Notices by Mu-An (muan@mastodon.social)

I am surprised at the lack of international coverage on the political movements in #Taiwan right now, so I guess I will do my own reporting, and hopefully y’all can help spread awareness. Perhaps international coverage would put pressure on the congress.

These are self-organized citizens on the street every day gathering petitions to recall congress people that no longer respect the democratic process in Taiwan and are passing bills undermining the sovereignty.

Credit: https://www.instagram.com/wanghongwei2025gg

Who’s ready to get some 88×31 banners on their laptops? (Actually 51×18mm)

I started doing accessibility at GitHub when it had a flat structure (2013) and no one was telling me what to do. In my free time I will just browse the issue backlog and find things I could do. Eventually, I found that there are tons of accessibility issues that are just stale, and a lot of them were just like: this icon button isn’t labeled. I looked at them and thought oh that’s easy. I will fix it.

At one point I added so many aria-labels that AT users got mad that they’re getting misused.

Anyways I was very lucky. But an unsupported accessibility position is an extremely terrible place to be and I wish that fate on no one. But I also think it is near impossible to talk decision makers into thinking accessibility is important.
So the most healthy thing is to work with people who already care. And I will continue to criticize *industry leaders*, *programming rock stars*, and *design leaders* who happily take that title with little to no understanding of accessibility. The end.

@tink and @scottohara were two biggest positive influences for me when I was alone in the company doing accessibility without any resources. They gave me feedback without judgement. My manager even asked me to stop cause it wasn’t mine or anyone’s job. Until the MSFT acquisition. I was asked to rep GitHub Accessibility team (something I did voluntarily on top of my job) to triage the audit. I got to work with sinabraham and @jscholes and learned a lot more.

Yes that was me. I am very sorry. I had no idea what I was doing. But then I learned the error of my ways and tried to be better.

Then I pushed for tooltips to be aria-label based, cause nothing that has text in them should need a tooltip. They should be clear, or they need an aria-describedby. But obviously not everyone knows the intricacies, like I didn’t, and they were misused.

Anyways I made a lot of mistakes along the way and I am sorry but I tried and I hope that counted for something.

@sayrer I think Jekyll is the closest. Not just serving but also in the making (dependency management). I don't need to write Ruby to build a blog with Jekyll but I need to write JavaScript with Astro (to get collections in order to forloop them, for example).

I think gem authors also seem to be more careful with adding dependencies than JS module authors. Perhaps I am biased.

@sayrer yea I didn’t know what Astro is until you just mentioned it, so I went through the tutorial just now before replying. I was surprised ES syntax in front matter was featured over YAML, had to dig deeper to find that YAML is fine until you needed collections. To me Jekyll just works too… do you have a different opinion?

I heard tons of good things about 11ty too but a JS config file put me off, then having to set eleventy.addPassThroughCopy for static assets drove the knife through.

@sayrer That is true. This part of Jekyll has annoyed me but not so much. Thanks for the suggestion.

I saw my JavaScript dos and donts post making the rounds and people have criticisms. I do not want to engage because I am very fragile. YOU WIN.

I volunteer @slightlyoff (?) for you to argue with.

But anyways I added an addendum to address and clarify some criticism:

- this doesn't scale
- what is a dash
- what is the point

I don't mean to throw my CV around but I doubt most folks asking about scaling has had to serve as many users as GitHub had to. But you do you!

https://muan.co/posts/javascript

I will be against bluesky until they prioritize accessibility.

https://bsky.app/profile/muan.bsky.social/post/3k2jlp2f27y2r
https://bsky.app/profile/oedipusnj.bsky.social/post/3jz3goet7vw24

Using exclusively an inaccessible platform means you create inaccessible content 🤷🏻♀️.

From: @tink
https://w3c.social/@tink@w3c.social/113448625564473223

Oh my god shocking. From the company that told me they only hire the best therefore there’s no women on the engineering team then lowballed me only to double their offer after I negotiated. Who would have known!

of all the government sites I’ve audited in the past half of a year, the ones that have the best frontend (most accessible, most performant) are those built 20 years ago. But the devs are usually embarrassed that they haven’t kept up with “what’s new,” and I always put in extra effort to tell them “no no no, this is great. you want to look new? over lunch I’ll write 100 lines of CSS to make that happen. but this site is plain old HTML, and it is the best.”

“add some headings though.”