Jules @afewbugs@librem.one

I have questions.

Saw this nice little piece drawn by @joan_de_art in the solarpunk subreddit and I honestly love the idea of little canals with fish, like in old Japanese villages. #solarpunk

Coprolite may not be my favourite fossil. But it's a solid number two.

Bezos donates $100M to charity the same week Amazon lays off 10,000 workers.

I’m sure that’s a total coincidence—not a calculated PR stunt to detract from worker exploitation the week before Thanksgiving while reporting a 14.7% increase in 2022 Q3 revenue of $127B.

Botanists from Ukraine asking for help to repair the damage done to the Institute of Botany NAS of Ukraine and the National Herbarium of Ukraine (KW) by russian missile strikes https://ukrbotj.co.ua/archive/79/5/339.

Ukrainian Botanical Society opened 2 special bank accounts for this (in EUR & USD, details below).

Source: https://www.facebook.com/anna.kuzemko/posts/10222323869433907

Need to mention that I know Prof. Dr. Anna Kuzemko personally for many years as well as many other Ukrainian botanists.

Excited to unveil our Warming Stripes on Exminster Primary School!
https://www.exminster-primary.devon.sch.uk/curriculum/eco-team

A great talking point for awareness in the local community

Please retweet and visit the link! The kids would love to see how much impact our stripes get!

Periodic reminder: Make fun of horrible people for what they do, not their body or their appearance. Many good, kind, and wonderful people exist who happen to share similar physical features with the horrible person you're mocking.

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! 😘

A typical European car is parked 92% of the time. It spends 1/5th of its driving time looking for parking. Its 5 seats only move 1.5 people. 86% of its fuel never reaches the wheels, & most of the energy that does, moves the car, not people.

I’m sure North American, Australasian, etc vehicles are similar.

Sound efficient to you?

HT @circulareconomy on Twitter. #carculture #cardependency #cars #evs #transportation #mobility #cities #energy #climatechange

They say “We can’t do that. We’re not #Amsterdam.” You respond “Amsterdam wasn’t always like that either,” showing before & after transformations illustrating that the cities we admire made CHOICES. And they’re still making choices TODAY. They make more tired excuses. You don’t accept them either. (1e van der Helststraat, 1978 & 2005) #Dutch #Cityplanning #urbanplanning #streets #urbandesign #cities #streetsforpeople

New blog post:

What Everyone Seems To Get Wrong About Mastodon (or what What Mastodon’t)

Posted: November 12, 2022

Let’s get this out of the way up front. Twitter is a massive corporation that recently sold for tens of billions of dollars. Mastodon (or, really, the Fediverse) is an adhoc collection of dozens of servers run on spare change and passion by hobbyists the world over.

https://ajroach42.com/what-everyone-seems-to-get-wrong-about-mastodon/

(originally posted at gemini://gem.ajroach42.com, reposted to the web with minor revisions.)

Yesterday, my local Mastodon admins called for people to donate voluntarily. So much money was pledged that today they posted a poll asking how many months of reserve funding they should keep on hand before donating the overage to charity.

Meanwhile, Elon's breaking Twitter because he desperately needs cash.