Matt McLeod @[email protected]

@slvn I have no problem with Firefox on Windows 10, more problems with Chrome.

Might be something weird going on related to the translations? Would not be surprised if most of the core FF people are running on US English.

(Also, good idea to look at browser addons if you have any installed.)

Even more glad than usual that I didn't end up going into the APS. I like regional Australia but a forced relocation is unreasonable.

Good use for my old Android phone that hasn't seen an update in a year: Spotify-to-Chromecast Audio player.

A really good piece by @senthorun on gender theory, Safe Schools, and so on: http://www.smh.com.au/lifestyle/news-and-views/opinion/why-gender-theory-deserves-a-place-on-the-school-curriculum-20161212-gt9mhx.html

Our possums are cute and basically harmless -- I mean sure, if you mess with them they'll fight back, but that's true of any wildlife. You'll hear them at night but not really see them much.

http://www.bobinoz.com/blog/4013/possums-and-opossums-australia-and-america-all-explained/

Today I finally looked for a photo of what Americans call a "possum".

Holy shit are those things scary-looking! Nothing like our cuties.

Phew! Glad I had the lid on my week-old laptop down when I knocked a glass of water over it!

@[email protected] Plenty of folks over there using it to be weird or have fun.

But yes, this does have a different feel at the moment. Less insular -- Twitter has devolved into cliques in a way that I don't *think* this has quite yet.

OTOH Twitter has scale that is very useful to some. I don't think one has to die for the other to meet its goals.

Pretty happy with @FreedomeVPN so far. Always-on does chew on the battery a bit on iPhone, but better safe than sorry eh?

While shitpost.club is a cool URL, someone should convince the owner of shitpo.st to run up an instance.

And yes this reflects my meatspace world more than the bird site does: I live in a very multicultural city, and it is super-common to hear Chinese languages, Vietnamese, Arabic, Hindi, Pashtun, and a variety of other languages.

I don't understand any of those either, but it keeps me grounded, keeps me clear that the world is not all just white English-speakers.

A thing I am really liking about #Mastodon so far is that it hasn't yet collapsed into very isolated language groups.

For example, here I routinely see at least English and French, and have started seeing a bit of Japanese around too.

On the bird site all I see is English, with the occasional Japanese retweet because I have a friend who works translating Japanese games to English so she sometimes retweets Japanese people about those.

I understand almost no French but it is still good to see.

@PetitFayot Happy to help! I'm going to go have dinner now (it's 7PM over here) but feel free to ask anything and I'll get back to you.

@PetitFayot Or here's a SharePoint site (of all things) done by one of our clients, which was a runner-up for a similar award: http://www.melbourne.vic.gov.au/Pages/home.aspx

Oh, another thing to watch out for: choices of colours! Need to make sure that colour contrast is good. WebAIM also have a checker for that: http://webaim.org/resources/contrastchecker/

We sometimes end up having arguments about colour because the marketing people chose brand colours that don't comply...

@PetitFayot If those were the only accessible sites then I would be terrible at my job. :)

It can be hard though, a lot of web dev is taking existing tools and putting them together to make something new. And a *lot* of the existing tools are not accessible. So you end up having to be very careful about for example which carousel library you use.

Here's a WordPress site I worked on that won an award for accessibility: http://www.rootedinrights.org/

@PetitFayot Also worth trying to use NVDA (http://nvaccess.org/) to test with a screen reader. WebAIM have a really good introduction article on how to use it for testing here: http://webaim.org/articles/nvda/

@PetitFayot Mostly though it comes down to "no surprises" and "if the information is conveyed using something other than text, include a text version too". Make sure you can operate the site entirely with the keyboard, code using proper buttons, links, headings, and so on.

After a while I found it harder to do inaccessible work than accessible work! :)

@PetitFayot You have to start somewhere I guess. I've worked with disability groups that don't have accessible sites -- problem is that it can take specialist knowledge, which can be expensive, and it is almost never factored into budgets anyway.

@PetitFayot A good place to start would be WAVE: http://wave.webaim.org/. That will do a basic assessment for you, point out some of the problems.

Anything using Google Maps can be tricky, you have to convey the info in the map some other way as well.

If you use Chrome for dev work then Google have a nice Developer Tools addon: https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/accessibility-developer-t/fpkknkljclfencbdbgkenhalefipecmb

@PetitFayot My employer published a bunch of fact-sheets which you may find helpful: http://www.accessibilityoz.com/factsheets/

But if you have something specific you'd like to know, ask away!