James Mullarkey @jamesmullarkey@w3c.social

Finn from Mojeek spoke on @jamesmullarkey new #WeDontStream podcast, all about Mojeek's story, being privacy by design & what it's like to challenge big tech in the field of search.

Also make sure to check in on who James chats to next as he "looks at the maverick renegades of the internet who are pushing back against big tech monopolies, surveillance capitalism and climate change".

https://www.jamesmullarkey.com/2020/06/building-the-worlds-alternative-search-engine-with-finn-brownbill/

@self I think it's gotten worse. HTML is used to make things pretty now, not to, oh I don't know, markup content like it was originally designed to do. And operating systems, like Linux and Android, with poor accessibility don't help either. Now, blind people usually prefer mobile apps and desktop clients because they feel *clean* compared to the sometimes very verbose, linear web, where keyboard commands are few and far in between, non-standard (look at Gmail then Twitter, or even Gmail compared to Google Voice.) And there are so many sites where headings could be used but aren't, and lists to facilitate things which can be skipped, like alternative language options for articles, replies to a comment, things like that. It's just poorly done, and even the "simple" layered approach of mobile apps are easier to use for us than the flat (to us) representation that is the web.

The HTML standard changing stuff probably doesn't help much either. And Javascript just means that if I want to use Emacs with Emacspeak to gather text formatting information that a dumb screen reader doesn't provide, I usually get told that Javascript needs to be enabled, on a mostly textual site. In fact, text is *all* that a blind person gets, besides other audio. So if image descriptions aren't provided, or if there's a presentation-style thing going on, like in a lot of Apple press releases, we need textual alternatives to the silent videos and images. So plain sites, like my blog which I recently moved to Hugo, are best. Simple, statically generated, no stupid freaking databases! and it's freaking clean! No heavy bull crap slowing down load times and not many images.

Oh and screen readers aren't magic, either. They're really quite dumb. They gather as much information as they can by the OS accessibility API's, which can be pretty good, like Windows, fairly okay, like Apple's, or pretty neglected, like Linux because no one wants to actually work on the core OS accessibility. Like I always say, accessibility starts with the OS.

#a11y

I'm sure many already know about Mozilla's hypocracies, but this is a nice compendium of transgressions:
https://digdeeper.neocities.org/ghost/mozilla.html

So use what? Crome? *barf* I think the problem goes deeper. We need a web that isn't so confounded to the point where no one, besides large corporations, can maintain a performant, usable and accessible web client. As long as it's this way we will continue to pay for the web with our privacy.