I’ve been working at reduced capacity for the last few weeks. Health Insurance is denying certain medications and supplies, and the repair to my wheelchair was botched at the beginning of November.Despite all that as an artist and accessibility hacker continues. Here is the latest on my projects
Poseidon 1.7.0
A new version of my Blue Proxy has already been deployed to the testing site, and will roll out to all mirrors, by Friday. This is a major feature upgrade , and the first version to include client side enhancements. By which i mean it loads javascript, and as this breaks one of the original design goals. I thought we’d talk about why.
Quite a pickle
I’ve always believed that “Accessibility” is more then just WCAG, or 508 compliance. After all those standards assume you have access to not only a device which supports a modern browser, and screen reading, or other specialized accessibility software.
I’ve written before in other spaces about how a whole industry has cropped up around these standards, and tools artificially inflating prices, in an effort to get the most money possible out of schools and other mediating institutions. The “Disability Industrial Complex” as others have called it. This leaves late diagnosed, or self diagnosed people in a lurch, even assuming they make it through the gauntlet to get an official diagnosis, and thus access to the mainstream “disability system”. The funding for technical accommodations often just doesn’t exist. Or worse the government will often place, the burden on private employers to acquire necessary technology
All of that assumes, you have a condition that is recognized, by the mainstream “disability system” and have a diagnosis or are willing to go through the process of getting one. One of the most avid users of my Blue proxy, has a phobia of “The Internet”. He only connects through public wifi, and only browses those sites he can view with Lynx. Which is a very small fraction indeed. He is as disabled as i am, but where is his support?
My work as a hacktivist has focused on these undeserved populations. In my experience serving this population requires throwing away the universal design/standards playbook, and writing the software to serve the needs of a community of users and a context. An Approach called “situated software”.
The Original Concept
The original idea behind blueproxy, was cooked up in a IRC chat about a year and a half ago. The idea was to replicate Firefox’s “Reader Mode” only render everything server side, and serve it in a stylized package appealing for print disabled readers. My friend with the phobia would see only the text.
So with four users myself included, a project was born. No Javascript, quickly became a design imperative because i couldn’t be sure of the browser support i could expect. Some of my original users wanted to bring in people who had devices which were still on Windows XP for example.
Small Success
BlueProxy was a success, as far as i was concerned. Then other people started finding it I could’ve easily rejected these people’s criticism, and suggestions. The Rude ones went straight to devnull. the one’s accusing me of using Accessibility as an excuse to support the Generative AI industry got.. *responses* that i’m not entirely proud of..
Granted there was a legitimate security issue there, but I’m not going to wade through someone’s toxicity. On the off chance they might have a point. The first time that someone was able to show me that AI crawlers were using Blue to get at things they shouldn’t be. I deployed the best fix i had, and I’m working on a better one.
Among the most frequent and polite comments i got were from people with dyslexia, who wanted certain features that would be quite trivial to implement with JS but hard to in the No Javascript ever mode. Even though these people weren’t in my direct community of care, I felt that because the project was semi public, and Christian Anarchist Morality would counsel in favor of doing the feature. I would do it in the least disruptive most “progressive enhancement” way i possibly could, and further that i would make the built in defaults on this feature somewhat aggressive..
TL:DR
That is how we got user controlled line height/spacing, and font sizing in blue 1.7
Also in this release Compatibility Mode works again, and will parse the input document in a rather brute force way that results in more of the page being render than with the Mozilla inspired semantic parsing stratagem.
The font sizing controls are hijacked on mozilla based browsers with extensions like NoSquint installed.
The only effect on users who browse javascript free is the addition of a few buttons at top of page
Some testing remains… I’m unconvinced that screwing with HTTP headers in the way i have won’t bite me in the arse. But assuming all goes well, this will end up going out to all mirrors, in a week or so
Love you all
