A government website rejected a strong, randomly generated password, requiring a manually selected one instead. The website’s password guidelines have since changed, but the author finds the situation ironic and concerning.

In the mid-1990s, a Unix administrator named Mason worked for a newspaper that started a dial-up ISP. He shared a prank email about “Internet Cleaning Day” with the ISP help desk manager, who believed it and planned to notify customers. Mason quickly clarified the joke, averting a potential customer service disaster.

A study assessed an LLM’s ability to generate accessible HTML code, revealing concerning shortcomings. The model demonstrated a superficial understanding of accessibility, often including unnecessary ARIA attributes and failing to address fundamental issues like form labelling and keyboard navigation. The findings underscore the need to improve training data to ensure AI-generated code adheres to accessibility best practices.

The text discusses the limitations of AI-generated code in terms of accessibility, highlighting issues like improper use of HTML elements, lack of error state management, and unnecessary JavaScript. It suggests that these limitations can be addressed by improving training data, fine-tuning models for accessibility, and integrating accessibility considerations into prompt engineering and IDE integrations. The author emphasizes the importance of prioritizing accessibility in AI-generated code to ensure a more inclusive web.

If you follow me on social media, one of the themes you’ll find I talk about fairly often related to accessibility is how text that isn’t shown visually needs to have better verificatio…

Stay sharp, and know the exits

Interac logo displayed in Toronto on August 23, 2023.

CBC News will provide live coverage of the Remembrance Day ceremony from Ottawa on Tuesday, including a moment of silence and the laying of a wreath by the Silver Cross Mother.

Meta’s smart glasses now feature a “quick connect” option, allowing users to create one-touch shortcuts for frequently used communication actions, reducing reliance on voice commands. This feature, similar to the Oakley Meta Vanguard’s “action button,” enables users to quickly message, call, or share media with a designated contact.

Fable’s new pay-per-project model provides quick feedback from disabled people using assistive technology. The service offers valuable insights into usability and accessibility, helping to improve the design and development process. The author received actionable feedback from seven participants, highlighting the importance of direct representation from disabled users.

Fable’s pay-per-project service provides valuable insights into how digital experiences work for disabled users. The service offers dedicated tools to communicate findings and improve accessibility. While the service is a gift, there are concerns about how organizations will interpret and act on the feedback, especially those without specialized training in inclusive user research.

On Monday, a notice went out that any Canadian who purchased Keurig pods, machines or brewing system sold in Canada from June 8, 2016 to now could be eligible for a payout in a settlement from a lawsuit claiming the company misrepresented the ability to recycle its pods.

: FOSS feud re-ignites with massive counter-claim

Back in the antediluvian times, when I was in college, people still used floppy disks to work on their papers. This was a pretty untenable arrangement, because floppy disks lost data all the time, and few students had the wherewithal to make multiple copies. Half my time spent working helldesk was breaking out Norton Diskutils to try and rescue people's term papers. To avoid this, the IT department offered network shares where students could store documents. The network share was backed up, tracked versions, and could be accessed from any computer on campus, including the VAX system (in fact, it was stored on the VAX).
I bring this up because we have known for quite some time that companies and governments need to store documents in centrally accessible locations so that you're not reliant on end users correctly managing their files. And if you are a national government, you have to make a choice: either you contract out to a private sector company, or you do it yourself.

Who, Me?: Four back-to-back weekends of work – and disastrously bad documentation – will do that do a techie

Timelinize unifies and organizes your digital life on your own computer.

I've written a number of little scripts over the years, many of which I use every day. Here's a little collection.

I use z-run for something like this.

On Call: Techie summoned at 02:00 AM to sort things out sent another 2 billion trying to fix it

It’s a start.

10 reasons why this would be great

An in-depth look at the currently trending Arch Linux configuration that is Omarchy.

Who, Me?: Oh … you mean we shouldn’t press that button?

Dear Third-Party API Support,

You're probably wondering how and why your authorization server has been getting hammered every single day for more than 4 years. It was me. It was us—the company I work for, I mean. Let me explain.

Who, Me?: Illicit colo cleanup seemed like a good way to get out of the house during Covid

Henrik spent too many hours, staring at the bug, trying to understand why the 3rd party service they were interacting with wasn't behaving the way he expected. Henrik would send updates, and then try and read back the results, and the changes didn't happen. Except sometimes they did. Reads would be inconsistent. It'd work fine for weeks, and then suddenly things would go off the rails, showing values that no one from Henrik's company had put in the database.
The vendor said, "This is a problem on your side, clearly." Henrik disagreed.

The lawyer who threw the shoe was reportedly suspended before the day was out.

On-device TTS model by Neuphonic. Contribute to neuphonic/neutts-air development by creating an account on GitHub.

Timbran - Building collaborative online environments

Not the “short and plain statement” Rule 8 requires, and also irritating.

Who, Me?: Big Blue turned the air blue

Target launches a first-of-its-kind accessible self-checkout experience, created with and for people with disabilities. Rolling out in stores now through early 2026.

Innovation, research and user insight are creating more inclusive ways to pay.

A multi-purpose messaging an social client (Mastodon for now) - G4p-Studios/Thrive

In this edition: “I’m an AG” fails to impress, some shady deals, another thing not to use AI for, and other stuff.

On Call: Contractor sneakily fired after pointing out odious ignorance

Text-Based Game Engine with IDE. Contribute to slate20/ScribeEngine development by creating an account on GitHub.

A customizable, WCAG-conformant cookie consent banner with GDPR, CCPA compliance. Latest version: 1.0.0, last published: 4 minutes ago. Start using @afixt/accessible-cookie-banner in your project by running npm i @afixt/accessible-cookie-banner. There are no other projects in the npm registry using @afixt/accessible-cookie-banner.

Why LLMs should not be integrated with screen readers

Who, Me?: Student thought she had the hang of this 'Linux' thing and its kooky CLI

Opinion: There's more than warm power supplies and wonky capacitors

On Call: Traceroute was also a mystery to this mountebank

This may be the only thing that Texas and Canada have in common.

Canadians with vision loss are adapting AI-powered glasses for daily life, finding freedom in the technology — and challenges in its risks.

Chops was a developer for Initrode. Early on a Monday, they were summoned to their manager Gary's office before the caffeine had even hit their brain.

Gary glowered up from his office chair as Chops entered. This wasn't looking good. "We need to talk about the latest commit for Taskmaster."