jack

It's December Days time again. This year, I have decided that I'm going to talk about skills and applications thereof, if for no other reason than because I am prone to both the fixed mindset and the downplaying of any skills that I might have obtained as not "real" skills because they do not fit some form of ideal.

11: Geocities

I made my first website on Geocities, and that probably tells you more than you wanted to know about how old I am.

The concept of Geocities was pretty genius, though. Less so the conceptualization of Geocities as divided into various neighborhoods, loosely based on what the person signing up for Geocities might make their website about, as it turns out that we didn't really need to map physical space onto virtual space. But the idea, basically, of offering someone a few megabytes of space to build whatever they wanted to, so long as they could provide the code (and so long as they ran Geocities' ads on all of their pages, because ad revenue is still the way that a lot of places think is the best way to get money - that, or venture capital.) There was no need for buying your own domain, or for learning how to administer a Linux system, or any of the other highly technical obstacles that would prevent most people from showing their own pages to the world. This was before blog software replaced the idea of having a personal page, and before content management software replaced them both. And so, people went off in every direction they could, bounded only by the restrictions on what the code could do and what things were permitted by the host. Things past what the sandbox of Geocities provided would be the kind of thing that you would get your own domain and hosting for, and therefore you'd learn all those things you weren't learning immediately by using Geocities.

The Web was not quite corporatized, and was not quite in the place where slick Javascript and CSS were considered standard parts of the Web experience. What you received, essentially, was an entire hodgepodge of material, based on how much the person creating the page wanted to learn the coding and how much the person making the page just wanted to get the content out. It was a time of great personality in pages, even if it also sometimes meant choices from the CGA era for text or backgrounds, or that you had to work with someone who didn't believe much in the paragraph tag, or the idea that a web page was designed for a specific resolution and wouldn't look right on any other resolution. Or that it was meant specifically for one browser over another, because it used tags that the one would recognize and others would not. It was a time of guestbooks and webrings and, I strongly suspect, an awful lot of fic archives. If I had been the kind of person who wrote and put their fic online at the time, it might very well have been a windfall to have 100MB of space to put all of my formatted HTML onto so that my epics would be readable, and possibly, I might collect the fic of others, too. It is also the era where search engines actually crawl and search, rather than some other purpose, and they would obey the instructions given to them in files like robots.txt. Discovery was still tough, of course, but people found ways of doing it all the same, through hypertext.

At that time, though, I used the space I had on Geocities as a sandbox to learn all kinds of things about HTML, and how to make links, and show images, and make images into links. I may have picked up a little CSS along the way, so as to make things more easy to control globally, and as well as to do things like use image files as my background for the page. Mostly, it was there as a personal page, constructed haphazardly, with plenty of animated GIFs, pictures from the Internet, and links to other places that I thought were interesting. A professional web designer's nightmare, in a phrase. But mostly it was articulating to myself what I wanted to do, and then looking on the Internet to see if someone else had done it, or if there was a keyword to zero in on, then consulting a reference work to find the appropriate tags and the appropriate place to put them, and then tweaking it until the rendered page actually looked and functioned the way I wanted it to. As I learned more, I put more of that learning into the pages that were there, sometimes adding new things, but often, refining what was there so that it was more specification-compliant and easier to handle later on. Even on the site that I have been neglectful of maintaining that holds my professional CV and as much of the presentation slides and commentary as I have stuffed into it, most of what I'm doing there is following my own template after having figured out the thing I wanted to do. At this point, I believe I've reintroduced frames to the site, because I don't want to have to recode the entire navigation into each page. It's likely the best solution I have for navigation involves Javascript in some way, but I am also the kind of person who wants their site to function properly without Javascript, and therefore I would have to learn how to encode a proper fallback from it.

This approach, "figure out what I want to do, then consult the reference works to figure out how it's done, then see if it actually does what I want, then refine it until it does" is probably much, much close to the actual process of people who code for a profession or a major hobby do, rather than the idea that I might have in my head of someone who, when presented with a programming problem, simply magicks the thing up out of the ether in a flurry of code and it works. (Well, hopefuly there's a test suite in there, too, but…) In the same way that I have a persistent belief that "real cooking" is not "following recipe" but instead "making delicious dishes from a basket of ingredients and your own knowledge", I have bought into some of the belief that "real coding" does not involve following recipe or template, unless you've developed the template yourself, too. That particular belief always gets mugged every time I start trying to get Home Assistant to do something new, or I decide that automation is the best way to do text string manipulation, because I can see how to do it in an automated manner, or when I need to push a change to a great number of records in a work system so that nobody has to do it by hand. (I tested that one on small batches first, because nobody wants to intentionally wreck production.) Or when I'm making changes to my professional website pages. Or the project that I built in one of my graduate school classes to pass a foundations course. The UI was terrible, but UI wasn't something I needed to think too hard about over functionality, and it was something I built for me (as well as an assignment).

For as much as I think of myself as a user, rather than a coder, if you start asking me what I mean by that, or start pushing on my self-imposed boundaries about where "real coding" starts and stops, you'll find all kinds of interesting treasures surface up as I start telling stories or start trying to justify how this thing that I did isn't really the thing it is, because it's someone else's code, tweaked to do the thing that I want it to do. Or because it's not elegant, polished, and efficient code like someone who knows what they're doing would turn out. I have ten thousand excuses to avoid taking credit for anything, or to admit that I might be practiced at or knowledgeable about something. The experiences of my childhood, and the mockery that accompanied when the supposedly perfect child made a mistake, has me perpetually looking out for the scythe and the reaper wielding it, the one ready to cut the tall plant for daring to peek its head above the others. I would say quiet competence is my sweet spot, except I also want to be recognized for the quality work that I do on a regular basis and not have it just be the expectation of me, unworthy of further comment other than "meets standards."

The older I've gotten, the more I realize that an excellent way of getting me to approach a problem or try to figure out how to make something work better is to present it to me as a sandbox, a puzzle, or some other thing where there's no pressure for the thing itself to be perfect or that it needs to be turned around in a short time. Something that is being solved for its own sake, and not because you have to provide the solution to a sudoku puzzle to your past self so that they can get out of the predicament they're in and survive long enough so they can become you and give the solution to themselves and generate a stable time loop. The less stakes there are in the situation, the more I feel like I can bring myself to bear on it, and not to get caught up in the twin weasels of "must be perfect to be seen by others" and "anything that fails will be viciously mocked." I realize this is maladaptive, and most other people do not suffer from these fears in their own lives, but it works, and therefore I do my best to make things as non-important in my head as I can, simply so that I can function in the moment.

I demonstrated that at work today, actually. There was a monitor at one of my locations that was rotating too easily in its housing, and so I tried to figure out what the problem was with it. Checked the screws and the like, and they were holding, and eventually, I concluded that, once I'd gotten the monitor off the clip that was holding it in place, that the bit that attached to the monitor and the clip was too loose, since I could spin it with my handss. There was a pair of pliers in the tool chest at the work site, so I tightened things up, and when we re-clipped the monitor on, it stopped wobbling so easy.

Thanks, Pops. Not just for the whole "can use hand tools" part, but for the bit where you encouraged me to think systematically about problems, to work methodically through possibilities, and to come to conclusions and test them to see if they're correct. You did exactly the thing you were supposed to do to help me achieve not only answers, but processes and analysis. Even though I really just wanted answers at the time, rather than to be led through a process of figuring out where my mistake was, or where I had overlooked something, or whether an assumption I was making was actually correct. It serves me well, just so long as I keep thinking of it as a puzzle rather than something of importance.

But also, if you are interested in the same sort of spirit, try Neocities, and maybe you can start building your own personal page or interest page or another fic archive.

It's December Days time again. This year, I have decided that I'm going to talk about skills and applications thereof, if for no other reason than because I am prone to both the fixed mindset and the downplaying of any skills that I might have obtained as not "real" skills because they do not fit some form of ideal.

10: Accessibility

As you may have gleaned from this series and many others of the type, I am not what you would call typical. This is in some physical manners, because I am Long Being, but mostly, where this is important is in the mental matters, as while I can do most of the necessary functions of life, there are some things, like time and memory, that don't function in "normal" ways. Variable Attention Stimulus Trait means that there are many things that I will tick as done that are not done, but I will only be reminded of that not-done status when it becomes contextually relevant again. Or I will try to remember a thing, and then it will not trigger again until someone else mentions it or there is some other reason for that piece of memory to fire. And sometimes, when I'm doing something that gives me actual dopamine and the feeling of accomplishment, it's not easy to get me to focus on other things. At least, not until I hit some goal of my own and can switch tasks. Which I may not remember the need to, especially if there's been some sort of progression in the game that is now presenting me with new options to explore.

These kinds of situations can happen even in spots where I am attempting to pay attention. So I devised systems to ensure that I had all the things I needed to do done first before engaging in anything that might produce the flow state. And I still use those systems. Even as I type this, there's the lure of other games and things to solve that I would also like to indulge in, but I am refraining because those things are likely to become time sinks, and I want to enjoyably spend my time, rather than recriminate about how I wasted it doing things I enjoyed and neglecting things that should have had higher priority. With appropriate supports and support from other people, I can function as a human being in a society. Mostly, what that takes the form of is "please write the thing down and give it to me, or send me a reminder e-mail or message that I have agreed to this thing, because once I leave this context, I will not remember it until I am in this context again, or at some other random, unhelpful time." This also means a certain amount of not giving me grief about the messiness of my spaces, because my working memory is often embedded in objects that are present in my workspace. They remind me to do certain things when I spot them. Once they are out of my sight, my brain often marks them as completed, even if they're not. Concentration sometimes means having fidgets available to keep the distractions part working on the fidget so that I can concentrate. Or it means taking notes, because taking notes means processing the thing that is happening. Systems at work, and they are always only as good as fixing the last thing that managed to evade or break the system and become a problem, so that will also mean having to be patient with me while I figure out how to prevent the problem from reoccurring. (The solution might very well be, as I wrote above, "please e-mail me when I agree to do a thing.")

Accessibility and accommodation is important to me, because without it, everyone expects me to behave and think and do things the same way they do, and at least one manager tried to fire me because she didn't understand that the things I was doing. She classified them as rude and personal failings, and didn't particularly like my explanations of "I would rather stand up and stay awake than stay seated and fall asleep" (at the time, the things that were interfering with my ability to have restful sleep were not yet diagnosed, so I was working on systems that worked for me at university without understanding why) or "I am paying attention to the participants in the program as I also try to puzzle out this situation in front of me." (Apparently, trusting children and teenagers to be responsible and at least do some amount of managing themselves is completely wrong.) Or even, "I forgot at that moment that this edge case existed to a regular rule, I'm sorry and I have created a flowchart of how the process works to demonstrate to you that I do understand it and I will try not to forget again." (The person being upset at me trumped any and all apology and demonstration that I could put together that this was an honest mistake.) My continued longevity at my place of work in my profession is mostly due to the fact that this manager retired before she could complete the process of getting me fired, and every subsequent manager I have had was either not in place long enough for issues to arise or actually understands that at least some part of your job as a manager is to help your employees do their best work, and sometimes that will mean having to do things in a particular way.

In many other aspects of my life, I benefit greatly from the curb-cut effect, making traversing physical space easier and having greater understanding of what is going on in media programs by being able to turn on subtitling or captioning and read to ensure that what is being said and done matches with what I'm hearing. (I don't use Descriptive Audio, but I think it's great to have available as well.) I can magnify text and pictures so that it's comfortable to view from several feet away, even if I can read it at the smaller, more original size. I have a fair number of tools developed for accessibility that I take advantage of when I get the opportunity to do so, even if they are things that I do not specifically "need" to function. I have not met people who think that I am either somehow taking advantage of something that doesn't belong to me or that I am somehow less human because I use those tools. Not yet, anyway. Most people who have taken me to task do so on the strength or compatibility with their worldview of my ideas and statements, and not because I use certain tools.

Because of the communities I work with, however, and the repeated parts of the instruction that I do on library resources, I am very sensitive to how accessible software packages are, and how many steps it takes to accomplish things, and where there are pain points, annoyance points, or where I end up saying the same things over and over again because they continue to be obstacles and impediments to a successful process. And while I would like to say that any such things that I discover are taken seriously and fixed by the people who make the software, or who control out environment, the reality is that library software and systems is the kind of place where you can count the number of products that do certain tasks on two hands, with some fingers left over, and you can count the number of companies that own those options on one hand and you might still have a finger or two left over. If competition is supposed to be the biggest driver of innovation and the threat of leaving is supposed to be the thing that gets companies to improve their products when there are complaints, then in library systems and software, we don't have enough options to be able to force either of those desired outcomes. And, as both publishing and library systems and services consolidate, we end up with fewer companies in charge of more things, making it even harder to change in the face of a company sucking. In a world where the government was on the lookout for anti-competitive behavior and starting giving serious side-eyes to conglomerates and making menacing gestures with a sledgehammer in hand, we might have that competition, but regulatory capture is a thing, and it's much easier for those who have money to buy politicians and legislation than those without.

So, with the understanding that DRM is an abomination unto Nuggan, but without it, nobody would license material to libraries to lend (and that all of that is basically controlled by one company, Overdrive, even oif other companies and projects exist to try and break that practical monopoly), allow me to complain about the inaccessibility of things that I encounter in my workplace.

First up, Windows. Obviously, our IT department does not want to give us free reign over our staff machines, nor to give the public the ability to make permanent changes to our computers or run or install malware on them. But it appears that their ability to control whether various items in the Control Panel are present is mostly controlled by the categories those items appear in, and perhaps some fine-grained control past that. Which resulted in me filing a ticket with them because the "Do Not Disturb" mode was kicking on while I was doing other things, and it meant I was missing e-mail and chat notifications because the machine assumed that I didn't want to be disturbed. I couldn't turn off DND, it turns out, because DND had been classified by Microsoft as a "Gaming"-related function, and the policy IT set removed the ability to access the Gaming part of the Control Panel. They were able to fix this. This feels like someone at Microsoft said "only the people playing games will use applications in full-screen or maximized modes, and so they're the only ones who will care about whether notifications will interrupt them or not, so stick the do-not-disturb settings in the gaming area," and nobody with the ability to get things changed pointed out that this was a foolish idea and made unfounded assumptions about the users of their product. (The integration of their LLM into basically all Microsoft apps and Windows itself is similarly a foolish decision based on unfounded assumptions about the users of their products, but at least there someone could argue that some people actually do want to use LLMs.)

Another large Windows Accessibility gripe I had is that the Ease of Access features (Microsoft's name for their accessibility features) are not available by default, so that when someone wants to log in to one of our computers, we do not have the option of showing the on-screen keyboard, or several other accessibility features that would make it possible for the machines to be used independently by people with physical disabilities. I had a person with a caregiver who came into the library, who had a USB-A pluggable control mechanism that allowed them to move a mouse cursor without needing their caregiver to do so. But because our Ease of Access functions aren't available by default, this person could not independently sign into our machine. Once the caregiver had typed in the appropriate numbers on the keyboard, then it was possible for the person to navigate merrily along in what they wanted, and to then access some of the Ease of Access features so they could do things independently. I do not know why all of those features are not available right from the jump. Some of them have become so, because I've seen people using the magnifier at the login screen, and then had to undo that work to make the machine ready for the next person. But still no on-screen keyboard toggle anywhere so that a person who can't use the keyboard can still type. (There's probably some sort of security reason to not do this that I don't know about, and I have questions about why we're using software where the presence of an on-screen keyboard somehow introduces a greater security risk than the attached physical keyboard does.)

After a months-long data breach incident, the details of which have not yet been fully revealed to the public or to the staff, we were staring down the barrel of a fair number of paper library card applications that needed to be put into the ILS, once it had been stood back up and the transactions that had been put into it had been run through. I didn't want to spend my time clicking through all of the form fields, so I tried to tab-navigate them, so that I would use as little motion as possible. Which is where I discovered that the form itself is only completely tab-navigable if there's only one entry in the autofill for a given ZIP code. If there more than one option and I have to select from the modal that pops up, the tab navigation resets to the top of the page, and when I get back to that ZIP code, I can't tab through it, even though I've already entered the information, without popping the modal back up and then getting kicked back to the top of the page. I filed a ticket about this, because surely this is a known problem and someone has already figured out how to move the cursor to the next field after the modal has been dismissed. It hasn't been fixed yet, so I still have to do at least one click to do a library card application. I'd hate to have to deal with that as a screen reader user, or someone who doesn't have the ability to consistently click a mouse to the right place.

Most of my accessibility headaches, however, come from the suite that we use to control user access to the computers and that manage the printing from those user accounts. First and foremost among them is the discovery that while the computer access and printing system has to communicate with our ILS, it doesn't actually generate any kind of account on its own systems until the first time that a card number and PIN are used to sign in to a computer, or to make a reservation for a computer. We had a fair number of people who have had cards for a very long time get stymied the first time they try to use our "print from anywhere" option, because the number is right, the PIN is right, and yet the system told them they were an "inactive user." While the fix is relatively simple (make a reservation for them, then cancel that reservation), how much simpler it would be if, say, every day or so, the computer access and printing system would query our ILS for accounts, and then create access and reservation entries in its own system for any numbers that it didn't already have such accounts for. This would not normally be an issue, but the print system runs on a sixty second timer that resets when you press the touchscreen.

Well, I should say that's the only visible timer that runs on the print release station and system. There are several hidden timers running all throughout the printing retrieval process, starting right with the beginning of it. Since we offer such things as print from home, the prompt at the end of the process that involves the person's device is to enter an e-mail address. The print release station is the place where we have an on-screen keyboard, and for people who don't do things particularly quickly, a long e-mail address can take several minutes to type on the keyboard. Several of the people I've been assisting have had their attempts disappear suddenly because we've reached some sort of hidden timeout that starts when the login screen is opened, and which does not reset itself in any way on any kind of keypress on the keyboard. I have been known to type their email addresses in on the second go-round simply because this timer is unforgiving and entirely invisible.

Another hidden timer runs while someone is waiting on various screens to either pay for their printing or use their library card credit, and no, we haven't been allowed to take cash for printing or copying for nearly a decade at this point. (This, too, is a matter of inaccessibility, even though our payment terminals are equipped with NFC readers so that the "tap to pay" options available with various cards or apps all work appropriately. Being cashless has pretty well made us hostile to the unbanked and to those people who would rather flip us a dime for a one-page print, rather than faffing about with a credit card charge of the same amount.) This hidden timer comes into play when we have to activate a supposedly "Inactive" user - even at my fastest, I would still not be able to complete it in the single minute of the visible timer. So I tell the people that they can reset the countdown timer just by pressing on the screen, but at about 45 to 60 seconds of sitting at the payment screen without pressing anything, the system drops back a level to the spot where you would select what you wanted printed from the available options. So, when the user becomes "active," they then have to go back through a couple of procedural steps, including re-scanning their library card and re-inputting their PIN, to get to the spot where they were before and discovered that the system didn't know who they were.

I'm not opposed to timers that exit out automatically and re-set the kiosk for the next person. I am opposed to secret timers that do this, because they create more problems than they solve. And especially secret timers that don't reset themselves.

The interface itself, especially the spot where the payment options are selected, has one glaring inaccessible part to it - only the button is touchable and will engage the labeled function. The text that is next to the button that describes its function is completely not part of the touchable space, and yet, I consistently have to help people who have touched the text, expecting it to be a target space, and who then get confused because something should have happened there. It sometimes takes me an explanation or two of "you have to push the button to the left" before they get to the right target area. And while these are not small buttons, neither are they particularly large, and so I can only imagine what someone with a disability or difficulty with being able to touch the same spot on a screen consistently would experience, in addition to massive frustration that this system doesn't have large enough touch targets for a crucial part of their function.

Oh, and also, apart from the first screen, which can be pinch-zoomed to make the target to start things easier to hit, everything from that point forward is of fixed size and is not zoomable or arrangeable in some form of larger blocks, or otherwise can have a mode for people who need larger touch targets or larger text to read or any other such accessibility concerns. And, while there's supposedly a button to change the language from English to Spanish, the only thing that gets translated is the interface where you put in a library card number and PIN or the e-mail address from the Print from Home option. Once signed in, everything is in English again. I filed a ticket about that, too, and apparently the company came back and told IT, when IT escalated the bug to the software developers, that they only intended to translate that first screen, and not the rest of the options that someone would have to go through to successfully print. That kind of sloppy, inaccessible work would have me advocating really hard for switching to some competitor product that actually gives a single shit about accessibility or language translation. That, of course, assumes there is one. I'm not entirely sure there is, at least with enough corporate support to make it something we would consider purchasing. (If we had an IT department that didn't have all their time consumed by putting out fires, I'd strongly urge us to find solutions that we could basically run and maintain ourselves, so that we could be responsive to comments and queries, instead of expecting and receiving the shrug emoji from the companies that we escalate these issues to.)

So I have multiple complaints about the software that we use, and zero faith that any of the issues that I raise about them will be fixed in any future release. And that's before I start complaining about our website, and our marketing materials, and so many other things that are also probably inaccessible. (although I did finally manage to get the text size bumped up for our digital advertising displays when I pointed it out to the marketing person how small the text was when they were at our location. I think they also need some refreshers on minimum contrast for images.)

The most recent gall for me, however, has been that other IT departments in our public schools have made foolish decisions of their own that render school-issued devices unable to get on our Wi-Fi. Our Wi-Fi uses a captive portal system, which is not my favored way of doing things, but it is at least a system that happens mostly automatically, with the user input needing to be to connect to the network and then to click the "Agree and Connect" button on the captive portal page. For most devices, this works fine, and people can then merrily use the Wi-Fi. For these school-issued devices, however, while they can supposedly connect to the Wi-Fi, they never get the captive portal page to appear, and none of the tricks that I know of to make said page appear work on these devices. As I was helping someone with this particular problem, I think I gained sufficient insight to know what's going on. Both of the sites used to try and generate the captive portal page timed out, and they both wanted to route through the same server and weren't able to do so. Which made me think "oh, no, someone's hard-coded a proxy for all traffic to pass through first." Which would work fine on school networks, or on Wi-Fi networks where you enter a passphrase to connect to the network, and otherwise then have access to the whole Internet from there. But on a captive portal network like ours, we need the connection to go to the captive portal page to start with, and then from there, we can open up the Internet at large. But the computers insist that all traffic has to go through this server first, including the captive portal page, no doubt, and so we have an impasse where the captive portal page needs to be acknowledged first, but the computer has been set up to route through some other server for everything, and therefore it will never let the captive portal appear and be acknowledged.

sigh

So to fix this, we'd have to convince the school IT to let their machines connect to our captive portal (and presumably other ones, too), and then to use their proxy server. There's probably CIPA and/or COPPA compliance issues there somewhere, and other things about who would theoretically be liable if a school computer were used to access age-restricted things, and so forth. Which, since we have trouble connecting with schools anyway, is probably a pipe dream of mine to get these conversations going and the desired result. Our best alternatives here are to use a desktop or library-provided laptop, but I wouldn't be surprised if it's somewhat hard to access your school learning modules and environments from a non school-issued device. So instead our Wi-Fi is inaccessible and students can't do their homework at the library, like they would like to.

And these are the things that I have direct contact with, or that show up in what I work with the public over. I'm sure there are so many other things that are accessibility concerns, or just concerns about whether or not someone feels represented, or safe, or that the library acknowledges their existence. I'd like for use to be better about all of this, but so much of that is in the hands of people with more decision-making power and resource allocation power than I have. And so I don't expect things to get any better any time soon, because the priorities of the library aren't doing a lot of pushing on those things, and the companies that we could be leaning on don't have incentives to improve, because they know we won't really be able to use a competitor product, assuming one exists.

But still I complain, and I file tickets, and I try. That's what I'm supposed to do, and hopefully, one day, things will get fixed. Preferably before someone decides to take us to court over accessibility issues. (This is an exercise in futility sometimes, and it bothers me, but I still try.)