for variable fonts and a push from the industry to make OpenType features more accessible to users. This is good, however there is still a lot of elementary stuff that needs to be fixed.”

(Some ideas if CalendarAgent is bogarting the CPU:)
“My Mac was running loud and hot so I do what most tech heads do, opened Activity Monitor to investigate. Discovered CalNCService process was using 80+ % CPU. 
“ 
“First try these quick fixes
“• Don Rowlands had success by disabling Google calendar sync in Internet Accounts System Preferences. Worked for me including re-enabling calendar sync.
“• Phong (apple.stackexchange.com) suggested to remove Calendar and/or Reminders widgets from the Today Notification Center. Applied this now as I don’t use the Today section of Notification Center.
“• user1559834 (apple.stackexchange.com) went full hog and removed ALL widgets from Notifications Center’s Today tab (i.e still leave notifications in place)”

(The attached thread goes over the problems with OSCON’s / O’Reilly’s speakers’ agreement that prohibits speakers’ talks from being political.)
“As an inclusion advocate, I couldn’t agree to a speaker agreement or code of conduct that prohibits me talking about politics. Inclusion, accessibility, bias, etc. are inherently political. So as long as that prohibition is in there, I wouldn’t be comfortable returning to OSCON.”

(If you should need some travel headphones, perhaps these may be worth a look?)
“Excellent as regular headphones, the M4U 8 make an almost essential wireless travel or workout companion.”

(This seems like a handy thing.)
“Export installed styles in Firefox Stylish into a Stylus compatible JSON format”

This page goes over alternatives for the Stylish extension for various browsers.
(via https://www.metafilter.com/175146/Browser-extension-Stylish-phones-home-with-urls-you-visit)

(On recovering one’s Stylish styles if Firefox ends up auto-disabling the extension:)
“> Mozilla has removed Stylish from its add-on catalog, but as of this writing it is still available on the Chrome store, and neither is likely to automatically disable or remove the add-on even for your protection.

“The lastest update to Firefox auto-disables Stylish 3.1.x. There are ways to recover your userstyles from your Firefox user profile, but the recommended workflow will lead you to a file that might be over a year old. To fetch the latest version, you have to do some digging through JSON files in Profiles/[your profile]/browser-extension-data.”
--

(On a potential Stylish replacement for Safari:)
“For Safari, the recommended Stylish replacement is Freestyler, with the caveat that it’s not as robust, and uses its own styles repository rather than userstyles.org. Freestyler’s UI is a pretty dramatic rearrangement but mostly works the same as Stylish does.

“On the upside, it looks like Stylish’s new owner has ignored Safari entirely; it’s still on version 2.0.8, which is pre-takeover. So I’m not certain whether Stylish for Safari needs to be replaced. I’ve installed Freestyler and copied the rules, but disabled it. Sticking with Stylish for the time being and keeping Freestyler as a backup utility.”

“Sounds like ‘tracking browsing history’ in so much words. I installed Stylish (v 1.6.3) from the Chrome store to investigate. I did not install any user styles. I went to the front page of Hacker News, and the Network tab in the dev tools of Stylish showed a POST to ‘https ://api.userstyles.org/tic/stats’ (I added a space in URL to prevent URL parsing). I randomly clicked on a link on the page and another POST was made to ‘api .userstyles.org’. I manually entered the URL of the page here in a new tab and another POST was made to ‘api .userstyles.org’.”
(via https://metatalk.metafilter.com/24843/PSA-Stylish-browser-add-on-steals-your-internet-history)

(It looks like you can get cookie-cutter privacy policies and such here—if you should ever need such a thing.)
“Attorney-level solutions to make your websites and apps compliant with the law across multiple countries and legislations.”

(via Kurt Wolf in Tech Chatroom:)
“SSA’s free ANDI tool is a bookmarklet/favlet that tracks ‘focusable elements’ (and provides the expected accessible name and accessible description)”

“It would seem that pasting any amount of text into a large-ish document can take several seconds if CotEditor’s ‘Link URLs in document’ option is turned o”

“Papa John’s Founder Allegedly Used N-Word On Conference Call.”

Perhaps this may be worth a look?
“Lexia Mono was drawn specifically with programmers and designers who work with tough compositional issues in mind. Its clean, uninterrupted rhythm and even colour make it remarkably easy to read, while its characters, redesigned to make full use of the bounding box, flow just like on a typewriter. Unlike many monospace font families which consist of only Regular and Bold weights, Lexia Mono also features a Light, stylish true italics, and box-drawing characters for terminal use.”

(This comment was in reply to a fuddy-duddy who was trying to get Microsoft’s style guide to undo contractions:)
“The wording is intentional. Microsoft style uses common contractions because that’s how people really talk. (See https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/style-guide/word-choice/use-contractions.)

“In general, Microsoft writing style strives to be warm and relaxed. It avoids some of the conventions of written communications that make writing sound stiff and formal. For more information, see ‘Microsoft’s brand voice’ (https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/style-guide/brand-voice-above-all-simple-human) and ‘Top 10 tips for Microsoft style and voice’ (https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/style-guide/top-10-tips-style-voice).”

(Looks like it could be worth setting up a flashlight shortcut for Siri once you get iOS 12:)
“Someone gave me this idea last night at the London MPU meet up. The Siri phrase is ‘Lumos’.”

(Hmm—that’s not so good.)
“In short, if on any monitor (internal or external) you have scaling enabled (like external monitor have higher/lower resolution and you connected it in ‘clone mode’, or you use non default resolution on internal), WindowServer will bleed and gobble memory (any model of osx machine).”

This video compares various makeup-setting sprays, including Urban Decay, Skindinavia, and Kat Von D.

She rather liked Skindinavia’s “Bridal” variant for mattifying.

“I have tried [Urban Decay] chill spray, Smashbox primer spray, and Mac fix+ but this is the best by far. I have dry skin but always set my foundation with powder to ensure that it stays on all day.”

“While .tv brings in millions of dollars each year for the tiny South Pacific island nation of Tuvalu, and .me benefits Montenegro, the people of the British Indian Ocean Territory, or the Chagos Islands, have no such luck. Indeed, profits from the sale of each .io domain flow to the very force that expelled the Chagossian or Ilois people from their equatorial land just a generation or two ago: the British government.”

“If you monitor these things, you might have noticed that Apple’s consumer email domains (iCloud domains) – mac.com, me.com and icloud.com – have moved to a ‘p=quarantine’ DMARC policy. This means that if you have an email address in these domains, your ability to send outbound mail using an email service provider or other, non-Apple email platform to send mail, deliverability won’t look so good. Mail may not be blocked outright (Apple didn’t move to ‘p=reject’) but moving to ‘p=quarantine’ means it’s much more likely that your mail could end up in the spam folder.”

“In the present paper, I examine one of the fundamental dichotomies underpinning the arguments in relation to the meaning of manga, the tension and interrelationship between the ‘style’ versus ‘made in Japan’ positions.”

“A 1995 study [1] found that junior high school students were able to recognize between 10,000–12,000 words, whereas college students were able to recognize between 12,000–17,000 words.

“While, which 10,000-12,000 words vary based on the individual, we can make assumptions about the recognizability of a word based on how common the word is. The more common a word is, the more likely an individual is to have been exposed to it, and thus the more likely that individual would be to recognize and understand the word. The Rare Scale is a linear scale based on word ranks from 10,000 – 20,000. A word with rank at or below 10,000 would be a 0% (thus considered common) on the rare scale, and a word with rank at or above 20,000 would be a 100% (thus considered rare) on the rare scale.”

It looks like this bug was marked as a duplicate of “Thunderbird should have a grammar checker”

(As of the Thunderbird beta from March 2018:)
“Thunderbird now allows the conversion of folders from mbox to maildir format and vice versa. This is an experimental feature that needs to be enabled by setting the preference mail.store_conversion_enabled. Note that this functionality does not not work if the option ‘Allow Windows Search/Spotlight to search messages’ is selected.”

“The advantages/disadvantages of both formats are discussed here http://www.linuxmail.info/mbox-maildir-mail-storage-formats/ and in this thread https://www.dslreports.com/forum/r30730482-Thunderbird-TB-mbox-files-per-folders-vs-maildir-files-per-message (obviously started by Wilders member @WildByDesign ). In my opinion, the most important advantages of maildir over mbox are the following:

“1. The maildir format is much more robust. The risk of losing data is much smaller if Thunderbird or your computer crashes.
“2. Incremental backups are much faster as only the new and modified files have to be backupped.
“3. Scanning your mails with an AV scanner is easier, and infected mails can be removed without the risk of data loss.”

“In a later episode, Seinfeld also interrupts another one of his straight friends to tell him that he’s picking up gay vibes. ‘The waves of gayness that wash through you from time to time are amazing,’ Seinfeld says to Alec Baldwin, in the middle of their meal. ‘You’re like one of the last men; you really have a manliness about you. But every once in a while, there’s like a vanilla-fudge marbling of homosexuality, just a ribbon of it, that flashes through.’

“And in the Tracy Morgan episode, Seinfeld is perplexed when the server, a woman named Caritza, introduces herself at the start of their meal. He turns to Tracy and says, ‘Caritza? That’s unusual. You ever heard that name before? Why do people keep making up names?’”

“One may ask what is the best way for these disciplines to abandon the harmful alphabetical norm. Some have suggested a top-down approach proposing that journals issue ‘a clear statement […] that this practice [ordering according to an alphabetical norm] is unacceptable’. While this certainly seems like a very good idea, a bottom-up approach may be even more promising, in which scholars discuss the issue with their co-authors and advocate the contribution-based norm, which is, after all, the standard when looking across different disciplines. If author groups feel that some of the authors contributed equally, they can resort to a random order of authors. This may be indicated with a footnote, ‘These authors contributed equally to this work. The order of author names was randomly determined’. Equally contributing authors who work together frequently could also alternate the author order on their various projects.”

“There is an issue with iOS Safari + VoiceOver where if an element is initially set to display: none;, even when updated to display: block; VoiceOver will not move focus to the element, even if focus is programmatically set. I’ve found to get around this bug, the CSS for dialogs should instead use visibility: hidden; for their inactive state, and visibility: visible;when they are displayed.”

(This is a pretty great introductory video about recording audio for videos and the like.)
“There’s an old axiom in filmmaking which states that an audience will forgive a poor quality picture, but not poor quality sound. This week, Chris and Jordan bring in an audio pro to discuss different types of microphones, how to position them, and to demonstrate how a cheap microphone positioned correctly will outperform an expensive model placed incorrectly.”

“The myth of the collaborative wonders of the open office debunked in new study. A tyranny of interruption, distraction, and stress for workers that require uninterrupted time for creative work. A way to squander the attention of highly paid workers to save money on real estate.”

On those who use glyphs from Unicode’s mathematical symbols block in their username:
“As a test, here is an uncaptioned video/audio where I changed my Twitter name to test it out: https://www.dropbox.com/s/lm0v4mc93p6rljd/twitter-fancy-font-example-voiceover.mp4?dl=0. This is how VoiceOver announces those ‘fancy’ names that Twitter users sometimes use.”

via @vavroom: “Are you using emojis in your Twitter display name? Do you think it's cute? Maybe. But check out what it's like for a screen reader user in this short video (open captions thanks to VoiceOver!)

“Avoid emojis in your twitter display name if you can. #a11y #accessibility”

“Clearview also made legibility worse on signs with what’s called negative-contrast color orientations — dark letters on light backgrounds — like speed limit or yellow warning signs. As such, the Federal Highway Administration (FHWA) is killing off Clearview after 12 years, and all new highway signs again be labeled in Highway Gothic, the old standard font.”

“Can you please just start saying ‘adults under 40’ for ‘Millennials’ because that is now literally what it means. Then see if your thing sounds silly.”

“Add in-place ‘View Source’ to MobileSafari with Shortcuts’ new JavaScript support. Some smart web dev could use this to add a beautiful source view with syntax highlighting and the ability to switch between live page and source. I am not a smart web dev 😛”

In answer to this question: “What‘s something that seems obvious within your profession, but the general public seems to misunderstand?”

Holly replied, “That $35 that scientific journals charge you to read a paper goes 100% to the publisher, 0% to the authors. If you just email us to ask for our papers, we are allowed to send them to you for free, and we will be genuinely delighted to do so.”

(These are actually pretty good tips, although they’re mostly directed toward women.)
“The good news? Learning how to take the perfect selfie or photo and actually love the way you look in it is a skill you can totally master. Here are a few of our favorite tips.”

This isn’t a bad intro-to-selfies post—and it isn’t too sexist either.

“Ochi on her ‘after’ selfie: Tess boosted my confidence with just a few selfie techniques. I had no idea that moving your hand a little up your waist or crossing your legs made such a difference. And even though the pose felt so unnatural, it looked awesome and not like I was trying too hard. Forget overanalyzing your selfies, all it takes is just a few small posing tweaks and you can be taking mirror selfies with the best of them.”

“Unfortunately, if you get the angle wrong, your pic is less likely to make the Insta-worthy cut. To avoid that, follow these easy tips for your best selfie ever.”

This page looks to be chock full of handy a11y-testing bookmarklets.

Among some of those that are included:
• Flash rectangle overlay
• Outline and Hide CSS background images
• Highlight CSS content
• CSS absolute position
• Show links
• Page Title
• Highlight Icon (fonts) (doesn't work on typed html unicode fonts...yet)

“The following tests can be performed in any order, but have been listed according to the SC requirement. Passing any of these tests will meet SC 2.3.1:
“Test 1: if a flashing element has a frequency at or below 3 Hertz;
“Test 2: if a flashing component is smaller than the size threshold;
“Test 3: if a flashing component does not contain more than 3 general flashes or 3 red flashes in a second.”

(This keyboard forum was created shortly after GeekHack was sold off to Massdrop.)
“Keebtalk is the home for computer keyboard enthusiasts online. We’re a friendly, community-owned space whose mission is to share information, to support each other and our shared interests, and to facilitate making better keyboard hardware.”

This geometric sans/grotesk is kinda nice, but just beware that its character set may be a skosh limited. (Like, it has letters, numbers, and general punctuation, but not all that much else.)

(It looks like one of Colleen’s cats is named “Dottie.”)
“Dottie’s epic blep is here for you.”

(About the mic situation at Fronteers:)
“One such not-great experience while speaking was from a headset-style wireless mic that amplified every jangle and clink against my hoop earrings.

“(I’m just putting that out there, Paul and Thomas. I’m not mentioning your last names, though, because your con was otherwise 💯.)”

“What you should then see are two columns: the first is the listing of your Documents folder just as before, but that to the right now fills the rest of the window as its width is incorrectly calculated. Select a folder within that and the window is almost useless, as the bug propagates down through the files and folders.

“There are two good workarounds. The first is to select a different folder in Documents, then use the back button to return to your chosen folder, with its width correctly displayed. Even neater is to click on the back button to return to Applications (but this time don’t click on any of its contents), then click on the forward button.”

(About the “Frog and Toad” adventures:)
“the author himself came out as gay to his family in 1974, his daughter has stated that frog and toad being a same sex couple that love each other was the beginning of her father coming out. don’t try and make it seem like ppl are forcing this to be lgbtq+ affiliated, it IS.”

“Sooo

“.io domains are pretty gnarly (to a point of supporting colonial efforts being held up by none-other-than the British.”

“Adopted into English from French in the 19th century, ‘mille tonnerres!’—literally ‘a thousand thunderbolts!’—is an expression of amazement or surprise.”

“A lot of people are waiting for CSS4 to come out. Where is it? Is it coming? When?

“CSS4 isn’t a thing. It’s never coming out. Jen explains why.”

(About 7 mins.)

“So however wide the ‘0’ character is in a given typeface, that’s the measure of one ch.  In monospace (fixed-width) fonts, where all characters are the same width, 1ch equals one character.  In proportional (variable-width) fonts, any given character could be wider or narrower than the ‘0’ character.”

“Sure enough, when using an Apple keyboard, if the [Control][F2] keystroke doesn’t give you access to the Mac menubar (menu system), try the [fn][Control][F2] keystroke and see if that works for you. You’ll be able to tell instantly, as focus will be moved to the ‘apple’ menu on your Mac menubar.”

(On the capitalization of “ob-gyn” / “OB-GYN”:)
“I used to work at the American College of Obstetricians and Gynecologists. We, the communications team, worked against this. It should be ‘ob-gyn.’ ”

Mel later added:
“To clarify, I haven't worked at ACOG in 5yrs & the comms staff has turned over twice, so not sure if they are adhering to that style anymore. But that's how the vast majority of ob-gyns said it & what we said as staff in the 8 yrs I was there. Also, could differ in UK & Canada.”
(via: https://twitter.com/MelEdits/status/1014966468130365442)