eggbug enthusiast

@aidan

former girlboss in chief

she/her
twitter.com/AerialShading

one quarter of @staff! i make the website look good and/or bad depending on your personal taste

here's my website

www.aidangrealish.com/

eggbug enthusiast @aidan12/6/2022, 10:44 PM

shoutouts to everyone gently enforcing good behavior here on cohost

Something i've noticed from being The De Facto Support Guy over the last forever is that relatively often, I go to process a report for "untagged adult content" and discover that it's already marked as adult because some helpful rando (complimentary) has kindly commented and asked the OP to mark that post as adult. I obviously try to process reports as soon as possible, but I've seen this happen literally within minutes of the OP hitting "post now", even!

we make reporting really easy here on cohost dot org, but i just wanted to commend everyone who takes the minute or so out of their Posting to help everyone else self-moderate. of course it makes my job easier while we work very hard to hire our Support Wizard (job title not final or official) but i did want to actively note the more important part- that this is the kind of community behavior that makes for a really nice website.

i sign most tickets and reports with this, but it's as true as ever:

thank you for making cohost a better place to Post and Interact

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in reply to @aidan's post:

Lapis the Nevrean @lapisnev12/6/2022, 10:52 PM

Related note, there is a user that has been replying to people's posts asking them to add alt text, which is fine, except they did it to my CSS Crime and I don't know how and they couldn't tell me. It would be great if there were official guidelines on how to guide a screen reader through CSS artwork and properly read a text description instead of whatever nonsense is inside the CSS Crime, because I couldn't quite get it working as intended despite trying my best, and I'm afraid that doing it wrong may be worse than not doing it.

mint @mintexists12/6/2022, 10:55 PM

could be worth looking at the method Markdown Plus uses for doing the alt text.

the alt text is put at the top in this which makes its contents invisible to a viewer but visible to a screen reader

<span style="position:absolute;height:1px;width:1px;overflow:hidden;clip:rect(1px, 1px, 1px, 1px);white-space: nowrap">this is a test</span>

and the content itself is put inside this span tag

<span aria-hidden="true"> this is a test </span>

The aria-hidden state indicates whether the element is exposed to an accessibility API.

https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/Accessibility/ARIA/Attributes/aria-hidden#description

Lapis the Nevrean @lapisnev12/6/2022, 11:04 PM

That's one of the ways I found while I was trying to figure it out on my own. I guess the real problem is that there isn't one right way that works the same for every screen reader...

I ended up putting my post in <figure> tags, using the magic CSS style on a <figcaption>, and then using aria-describedby= to link it to the figure. I should probably go back and add aria-hidden= to the CSS Crime's text.

Edit: Update: I fixed my CSS Crime! Adding aria-hidden= to ALL the text inside the crimepost (even the caption) finally convinced my phone's screen reader to select the figure surrounding the entire crime and read the description.

eggbug enthusiast @aidan12/6/2022, 11:09 PM

this is admittedly a blindspot for us that hasn't been appropriately addressed, so i empathize with both you and the alt text requester. because CSS Crimes weren't really part of the original Design Vision For Cohost, we don't have a framework for best practices related to CSS Crime alt text and it's led to a little bit of what might be best described as Accessibility Debt. what mint said here is v helpful in general, but yeah- CSSposting is in itself an Advanced Posting Technique and making crimeposts accessible is an opaque and often difficult process both for us to mandate and for OPs to act on. as i keep saying in various places, having a support lead (so, so, so soon) will let us actually spread this kind of work out and let me in particular actually do more in depth UX research/work.

signal eleven @widr12/9/2022, 6:54 PM

would it work to put like an aria label on the outer div describing the crime and leave it at that? i feel like it might

signal eleven @widr12/9/2022, 6:55 PM

trying is better than nothing and web technology in general, let alone web accessibility technology, is a fucking nightmare. no worries

Autumn in Winter @autumndidact12/6/2022, 10:53 PM

Oh, I've done that! Glad it helped! 💛

Ackart @Ackart12/6/2022, 11:09 PM

This is making me wonder how bad Twitter and other sites have broken my brain where this wasn’t even an option to consider, lest I wanna get yelled at for “backseat moderation” or a litany of other things

Here’s to the little things we can do to help make this a better online zone

Tavi @Tavi12/7/2022, 12:18 AM

Here's hoping for many years of a community this awesome to come! Seeing stuff like this on cohost has been making me remember the optimism I had as a kid in the 90's and early 2000's about the internet being a place full of cool people sharing knowledge, ideas and creativity. ❤️

Ecter B.@ecter12/7/2022, 7:24 AM

Oh my, that's why it's so nice in here! People spend time educating other users rather than just reporting.

That's nice. It's nice to see users that made mistakes are being approached by others as people in need of support rather than people to punish <3

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