Monday, 6th November 2017
How technology helped a blind athlete run free at the New York Marathon. Fascinating piece on technology to help blind people better navigate the world—combing GPS and chest-mounted ultrasonic sonar. # 4:58 pm
Skip the title text! Nobody uses them – they don’t work on touch screens and on desktop they require that the user hovers for a while over an image, which nobody does. Also, adding a title-text makes some screen readers both read the title-text and the alt-text, which becomes redundant.
— Daniel Göransson # 4:56 pm
Alt-texts: The Ultimate Guide. By Daniel Göransson, a web developer with vision impairment who uses a screen reader. This is the best, most practical guide to writing image alt text I’ve seen. Just one of the neat tips contained within: consider ending your alt text in a period, so the screen user knows to pause. # 4:54 pm
walrus. Fascinating collection of Python utilities for working with Redis, by Charles Leifer. There are a ton of interesting ideas in here. It starts with Python object wrappers for Redis so you can interact with lists, sets, sorted sets and Redis hashes using Python-like objects. Then it gets really interesting: walrus ships with implementations of autocomplete, rate limiting, a graph engine (using a sorted set hexastore) and an ORM-style models mechanism which manages secondary indexes and even implements basic full-text search. # 1:14 am