seedyh @seedyh@social.cleverlibre.org

Well, I realized one of my retirement ambitions this morning as I listened to the traffic report on the radio, looked out at all the snow, and went back to bed.

If you visit one new website today, make it

https://floor796.com/

😂 it's like Hieronymus Bosch, the animated, isometric, indie comix space remix

A fun game to play is to put on your dressing gown and slippers, run out into the street, grab passers-by and ask them in befuddlement "WHAT YEAR IS THIS?!".

A eastern tiger swallowtail sipping on some red clover in the Catskills this past June.
#swallowtail #butterfly #insect #hiking #wildlife #photography #catskills

OK #Mastodon. I've seen several toots on #accessibility for #screenreader users, however, I've not seen one from a screenreader user (as far as I know). I've used ZoomText, Outspoken, JAWS (AKA JFW), Supernova, NVDA (Windows), and VoiceOver (both on Macs and iPhone). I don't have experience with Windows Narrator or TalkBack. I would like to rectify and clarify a few small things.
First off, any awareness of accessibility issues, and endeavours to make things more accessible is great. Keep going!
But…
Blind/low-vision people have been using the internet as long as everyone else. We had to become used to the way people share things, and find workarounds or tell developers what we needed; this latter one has been the main drive to get us here and now. Over the past decade, screen readers have improved dramatically, including more tools, languages, and customisability. However, the basics were already firmly in place around 2000. Sadly, screen readers cost a lot of money at that time. Now, many are free; truly the biggest triumph for accessibility IMHO.
So, what you can do to help screen readers help their users is three simple things.
1. Write well: use punctuation, and avoid things like random capitalisation or * halfway through words.
2. Image description: screen readers with image recognition built-in will only provide a very short description, like: a plant, a painting, a person wearing a hat, etc. It can also deal with text included in the image, as long as the text isn't too creatively presented. So, by all means, go absolutely nuts with detail.
3. Hashtags: this is the most commonly boosted topic I've seen here, so #ThisIsWhatAnAccessibleHashtagLooksLike. The capitalisation ensures it's read correctly, and for some long hashtags without caps, I've known screen readers to give up and just start spelling the whole damn thing out, which is slow and painful.
That's really all. Thanks for reading! 😘

John Fetterman looks like me whenever a parent says:
"Here's the thing about vaccines"

The fact that far too many people cannot recognize fascism unless it looks exactly like Nazi Germany is very dangerous.

Refraction. When light is bent from an otherwise straight line while passing through a medium. You've seen this in everyday objects like a glass of water or a prism. The sunset hangs in the sky a little longer because of this.

Saturn's atmosphere, true to the physics, has been observed to cause the appearance of it bending the rings as they pass behind it. You are seeing Saturn's upper atmosphere in action!

NASA/JPL-Caltech/SSI/CICLOPS/Kevin M. Gill

#Saturn #Cassini #Space #Science #Astrodon

I didn't follow the FTX disaster, Today in Tabs has a good and humorous summary
https://www.todayintabs.com/p/magic-bean-dad

Unfollow that account you hate. Stop reading that book you think is meh. Close all those tabs.

Life is simply too short.

An animation I made ~10 years ago: Every point of light is a galaxy in our local universe

#Space #Science #Astrodon #Astronomy

@tlsmith63 @mcneely I was actually suspecting this. Mastodon is the most GenX thing I've seen since the 90s.

Click to embiggen.

Forbes really knocks it out of the park with their business prowess

My son pulled my license out today and said, "Papa, is this you? You look so young!"

That photo was taken last year 😅

My youngest (9) did some good work at school so he was given the reward of being able to pick a song to play in class.

He chose Rick Astley - Never Gonna Give You Up.

He came home today so pleased with himself that he'd managed to #RickRoll the entire class and teacher.

quit saving shit for a special occasion
being alive is a special occasion