Zarobi

I always used to quietly rebel against my boss when I did web development work. I’d spend the time making the pages actually accessible to screen readers and tab navigation and such. Even fixing my coworkers’ code to be compliant.

I always thought it was a fun minigame, and it didn’t even take that long. Little things like, icon buttons also need a text label, tabbing needs to follow a logical layout, shortcuts to jump to different parts of the page, actual tables and description lists.

I used to get in a lot of trouble for “wasting time” because “no blind people are using our software.” Years later an audit happens and my boss is shitting himself. We get a passing grade for accessibility. I never got any recognition for it, but he stopped yelling at me for wasting time after that and just let me do my thing.

I think at the time, nobody realised how valuable a written transcript of 14 years of verified human conversations would become. “It’s just internet comments.” But it grew into so many people with unique problems and solution and discussions. Sometimes I imagine if we could somehow read and search that many people’s conversations from 1000 years ago

That sounds nice. Wish we had an ADA, wouldn’t even need to change the acronym lol

In my experience, those laws aren’t followed much in reality. The biggest sites, sure, but most smaller sites are a mess under the hood. As long as something is “technically usable”, even if very awkward and annoying, it’s often hard to sue or anything like that. Maybe it’s different in other countries though, I live in Australia.

Next time you use a website, try only using your keyboard to navigate it and accomplish your task, and you’ll see what I mean. It’s a rough test of how much they value accessibility. For example, many websites disable the border around what you’re highlighting, so you have no idea what the tab button is about to click. Or popup windows don’t actually change your tab selection, so you have to tab through literally the entire page in the background to get to the popup window. Stuff like that; technically usable but annoying as hell.

Yeah, if you care about screen reader users, functionally it’s just “Anubis but worse”. Unfortunately, most people don’t care, so for them and all visual users, it has the benefit of no additional “load time” computational check — the page appears instantly without the Anubis step. Though I’m not sure how long it takes the page to do the de-scrambling.

The primary purpose of this project is to mutilate your HTML so bots can’t scrape it, rather than preventing bot traffic in the first place. The screen reader stuff is a bolt-on.

Per the GitHub:

Accessibility layer: <Shield> hides protected regions from assistive tech and ships an a11y prop that renders a real alternative beside them — mode: “text” puts your words in the page encrypted behind a time-lock puzzle the reader’s browser opens (no link for a scraper to follow, no artifact for you to host), or mode: “audio” points at a recording you make. What remains: NVDA and JAWS verification (VoiceOver is done by hand, Windows is not), the focus indicator a sighted keyboard user loses to an invisible control, and the non-React tiers shipping none of it.

In summary, they have two ways to get around this.

• By default, blind people are fucked as usual. Most everything is unusable via screen reader just due to the way modern websites are designed.
• Audio mode pre-records an audio file of your text, and plays that, bypassing the screen reader. This is extremely horrible UX for screen readers, for anything more complicated than a wall of text, but at least it’s something.
• Text mode will do some sort of computational challenge, using CPU on the blind person’s machine for a few seconds, then revealing the original unmolested text. Assuming this works properly, because screen readers are extremely fragile beasts.

There’s an alternate reality where Google was good. They improve the world and push humanity forwards with creative and helpful technology. Instead, we get Gemini

That’s a bit misleading.

A bunch of links in an unlisted share directory were indexed and crawled by Google. A Reddit user found them via Google Dorking, and discovered private conversations they shouldn’t have had access to. It’s not clear how Google discovered these links. To prevent this, Anthropic should have added a “no index” flag to this directory, which they have fixed now.

Yeah it’s really bad situation right now, but the reality is nobody is willing to actually decide what to do about it. Lawmakers and courts are still struggling with how the internet works, let alone A.I.

Honestly I barely look at the car time. I usually use Apple drive or Android Auto

I’m not obligated to answer

It gets down to 4°C sometimes where I live, so not that harsh comparatively. I’ve experienced -5°C when traveling and it’s a whole different thing, my Australian ass was not equipped for that environment lol. Let alone -20, I’d probably just die. But above 0 it feels like good pants are probably good enough.

Honestly the bigger problem here is the opposite; on a 40°C day the seats and steering wheel become lava. I keep gloves in the car just to not burn myself in summer. I wouldn’t mind “cooled” seats and steering wheel instead of heated, but that sounds harder to pull off somehow.

It’s not the first tone deaf car feature sold in Australia, though. The worst are the holes in the ceiling to let the sun in. Free skin cancer for everyone!

I think we found the service that’s responsible for astroturfing Reddit with thousands of memes / ads per day. The real question being asked is, is it breach of copyright to use an artist’s work for commercial uses? Probably yes. If it were a human doing it.

A.I. makes things complicated though, because it’s almost entirely created by plagiarised work in the first place, so that can of worms remains mostly sealed.

Good thing wildlife are known for their terrible hearing

If you know someone’s rough location, you can narrow it down a lot more if you know their car details. Especially if you get right down to exact make model year and colour. How many of your neighbours drive the exact same car as you?

I remove my own default upvote from my comments because I’m a weirdo. Maybe that contributes? People see it’s already at 0 votes and join in?

Edit: in my client I can see both up and down votes separately. So in this case it’s a controversial post with currently equal up and down votes

Yeah it seems strange to me, but it must be popular for some people.

People here often assume I’m being disingenuous or acting in bad faith, I’m not sure what causes that to happen though. Maybe it’s the way I type?

I don’t want to dox myself, sorry

Wow a whole app just for your car? That’s pretty fancy. I don’t see the appeal personally, but going by the vote ratio I must be in the minority. I like my stuff to be simple

As a side note, heated seats suck, I don’t get the appeal. It makes me feel like I’m wetting myself.