The Best Of The Internets

We are building toilets with world-class plumbing that people can’t then sit on. And the people who know how to fix the toilets have no clue how to fit a toilet into our plumbing.

Ralph Nader is absolutely right:

“We need more engineers who embody the three principles of any profession – independence, scholarly pursuits, and commitment to public service. Those are the vital ethical pillars to helping engineers withstand the great pressures to place commercial priorities over their engineering integrity and limit harm to the public.”

Subtitles are yet another example of an accessibility feature that improves the experience of a much broader audience.

Personally, I started using closed captions when we came home with Oscar. It also me to watch movie & shows while he slept in my arms. Interestingly, I’ve always tuned in dialogue subtitles in video games.

From optimistically conceived origins and message statements about making the world a better place, too many websites and startups have become the leading edge of bias and trauma, especially for marginalized and at-risk groups.

This is an important read.

The DETOUR Act, introduced by Sens. Mark Warner and Deb Fischer, targets bad actors on the web. I need to read through it fully to get a sense of what covered and/or missing, but that this is happening is, I think, a good thing.

I’m incredibly excited that this feature is shipping in Chromium. It was one of my favorite IE features.

Note: I no longer use “native” in this context, but it remains in quoted material.

I am 100% in favor of social media platforms taking a proactive stance against online harassment, bullying, threats, and the like. Sadly, few are doing much (if anything about it).

Tech companies also need to make their content moderation training materials publicly available so anti-hate advocates and the public can make sure the trainings accurately reflect what we need to feel safe on these platforms. Recent leaks of moderation materials have shown these documents to be woefully inadequate – one leak of a Facebook manual featured passages lifted straight from Wikipedia. When asked for comment by one media outlet, Facebook directed it to the “community standards” document the company released to the public. A $500 billion company such as Facebook should have higher standards than a college freshman rushing to finish a term paper.

While this approach is total overkill for pretty much anything I build, if you have a lot of JavaScript, especially JavaScript that uses newer language features, you might consider taking an approach like this. IT ensures the broadest level of support for your app without penalizing more modern browsers by making them download polyfills and transpired code they don’t need.

Great work!

I recently asked a friend who happens to be blind if he’d share some sites that were built really well—sites that were beautifully accessible. You know what he said? “I don’t use the web. Everything is broken.”

Everything is broken. And it’s broken because we broke it.

We need to do better.

Dave has an excellent round-up of considerations when looking at your reliance on 3rd party scripts (or any 3rd party resources, for that matter). Most are hidden and all have a serious effect on download performance, UI responsiveness, and, ultimately, user experience.

The Web is an undependable place, so this shouldn’t be very surprising.