Garrett LeSage @garrett@mastodon.xyz

GNOME has a reputation of being the most accessible Linux desktop, so it's sort of sad how janky our accessibility actually is. While keyboard navigation is generally good, things like the screen reader don't work right, and there was entire cycle where zoom was broken.

For an example of the screen reader, some widgets don't properly read out what they're for or their labels. In Firefox it will only read the first line of any paragraph (and only the line, not a sentence), and in GNOME Web it doesn't read anything at all.

Using the screenreader for a bit has been an enlightening experience. I'm going to try to do better for my own apps, and any apps I have time to fix.

tired: inkjet cartridge
wired: printer juice box

Since I know the news that #Facebook planned to backdoor #WhatsApp got a fair bit of traction on Fedi (I think I shared some related links), it's worth pointing out this retraction from Bruce Schneier:

https://www.schneier.com/blog/archives/2019/08/more_on_backdoo.html

Of course, level-headed retractions never get as many boosts as prejudice-reinforcing security panics... but for those of you who care, there it is.

asimov's laws of robotics

On responsible vulnerability disclosure - https://people.gnome.org/~federico/blog/on-responsible-vulnerability-disclosure.html

@kde 💜

We should just call static websites 'micro pages', the industry would be all over that immediately.

the road is cloopsend

One of my favorite subtle changes that Firefox and Chrome made recently, and which I really appreciate, is making it so the backspace button doesn't go back anymore.

Can't tell you how many times I've been editing a piece of text, lost focus, pressed the backspace button, then the browser navigated back and I lost my work. Alt+left exists; I don't need the backspace for this.

This is too much to handle

IT DOESN’T NEED AMP. It’s entirely static, is as fast as or faster than AMP sites, and is served from a fast global CDN with aggressive caching.

I’m INCREDIBLY tired of Google abusing their position as the global search monopoly to push their tech on sites or fear being demoted.

I launched a new blog this week. It's stupidly fast, uses zero external JS or CSS resources, is responsive, and supports modern features many sites don’t like dark style support. But Google just emailed me saying they might deprioritize it on Google because it doesn’t use AMP.

heyo, code people friends! Just thought I'd let you know about this helpful testing resource I ran into a few years ago: https://github.com/minimaxir/big-list-of-naughty-strings

it's a long long list in various formats of bits of text that are liable to cause Problems when you use them as user input, from control characters to fancy unicode to things that look like rude words to simple script injections

Turns out, toxic masculinity is a threat to the environment... https://psmag.com/environment/how-gender-stereotypes-affect-pro-environment-behavior

utopian future in the 1980s: flying cars
utopian future in the 2020s: no cars

well isn't this next level bullshit

Person A: "What is speleology"
Person B: "The study of caves. Here's a wikipedia link if you want to learn more."
Person C: "Wikipedia isn't a reliable source@!@!!!!"

Me: I wish people would stop mistaking "don't use this as an academic source for citations in a paper" with "this is not a reliable source for getting an overview of what something is." For non-controversial topics, Wikipedia is rarely inaccurate, and controversial topics are typically flagged.