Links

Kitty explains the difference between disabled and aria-disabled:

[disabled and the aria-disabled attribute] are both meaningful attributes with their own pros and cons

(From: On disabled and aria-disabled attributes | Kitty Giraudel)

There's a lesson in here that applies more generally: ARIA attributes always merely set ‘accessibility semantics’, they don't have side effects like affecting discoverability. It also means when you use them and want behaviours associated with the attributes, you need to add those yourself. So if you add a button role, it won't behave like a button upon adding that attribute, you need to add click and keyboard handlers (and more) yourself.

The WebAIM Million 2024 report is out! More errors were detected, but also pages with fewer errors generally got better.

If this inspired you to go fix low hanging fruit in your projects, I previously wrote about ways to fix common accessibility issues, and a part 2 with more issues to fix. Making websites perfectly accessible can be hard, but reducing fruit that is both low-hanging and very common, is not.

If ChatGPT were integrated into the 9 billion searches done each day, the IEA says, the electricity demand would increase by 10 terawatt-hours a year — the amount consumed by about 1.5 million European Union residents.

(From: AI already uses as much energy as a small country. It’s only the beginning. - Vox)

This is from an interview with Sasha Luccioni, climate researcher at Hugging Face. In it, she explains what the power and water consumption of AI, specifically LLMs, looks like today. It's bad, the amount of energy required is enormous. One example in the post is that a query to an LLM cost almost 10 times as much energy as a query to a regular search engine. That's unsustainable, even if we manage to use 100% renewable energy and water that we really didn't need for anything else.

Once again, this begs the question if we really need all the AI applications companies are rushing into their products. It's often completely unnecessary.

It reminds me of eating animals. With all we know about animal welfare and climate impact, we've got to consider if (regularly) eating animals has benefits that outweigh those downsides.

Everyone can choose to do whatever they want with the information they have available to them. As a person or as a company. But if you're deciding for a company, the impact is larger, it's the decision times the amount of users. For me it's increasingly clear I don't want to use these “AI” solutions in personal workflows, suggest we might as well use them when I give talks, let alone push for integrating them into the products I work on.

Cory Dransfeldt explains that while we are developing technology that can generate and produce a larger amount of content, the real problem is the quality of that content:

I'm more and more concerned that we're heading to a place that will make it ever more difficult to find anything that's actually worth our time.

(From: We have a content quality problem, not a content quantity problem // Cory Dransfeldt)

The idea of including alt text for images as metadata into image files pops up every now and then.

Eric Bailey explains some of the many reasons why this isn't as good of an idea as it seems:

The largest thing to grapple with is that images are contextual. Choosing to select and share one is a highly intentional act, and oftentimes requires knowing the larger context of how it will be viewed.

(From: Thoughts on embedding alternative text metadata into images – Eric Bailey)

He explains describing images is a human to human thing, not a “problem” that just needs some tech thrown at it. Even if some of the tech can in some ways be helpful and powerful.

Touch screens and buttonless designs on devices have become the norm, not a definition of the ultra-modern any more. Which means, as a blind individual, that finding accessible household appliances has become increasingly challenging.

(From: Devising devices with accessibility in mind)

On Wednesday, Parliament approved the Artificial Intelligence Act that ensures safety and compliance with fundamental rights, while boosting innovation.

(…)

It aims to protect fundamental rights, democracy, the rule of law and environmental sustainability from high-risk AI, while boosting innovation and establishing Europe as a leader in the field. The regulation establishes obligations for AI based on its potential risks and level of impact.

(From: Artificial Intelligence Act: MEPs adopt landmark law | News | European Parliament)

The W3C established articificial intelligence is having a “systemic impact on the web” and looked at how standardisation, guidelines and interoperability can help manage that:

Machine Learning models support a new generation of AI systems. These models are often trained on a large amount of Web content, deployed at scale through web interfaces, and can be used to generate plausible content at unprecedented speed and cost.

Given the scope and scale of these intersections, this wave of AI systems is having potential systemic impact on the Web and some of the equilibriums on which its ecosystem had grown.

This document reviews these intersections through their ethical, societal and technical impacts and highlights a number of areas where standardization, guidelines and interoperability could help manage these changes

(From: AI & the Web: Understanding and managing the impact of Machine Learning models on the Web)

All of this leaves me wanting simpler businesses with simpler motives — I'll pay, you provide a product or service commensurate with the value. No opaque policies, no concerns about data. I'd love for you to be profitable and sustainable, without being obsessed with scale. I'd love you to build products for the customers, not the speculators, that have invested in you.

(From: Of course AI is extractive, everything is lately • Cory Dransfeldt)

Sean Voisen recommends to not stick to a particular technology:

Lose the label and become T-shaped. Stay curious. Keep learning. Go deep in a specific technology or framework or programming language, but develop breadth in adjacent technologies that will help inform your work and develop new perspectives.

(From: On being a ‹insert favorite technology here› “guy” | Sean Voisen)

Coincidentally, Jonathan Snook posted similar advice this week, in Shifting identifies.