Yet another reason why I’ve never donated to mozilla. I genuinely think they are determined to screw their browser and company up. Firefox 142 offers AI summaries of links
It is my forever belief that all the people that hate email have zero clue on how to use email. For instance, for me? I stopped subscribing to newsletters and moved everything to RSS feeds.
I now use email strictly for communication. I move things into folders based on what kind of email it is. if I wanna keep something in the message, I copy it to a plain text file, with a note at the top when I got the email, who the sender was, and more. I copy full signatures when I want to save an email to a text file because then I'll never have to remember contact information again.
Lastly, I stopped reading email in HTML view. It's all plain text for me. No crap tables anymore, no nothing.
I made email great again!
#Email #PlainText
I was reading #AI output because people can’t help themselves I guess, and I suddenly thought Jesus fuck, this sounds like a man. And then, it hit me. Every large language model I’ve encountered sounded like a cis hetero man on the internet.
Maybe I don't quite hate it all, but I do hate talking with managers, marketing people, people not in web development about accessibility issues on websites because, usually, the conversations always go something like this.
Me. This complaint checks out. You need to do this and that and this to make it accessible.
Manager. But why isn't our accessible AI tool working?
Me. Because AI doesn’t understand your website and it won’t work anyway if someone is on a shit connection and the javascript won’t load.
Marketer. But then maybe the person needs to upgrade their internet.
Manager. Maybe the screen reader’s broken. Have they added AI to screen readers yet? That will fix everything. why doesn’t NVDA have AI yet? If NVDA had AI, we wouldn't need to worry about this.
Marketer. Did you try tabbing? I noticed you weren't tabbing at all, did you try that?
Me, internally. That's fucking it! You all deserve to be sued.
Today was the first day I thought about turning to the accessibility dark side and actually just becoming a plaintif in all these ADA lawsuits, because this level of, our website isn't the problem, when it clearly is, is getting on my last fucking nerves.
It's always managers and marketing people that are the first to ask, well, why doesn’t JAWS have AI yet? Why doesn’t NVDA just compensate for our shit web design?
Oh don't get me wrong, developers and I have had our share of, why do I need to use HTML? That's so 1980! Battles. You know, HTML can label a button, you don't need to use ARIA for that. Developer. But ARIA is richer! HTML is boomer technology!
Me, screaming internally. I hate you all!
But I'm getting more and more of these kinds of clients and so, like, I can fully understand why you'd join these law firms as a plaintiff and just going to town with demand letters and such, because this shit is maddening!
The best accessibility conversations I've had have been with developers. Not all the time, but more than not, they get it more than the dipshits in marketing and management.
My other alternative is I think everyone in marketing needs to take a mandatory web development class, and pass, and have a certificate.
#Accessibility #Rant #A11y
