I know my friends at Microsoft Typography (note the majuscule) are trying to make things better, but do they not run smack dab against the basic cluelessness and epic bad taste that is endemic to Windows users?

Here’s a tiny corner of a screenshot of a Windows Longhorn build:

If you’ll excuse my French and my tmesis for a moment, what the fuck is this, MS-fucking-DOS? If you have to signify that “Microsoft” and “Windows” are registered trademarks, the one and only symbol you may use is ®. Oh, but Microsoft® Windows® makes those almost impossible to type, doesn’t it?

Since U.S. courts have held that the copyright symbol is a circle in a C and not, say, a circle in an octagon, I expect they would also hold that a registered-trademark symbol is an R in a circle and not a space, a parenthesis, an R, and another parenthesis.

“From the people who brought you Arial,” etc.

“Disenchanted.”

Possibly mine. Possibly. I may not have been the first person to propose it, but I was a person who did. (See the VoiceOver video.)

I sent the following E-mail to an Apple contact on 2003.07.04 (excerpted, HTMLified):

Screen readers & OS X

Simply put, there aren’t any screen readers for OS X, and the current rate there never will be. That means OS X is highly inaccessible to blind and visually-impaired users, who have many choices on Windows. Individuals, schools, corporations, and especially the U.S. government can be predicted to begin to favour Windows machines over Macs because of their need to provide an accessible computing environment, particularly across large numbers of users.

Screen-reader basics

“Screen reader” is a term for a category of software, like “word processor” or “spreadsheet.” Screen readers are programs that interpret and read out loud in voice the text, menus, and other visual components of an operating system and application software. People with low vision, usually people with next to no usable vision, are the main users of screen readers.

These programs make the entire computer accessible to blind people. They do not simply read text aloud from left to right, top to bottom; the user has considerable control over the focus of the speech, and can choose, for example, to read items in the Dock, menus, the text in a floating palette, a cell in a spreadsheet, or an entire dialogue box. You can spell words and enunciate numbers. When browsing the Web, you can skip navigation links and entire table cells, navigate through table cells and frames, fill in forms, and read text equivalents for graphics, among many other functions.

Windows vs. Macintosh

Mac OS used to have a screen reader, OutSpoken for Macintosh by Alva Access Group. It was barely passable for application software and couldn’t handle Web sites in any usable fashion. Worse, it worked in Mac OS 9 only and will not be updated for OS X.

Windows users have a range of products to choose from. The Microsoft of screen reading is Freedom Scientific, makers of Jaws for Windows. (If you think Quark is hard to deal with, wait till you talk to them.) Window-Eyes by GW Micro is the main competitor.

Accessibility requirements

Employers, schools, and especially governments are required to accommodate people with disabilities. That includes offering adaptive technology for people with disabilities where necessary. Having a screen reader in white-collar jobs is the difference between working and not working for many blind people, a group that already is significantly underemployed. Currently, the only way to accommodate a blind person on the job involves using Windows. (People with less-severe visual impairments may possibly, in some cases, be able to get by with OS X’s built-in screen magnification.)

With no screen reader on Mac OS X, Apple loses each and every one of those sales. Further, nobody has managed to get a Windows screen reader to run under VirtualPC, which in any event defeats the purpose of buying a Mac.

How to leapfrog the market

While blind Windows users are far better off when it comes to accessibility, there’s a significant weakness that Apple could exploit. Jaws for Windows costs $895 to $1,[2]95. It’s also a notoriously finicky program that crashes regularly, forces users to learn over a hundred keystroke combinations, and is updated infrequently.

While there may be screen readers on Windows, they essentially tell blind people “We’re going to charge you an extra thousand dollars for being blind, and stick you with hard-to-use, crash-prone software. Welcome to equality.”

It is unrealistic to think that any third-party developer will volunteer to write a screen reader for OS X. Apple should do so itself. The marketing angle is irresistible: “Unlike some people, we don’t believe in charging extra because you’re blind.”

Apple’s performance in the accessibility field has been poor in recent years. The action is happening on Windows, and notwithstanding the Macintosh advantages of built-in speech, better fonts, and an easier-to-use system, on the topic of accessibility Apple has lagged behind.

So instead of just catching up, leapfrog everybody else. Ship a screen reader with at least the capabilities of Jaws that is easier to use – and ship it as a standard part of the operating system. If OS X can include tens of thousands of dollars’ worth of Asian-language fonts that only some users ever need, the same can be done for this crucial form of adaptive technology.

The E-mail was later passed around; I talked on the phone with a senior manager; and the VoiceOver project (né Spoken Interface) was approved.

I have no way of knowing if a movement within Apple predated my suggestion, but I know I made the suggestion when I did.

Whenever you choose an HTML element to mark up your content, your choice will fall into one of these categories:

1. Element chosen is valid, semantically correct, and structural.
2. Element chosen is indisputably wrong according to the validator (e.g., div inside p)
3. Element chosen is indisputably wrong according to a plain, uncontested reading of the spec, even if the validator passes it (e.g., using div instead of p)
4. Element chosen is presentational when a structural element could be used (e.g., tt for samp)
5. Element chosen is structural but could be replaced with a structural element with better semantics (e.g., p should really be address)
6. Presentational element is chosen because the content does not suit itself to a structural alternative (e.g., b and i in marking up historical documents)
7. Element chosen is semantic but relies on sometimes-disputed interpretation of the spec (e.g., definition lists used to mark up dialogue)
8. Element chosen is semantic but pushes the very limits of its definition in the spec (e.g., individual Weblog entries marked up as li)
9. Element chosen is generic (i.e., span or div) because no other element conceivably fits

Please make your selection now.

Say, wasn’t that most of the Muddy York ruggerses team (q.v.) laughing and having a whale of a time in the hot tub at the Steamworks this afternoon?

Smells like team spirit!

I had had enough of finding every en dash and quotation mark on Gawker replaced with a question mark, so I wrote this:

Ever since you new kids took over, the already-nonstandard Gawker Web presence fell down even drunker, with massive character-encoding errors. Hint: You can’t just copy curly quotes from MS Word and have them appear properly on the Web, unless you think that everyone looks great in black and every pi character should be ?.

And here’s how Noelle Hancock replied (all renderings sic):

excuse me for not being an html nerd. now get back to masturbating to your mother’s photo, honey.

Brian Bouldrey, Monster: Gay Adventures in American Machismo (q.v.), pp. 59, 72, 189:

• Being a sissy, like being a boxer, takes sheer chutzpah. Don’t mess with a seasoned queen…. An adult sissy is one who survived years of torture (invisible pain) and is still alive. An adult sissy has learned he can’t afford to lose.

• [A] flaming tire detached itself from a passing car and leaped the fence, landing not six feet in front of us…. The molten tire was immediately surrounded by six or seven scruffy white children…. One of the children’s parents screamed from behind our seats (and I am not lying or exaggerating…): “Git aways from that tahr, Skeeter.”

  All the children backed up. Perhaps they were all named Skeeter.

• My late friend Will shared my love for the disproportionate. We were size queens together, but not of the usual sort. What thrilled us were big noses, jug ears – like a Mercedes with its doors wide open.

Well, we bring the Consumer Guide to BigMuscle(Bears) to an end with a Superspecial Ginger Edition, inevitably. (Previously: (I [q.v.], II [q.v.], III [q.v.].)

Other gingers?

1. RedMuscleSTL,
2. RedHairyTop,
3. SFRedHead,
4. CB-Red,
5. BigReds2,
6. BGREDMSCL9,
7. ShortNBuff,
8. Dickinson94,
9. BubbleBicep,
10. BiJockRed,
11. Plug·in·Device,
12. Hung9×6Stud

Glenn O’Brien, GQ, May 2005:

Q. When I close a big deal, I always treat myself to something extravagant. Last time, I bought Patek Philippe watch. I am working on another big deal. When it closes, I intend to purchase a fur coat. I try to separate myself from the pack in my demeanour and style of dress. Is a fur coat too over-the-top, even for someone like me?

A. Well, if you got your leg caught in a trap, would you gnaw it off? If your answer is yes, then yes, reward your next big deal with a fur coat. By the way, have you ever considered what the pack will do to you when they catch up with you?