Yay Cloroform

The noble archelon.

A mixed-media (primarily watercolour) painting of an archelon swimming among fronds of kelp. The painting is rendered in soft and bright colours, with luminous golds and yellows standing out among green-blue and the turtle in darker gray-blue-black tones. The texture of the painting is a bit fuzzy.

Color version!

Available on Inprnt and in my Etsy shop!

"Once I was a man, like you. But the lake helped me, to become something else."

happy wavesday! 🐰🐱

if you've made replies on posts there is now a tab on your blog showing every post youve replied to and your reply.

if this is not what you want, either go to your blog and click comments and disable it from there or just go to your individual blogs setting pages. just change it from blue to grey if you dont want everyone to see your replies AND the post you're replying to

PLEASE BE ADVISED that it is set to disabled for blogs that have not made any replies but it will turn ON if you reply with that blog in the future.! i just tested it with my main, which was greyed out but it turned on the moment i left a test reply

so couple of clarifications. comments are disabled as default for primary blogs that have their likes disabled. they are seemingly enabled for all other blogs that have replied to posts

This one may unfortunately be a little bit above my pay grade. I don’t know too much about the technicalities of HTML or web coding.

What I can tell you is that most of those elements are announced when we land on one and that we often use shortcut keys to jump to useful elements. We can quickly jump between headings, links, buttons, combo boxes, and form controls. If these things are not marked up properly, it can interfere with our ability to navigate the Page efficiently.

One of the most common accessibility barriers we face is actually unlabeled buttons. This is especially prevalent in mobile apps. It is not uncommon for me to download a new trendy app, only to open it and find that every single button in it is completely unlabeled so all I hear everywhere I touch is “button.” As you can imagine, this can make even the most simple apps completely unusable. Buttons must have accurate labels, not just the visual appearance of one. If the visual image on the button says submit, then the actual label should also say submit. This can also be a problem sometimes with unlabeled links.

Similarly, headings that are not actually marked as headings are a common issue. This is most common in documents rather than proper webpages—often times someone will make a word document and they will make a fake heading by just changing the font size to 40 without actually choosing the heading style. When a heading isn’t actually properly marked as a heading, this means that to a screen reader, all of that text is body text so we cannot use the heading shortcut to skip to different sections with different headings. Jumping between headings is a major way that many of us navigate webpages and documents quickly and get a sense of what kinds of information are present without having to manually arrow through all of it. It’s one of the closest things we have to skimming.

For things like side bars, these are often considered regions which we can also jump to with a shortcut. Sometimes these are also not correctly labeled or marked which can make them a little bit harder for us to find or understand what we are looking at when we are manually tabbing through links on it. However, if by sidebar you meant the visual divider, we do not interact with that element.

Dividers in general are not meant to be interacted with by a screen reader because it just adds clutter. One common piece of accessibility advice given is actually deliberately not to describe purely decorative dividers, such as a swirly line between paragraphs, because it adds unnecessary elements for us to move through and adds no functional benefit to us.

More information can generally be found by looking up "ARIA Roles" (here's a link to the Mozilla developer page about it to get you started: WAI-ARIA Roles)

Those roles are basically additional attributes on an HTML element that a screenreader can look at to figure out what that element was labelled as. For a lot of common HTML tags, like h1, table, button, ..., those roles are derived from the HTML tag and implicitly set. But if non-standard HTML is used, the additional aria attributes are needed to set this information.

The aria specification also includes other attributes, like aria-live (telling the screenreader that this element contains information that updates live/without a site refresh) or aria-busy (telling the screenreader that this element is displaying something that indicates a progress is happening) and more based on the specific element. There are also aria attributes to indicate if something is expanded or selected for example.

This one may unfortunately be a little bit above my pay grade. I don’t know too much about the technicalities of HTML or web coding.

What I can tell you is that most of those elements are announced when we land on one and that we often use shortcut keys to jump to useful elements. We can quickly jump between headings, links, buttons, combo boxes, and form controls. If these things are not marked up properly, it can interfere with our ability to navigate the Page efficiently.

One of the most common accessibility barriers we face is actually unlabeled buttons. This is especially prevalent in mobile apps. It is not uncommon for me to download a new trendy app, only to open it and find that every single button in it is completely unlabeled so all I hear everywhere I touch is “button.” As you can imagine, this can make even the most simple apps completely unusable. Buttons must have accurate labels, not just the visual appearance of one. If the visual image on the button says submit, then the actual label should also say submit. This can also be a problem sometimes with unlabeled links.

Similarly, headings that are not actually marked as headings are a common issue. This is most common in documents rather than proper webpages—often times someone will make a word document and they will make a fake heading by just changing the font size to 40 without actually choosing the heading style. When a heading isn’t actually properly marked as a heading, this means that to a screen reader, all of that text is body text so we cannot use the heading shortcut to skip to different sections with different headings. Jumping between headings is a major way that many of us navigate webpages and documents quickly and get a sense of what kinds of information are present without having to manually arrow through all of it. It’s one of the closest things we have to skimming.

For things like side bars, these are often considered regions which we can also jump to with a shortcut. Sometimes these are also not correctly labeled or marked which can make them a little bit harder for us to find or understand what we are looking at when we are manually tabbing through links on it. However, if by sidebar you meant the visual divider, we do not interact with that element.

Dividers in general are not meant to be interacted with by a screen reader because it just adds clutter. One common piece of accessibility advice given is actually deliberately not to describe purely decorative dividers, such as a swirly line between paragraphs, because it adds unnecessary elements for us to move through and adds no functional benefit to us.

My second ever paper pieced quilt friend! Lots of learning and seam ripping during the making of him, but I'm so proud of him! The blue fabrics are vintage bed sheets I inherited from my grandma, and his antenna and feet are a really pretty velveteen gifted by a friend.