Links

Apple's ethos3 has always been about building tools to empower users to make art, to create, to be original. I don't know what is is, but it sure as hell isn't human creativity.

(From: roguelazer's website: oh, the humanity)

Rahim Abdi of Apple describes an effort to make it possible to test more web platform features for accessibility features:

what if we could regularly test the accessibility behavior of any and all web platform features on the latest browsers in an automated fashion? How much time and effort could this save?

(From: Improving Web Accessibility with Web Platform Tests | WebKit)

Neven Mrgan received an email:

my friend had a question to ask me, and the email asked it over the course of a few paragraphs. It then disclosed that, oh by the way, I used AI to write this

(From: How it feels to get an AI email from a friend)

In his post he talks about what it feels like to be on the receiving end of AI generated content, in this case one where you'd hope these tools aren't used: an email from a friend. Not for grammar checks, but for the actual message. It felt off:

It felt like getting a birthday card with only the prewritten message inside, and no added well-wishes from the wisher’s own pen.

Firefox experiments with automatic text alternative text generation, using a local and therefore privacy-preserving (?) machine learning model:

Until recently it’s not been feasible for the browser to infer reasonably high quality alt text for images, without sending potentially sensitive data to a remote server. However, latest developments in AI have enabled this type of image analysis to happen efficiently, even on a CPU.

We are adding a feature within the PDF editor in Firefox Nightly to validate this approach. As we develop it further and learn from the deployment, our goal is to offer it for users who’d like to use it when browsing to help them better understand images which would otherwise be inaccessible.

(From: Experimenting with local alt text generation in Firefox Nightly - Mozilla Hacks - the Web developer blog)

This is good to see as so many websites lack text alternatives and this may be the first of its kind made by a company that didn't take part in large scale user privacy violations.

CSS can lay things out for you automatically, which is cool but could mean reading order and visual order end up not matching. Luckily, Rachel and others at the CSS Working Group are working on a solution, that lets developers choose which order makes most sense:

There’s a proposal however that aims to deal with this, that would let developers indicate to the browser that they want to follow the “visual” flow of items rather than source order. This is currently named reading-order-items, and I recently added a draft of the proposal to the CSS Display Level 4 editor’s draft. The specification deals with reordering both in an automatic sense, but also the reordering you might want to do when placing items on the grid.

(From: Masonry and reading order – Rachel Andrew)

Jeremy noticed that an Instagram
notification said:

we’ll now rely on the legal basis called legitimate interests for using your information to develop and improve AI

(From: Adactio: Journal—InstAI)

That's not by any means reasonably what the word legitimate means, is it?

It's unfortunate many interesting people and businesses can mostly or only be followed on Instagram, as that's pretty much why I still keep an account. This feels like the social media equivalent of being kept hostage.

Rachel Smith on makers vs idea guys:

Generative AI is like the ultimate idea guy’s idea! Imagine… if all they needed to create a business, software or art was their great idea, and a computer. No need to engage (or pay) any of those annoying makers who keep talking about limitations, scope, standards, artistic integrity etc. etc.

(From: Generative AI is for the idea guys)

Building a component library is a challenging and rewarding experience, but there’s more to it than writing great-looking components. At every step of the journey, you’ll need to make choices to ensure your library is built appropriately for its intended audience.

(From: andrico1234/the-dilemmas-youll-face: The Dilemmas You'll Face When Creating Your First Component Library)

Currently, the Baseline support information does not include whether the feature is supported accessibly:

If you need to understand whether browsers support accessibility features as your own base level set of requirements, for legal or other compliance reasons, then Web Platform Baseline does not represent a baseline.

(From: Baseline Does Not Really Cover Baseline Support — Adrian Roselli)

I support Adrian's call for this to change. We should't assume features to be supported, if there are known accessibility issues in specific browsers or assistive technologies. I previously noted I feel Interop should include accessibility (and there is a separate Interop project for accessibility now, nice). I hope Baseline can meaningfully implement updates to make accessibility support more clear. A disclaimer, as Adrian suggested seems a good first step.

What would that it mean to deem a feature supported accessibly? WCAG's accessibility supported definition is a good start, but the W3C or Accessibility Guidelines Working Group (that makes WCAG) don't say exactly which browsers or assistive technologies a feature needs to work. For users of assistive technologies, ‘it works’ depends both their choice of assistive technology and the browser they use it with. But even if there's no clear cut answer to ‘which browsers or AT’, even the information that there are known bugs and where would tremendously help web developers decide whether to use a feature or not.

Just in time for #GAAD, and in the week where we saw OpenAI share a video of a new feature that integrates the GPT-4o model with BeMyEyes to assist blind people, I want to share the definition of “inspiration porn”:

Inspiration porn is the portrayal of people with disabilities (…) as being inspirational to able-bodied people (…), on the basis of their life circumstances.

(From: Inspiration porn - Wikipedia)

The demo itself was impressive, but I couldn't not notice that OpenAI shared it without captions. It could be that they just forgot. But they clearly didn't forget to upload record, edit, upload and promote the video, so accessibility must have been lower or no priority. And that's likely to be a systemic issue, a bit like some of the other announcement videos that portray assistants as somewhat flirty women.

The term “inspiration porn” has been used in various places, I found the concept particularly well explained in “Against Technoableism” by Ashley Shew and “Handicap” by Anaïs Van Ertvelde. I believe it was originally coined by comedian and journalist Stella Young, see also her TED Talk.