As a designer, if I'm going to use AI, I don't want it to do someone else's job that I'm not an expert at. I want it to help me do my job better. I want AI to help me explore more edge cases and make better decisions—not become an engineer AND not design for me. So I wrote a thing.

“In a vibe-coded world, building gets cheaper. Confidence doesn’t. We can make things real faster than before, but the cost of being wrong hasn’t fallen.” — @bm.wel.by Via @neillyneil.bsky.social’s weeknotes

Benito is a threat b/c he makes art so alluring and enjoyable you want to understand everything about it and then you end up learning about sugar and slavery and colonialism and the Taínos and Hawaii and then you probably have some thoughts of your own, and that's why art is powerful and dangerous

Using Mr. Rogers in a Super Bowl commercial for mortgages should result in prison time

My book, Accessibility For Everyone, is now free and online as a website. accessibilityforeveryone.site The book was first published by A Book Apart in 2017 but it holds up! It covers web accessibility for designers, developers, content folks, and really everyone who works in tech.

Listening to the @coloradosound.org Music 101 right now… they’re playing freedom songs and teaching us something along the way. You can tune in to it (and other radio) from scrobblerad.io @scrobblerad.io

@github.com Would love to know what your alt txt would be for the unicorn on your current status page, if you had added alt text.

@joshjameswuky.bsky.social @claywallace.bsky.social & @wuky.org I'm missing the longer hours of Rock & Roots during the day :\ I know you all had to do what you had to do.. but just sayin... I'm missing them. :)

We don’t need AI to “be creative” for us; we need a world in which there is time and space to wonder, joke and play with words. To fuck around with color and texture, to experiment with an intriguing sound, without the need to immediately convert process and artifact into engagement to stay solvent.

@scrobblerad.io is there a way to figure out the geo location of the United States radio stations?

I’ll be digesting this for awhile. In my context of design systems & accessibility, this is so true: “Shared awareness requires practice….and discipline to separate “what’s happening” from “what should we do.” Especially when “everyone else is left reacting to calls they were never read into.”

You know the baseball game is intense when I have to put my knitting down.

@adamsilverhq.bsky.social is always great at distilling down to the most important parts of digitizing forms. I would add another to his laws of form design: 1. Don't ask questions you don't need for the form—including information you might already have about a user. (Increases speed & accuracy)

Im listening to Brené Brown’s new book “Strong Ground”. She shares.. “Technology built on dysfunction is dysfunction, regardless of the genius of the code or the power of the algorithm". Oof. So much to unpack here in terms of AI, band-aiding legacy systems, power dynamics and more.

For nerds everywhere like me...

New project on the #rigidheddle loom. Kitchen towels, 3/2 cotton. Somedays… the simple rhythm of back and forth plain weave helps you get through the chaos #weaving

This is a fantastic read about how design systems are human systems, full of human problems & human fixes. I’ve suffered from the “First-solution inertia” problem they talk about. Design systems make it too easy to jump from no-fi to high-fi without thinking about the problem we’re trying g to solve

Upcoming nerd reading came in the mail today from @bookshop.org “Inclusive design for accessibility” by @dboudreau.bsky.social and others. And “Go back and fetch it: recovering early black music in the America’s for fiddle and banjo” by @rhiannongiddens.bsky.social

The truth matters. Chicago did not form a blockade of snow plows to keep ICE out of the city, despite social media reports. The city “deployed salt trucks to support public safety efforts related to a planned protest and the Taste of Chicago. This is a routine practice.”

When it comes to managing focus in #accessibility work, I feel like it should be treated like ARIA. The number one rule of "managing focus" is... don't. (Unless you absolutely have to—like when you build a single page application (which I'm starting to feel like you shouldn't build those either)).

Design is not accidental. It's full of choices. And the National Design Studio has made some choices. > "...it is digital design intended for the privileged few, one that actively excludes people who don’t conform to a specific, discriminatory definition of 'eligible.'" - @ethanmarcotte.com

Somebody somewhere Needs flowers tonight

Farthest I've been: N: Edmonton, AB Canada E: Blagovegrad, Bulgaria S: Kibungo, Rwanda W: Los Angeles, CA (Technically Rwanda is east of Bulgaria, but then I'd have Rwanda on my list twice)

Second project on the loom! #weaving

@wuky.org I am devastated about DeBraun Thomas' departure! Please extend my deep, deep gratitude for what he has brought to my ears and my heart over the last six years.

I helped with the technical review of this book! While it focuses on the technical nuts & bolts of setting up A/B tests, when paired with Human-Centered Design, it becomes a powerful way to gather meaningful data and see which features are working or need iteration. Check it out from @pragprog.com

The 988 suicide prevention hotline in Illinois will continue to provide mental health support services for LGBTQ+ youth despite federal funding cuts. In addition, IDHS is working to expand crisis counselor training specific to supporting LGBTQ+ youth. to.wttw.com/4kIuXVF

Do you have any tips & tricks on how to make Github markdown as #accessible as possible? We have complex ordered lists & VO is not able to accurately identify how many items are in the list. Sometimes VO is not recognizing it's a list at all. Also, anchor links don't move focus for screen readers.

The BBC did a podcast series on this. It was horrifying and captivating. It also helped remind me that my government tech work can have not just good impact on people but also be devastating.

Venting is normal.

Canadian #knitting and #accessibility friends in Quebec, check out the Twist workshop in Early August. There’s a specific workshop on teaching knitting to people with visual impairments!

#NoKingsDay in Palatine, IL

No additional commentary needed.

@brendan226.bsky.social good to hear you again at wintrust stadium @boomersbaseball.bsky.social

A data viz story for you today... you'll want to click through and see all the replies.

When forms go wrong. A woman faced deportation after submitting an online form instead of a paper one. The UK took nearly 6 months to inform her, but later reversed the decision. A reminder of how much impact simple mistakes can have when dealing with government services.

Went down a rabbit hole w/a coworker trying to figure out how to create #accessiblity instructions to write markdown. How can we do this when screen readers don't announce some special chars like parens & brackets. This article by @ericwbailey.website is helpful, but even there [ & ( aren't read

This was fantastic. Thanks to CBS for still making this concert possible despite the current political climate.

A reminder in dark times: kindness, mercy, decency, and respect towards the least of us enrages Trumpists. It burns them. It’s like a mirror that shows them how they fall short of humanity. Kindness and decency towards the people Trumpists hate is not just right; it torments Trumpists.

On the power of the imagination: “To me, imagination is key to morality. If you can’t imagine what it is to live in someone else’s head, then you’re more likely to hurt them.” –Michael Chabon (via Mary McCampbell, "Imagining Our Neighbors as Ourselves: How Art Shapes Empathy")

Something to mourn: that people thought it was ok to pay people with disabilities less than minimum wage. Something to celebrate: the people who thought we should pay people with disabilities equal pay, out numbered those who did not.

In a post-mortem mode. Here's a few factoids you probably didn't know about 18F and the cost-recovery biz model and the perils surrounding it: 18F wasn't allowed to direct reach out directly, agencies had to find us first. Every deal req. an inter-agency agreement which could take MONTHS to sign

A letter to the American People from a shuttered Agency, 18F: 18f.org

“If we remain unable to imagine a world where love can be recognized as a unifying principle that can lead us to seek and use power wisely, then we will remain wedded to a culture of domination that requires us to choose power over love.” - bell hooks

"The focus here is on *better government services* — the end goal is not the tech. Here the tech is a *vehicle* to delivering better services." This is why I work in civic tech.

One straightforward way of looking at the current era is that a majority of white Americans were willing to burn the country down around them rather than see people they’d kept on the margins welcomed into the center.

This made me chuckle this morning. It's a a great way to explain the "one thing per page" principle in form design. #ux #accessibility

I am just looking around today, feeling overwhelmed by the number of extraordinary people I know who have been working very hard for a very long time towards making this flying rock safer and more free for more people. I know these times are scary. They are. But we're not alone. You are not alone.

This is a very relevant read on the history of #accessibilty work and its impact in our modern context. “…everyone, including people with disabilities, should be able to access information and accomplish tasks via computer independently.“