forthwritten: stained glass spiral (Default)
forthwritten ([personal profile] forthwritten) wrote2009-04-23 12:26 am

thinking about accessibility

Meeting with supervisor today. I now feel a bit less confused about what I should be doing and a lot more guilty for not having done any corpus cleanup. Rather frustratingly, WS5 appears to have broken on my computer (shortcuts don't work, trying to open the .exe from c:\program files\wsmith5 doesn't work, opening Ctrl+R and trying to run it from there doesn't work) and MonoConc refused to recognise my .txt files as .txt files so I think I'll be working in the grad room tomorrow.
Found out that, as I'm volunteering as a helper at a conference, I don't have to pay the £300 fees. While working 8-6 is going to be hard work, not having to pay is pretty good. We also get fed and, if the last conference was anything to go by, supplied with truly impressive amounts of coffee.

Have more or less finished writing my FAQs - I could probably fiddle around with these forever but I'm handing them to the copy editing team for a fresh pair of eyes. Some of them aren't as extensive as LJ FAQs, but the whole point is that FAQs are for quick reference. I don't think a guide to HTML should be in FAQs, for example. Instead, Dreamwidth is going to include more extensive information in knowledge bases and have guides for more general questions to supplement the FAQs.
At the moment I'm mostly editing for visuospatial language, although I wrote the FAQs for dating out of order and polls this week. I find it interesting that I asked to change link text today, whereas I'm not sure if I would have noticed this was a problem even a few weeks ago.

I don't want to be a DW bore (I have sometimes been procrastinating on icerocket and even the posts by advocates are annoying when they're wrong or misleading) but I like the concrete things they think of to improve the site. I like that alternative site schemes were prioritised because the red username links in the default site scheme have different, distressing connotations in other cultures. I like that, when someone pointed out that the diversity statement could be read as excluding transpeople, one of the site owners responded in a non-confrontational way and it's being rewritten to explicitly welcome transpeople using their preferred terminology. I love what the accessibility team are doing.
I'm not fannish, I find it frustrating that Dreamwidth has been seized on as a fannish project when it's not, I find the hype and bitterness over invite codes hard to understand (people, it's in closed beta, this is the equivalent to sawdust everywhere and people in overalls banging on things and a crackly radio playing chart hits somewhere), and I think that level of hype is dangerous because it creates unrealistic expectations and with that, disappointment. Of course it's not going to shit glitter and rainbows and world peace. But I, personally, am glad that I've given it my time and contributed towards it.
delight: (relaxed in tiny empty spaces)

[personal profile] delight 2009-04-23 01:02 am (UTC)(link)
+5 thousand (or just +1 if you prefer) to the entire end of this post; I constantly want to correct people, the hype in either direction makes me nervous and the assumed connection to fandom bothers me a very great deal.

Also, your FAQs are very well done!
edderkopp: (Default)

[personal profile] edderkopp 2009-04-23 08:41 am (UTC)(link)
This. I wholeheartedly agree. I pressed comment meaning to say the very same thing @_@
zorkian: Icon full of binary ones and zeros in no pattern. (Default)

[personal profile] zorkian 2009-04-23 01:54 am (UTC)(link)
Dude, reading up on what the docs team is doing with accessibility and visuospatial language -- stuff I've never even thought about. It's pretty enlightening to learn about it and try to think about things with that in mind.
sara: S (Default)

[personal profile] sara 2009-04-23 02:51 am (UTC)(link)
Of course it's not going to shit glitter and rainbows and world peace.

But I'm getting a pony, right? I'm sure I saw that in the TOS somewhere....
sara: S (Default)

[personal profile] sara 2009-04-23 03:15 pm (UTC)(link)
Oh, I dunno about that. I've had two kids. I think a unicorn would blow me off at this point. And I've read C.J. Cherryh; those sparkly psychic ponies will fuck you up, man.

Maybe I just want an interoperable, domestically-owned, open source social networking service with an active development team and a basically comprehensible set of management policies. That would probably poop less than a pony and not expect me to ride it through snowstorms to fight evil.
ephemera: celtic knotwork style sitting fox (Default)

[personal profile] ephemera 2009-04-23 11:53 am (UTC)(link)
I *am* fannish and it bothers me that it's being co-opted as a fanish thing. I have been trying to balance out / correct some of the more egregious bits of miss-information that I've seen float past, but I've been stretched too thin this past couple of weeks to have been keeping up with developments, so I'm wary of being wrong myself ...
owl: Stylized barn owl (Default)

[personal profile] owl 2009-04-23 12:41 pm (UTC)(link)
this is the equivalent to sawdust everywhere and people in overalls banging on things and a crackly radio playing chart hits somewhere

I <3 this description. And of course it's the people who whined loudest about elitism that whine the harder about the bugs whenever they do get a code.