The Cottage

In case you’re confused, here’s some more detail:

What’s a screen reader? It’s a software used mainly by blind and visually impaired people. It reads the text on a screen aloud, so you don’t have to see it.

What’s gradient text? Gradient text is when people use the customization options on Tumblr to turn every letter in a word a different color. This option is currently not available to all users, so I can’t show you myself, but here are two screenshots I took:

[ID: The words “ghibli + spring” in a green to red gradient. /end ID]

[ID: The words “happy lesbian visibility day” in the colors of the lesbian pride flag. Red, orange, and pink. Next to that, it says “Derry Girls (2018-)” in regular black font. /end ID]

How is it inaccessible? Instead of reading the words or sentences normally, my screen reader spells everything letter by letter when it’s gradient text. This makes it very hard to understand.

Does this apply to all websites and screen readers? I’m not sure, but at the least it applies to Tumblr and my screen reader. I haven’t run into gradient text on other websites.

I really like gradient text. What should I do? I would suggest adding a plain text version after the gradient, like this: Example [Example]

By the way, this is not an attack on anyone! I used the two examples above not to shame anyone, but just to illustrate my point. I purposely only took a screenshot of the gradient part and not the rest of the post or username.

It’s fine if you didn’t know about this before. There is no shame in not knowing.

Basically, market research for japanese bakeries determined that a) they sell more breads and pastries the more different varieties they have, and b) japanese bakery customers prefer items which are not wrapped, because individually wrapped things give the impression of being like, preserved or something instead of fresh and good I guess? So the obvious solution is to sell as many different kinds of unwrapped breads and pastries as you can.

But! In actual practice, that’s a nightmare. No packaging means no barcodes to scan, so the cashier needs to know all like 200 different (often very similar) items by heart and add them up manually, which means training new employees is a slow and painful process and customer service in general suffers badly. And having a person handle all those un-packaged foodstuffs to count them or examine them, in addition to being slow and clumsy, is unsanitary as fuck.

So one bakery chain owner approached this computer guy in 2007 asking for a system to automate the checkout process. It took five years and the company barely survived a financial crisis in the middle, but long story short they developed a highly specialized AI that will look at the pile of bread a customer picked out and automatically identify everything, tally it up, and charge them correctly, while the live cashier is free to make small talk or help people out or whatever. The whole process is simple, fast, sanitary, and pleasant for customers and employees alike, and to an outsider it looks like fucking magical bullshit.

Obviously meant to use change in barometric pressure with altitude. But one student submitted the following:

There are several ways of doing this

1. On a sunny day, stand the barometer up in the sun, measure the length of its shadow relative to its height, then measure the length of the building’s shadow and calculate its height from that.

2. Go into the stairwell and climb the stairs to the top, marking off the length of the barometer on the wall, giving you the height of the building in “barometer units”.

3. Go onto the roof of the building and drop the barometer off the top and time how long it takes to hit the ground, then calculate the height using the well known formula of 32 ft./sec./sec.

It’s the Basic Ball!

A ball for the rest of the LGBT-cuties.