(Now with superspecial UPDATE!)   So let me get this straight…ish:

• Google tracks television broadcasts and indexes the closed captions – but with Apple-style incorrect character encoding (♪ misrendered as ♫) and without showing you the captions on the video
• Google shoots and edits a canned and stagey propaganda video ostensibly intended to attract women engineers… and publishes it without captioning

So tell me again how I’m in any way inaccurate in saying that Google doesn’t give a shit about accessibility? Captioning is mere feedstock data to Google, and valid, semantic HTML is something their brutish computerized trawlers overpower and ignore rather than reward.

In fact, why is it inaccurate to say that Google is stupendously inept at accessibility?

Update

After prompting, Google wrote back (2005.04.15) and told me they’d corrected the character misencoding (♪:♫).

This is an appeal for WordPress help to do the following:

1. Move old NUblog entries to a new installation of WordPress. I already have them in a WP-compatible database. This job will entail matching the existing template, which is crappy but it’s what I’ve got to play with. (We’re not defaulting to Kubrick.) Extra points for converting it to CSS.
2. Upgrade this Weblog to Version 1.5 without a hiccup.
3. Fix the Webstandards.TO Weblog in several ways (template, categories, links, author bylines).
4. Make WordPress work with the Screenfont Weblog template.

I can Amazon-wishlist you a book or two, but apart from that, this is gonna be a labour of love.

“Sometimes it snows in April.”

(Today it’s 13° and sunny.)

“500 Up,” “I Am the Cancer,” “Median Strip,” “Money City Maniacs,” “Penpals,” “Sugartune,” “Take It In,” “Underwhelmed.”

Camille Paglia (visit the Salon cookie trick page first):

The blogs, for example, are becoming so self-referential. If people want to be better writers, they can’t just read the blogs! You’ve got to look at something that’s outside this rushing world of evanescent words. Nowhere in blog pages does anyone pay attention to the individual word – things are moving too fast. Someone like Emily Dickinson was working with the dictionary and looking at the etymology of the word, so that you have all this tremendous stuff going on within a single word!

Her claim fails to explain the many linguistics Weblogs in use, or the fact that actual writers maintain Weblogs. Some of us even cover books and, indeed, lexicography.

My partner of 12 years, Alison Maddex, gave birth to a baby boy in November 2002 – Lucien Harry Maddex. I am Lucien’s adoptive parent – but certainly not his mother! […] I kept Lucien’s birth completely out of the public eye….

Except, of course, for telling C-SPAN about Lucien’s birth in 2003, which I reported.

Then when Matt Drudge put the picture up on the Drudge Report, I thought, “Hooray! This is Roethke’s first appearance on a major news Web site!”

Could it be that Camille secretly enjoys “look[ing] at something that’s outside this rushing world of evanescent words”?

Anyway, is it not true that “cultural energy at the end of the century has abandoned the traditional arts and shifted to the Internet – which is why you and I are having this conversation”?

I just love that idea of lineage and transmission from generation to generation.

We’re doing what we can. Some of us write for longevity. We are trying to ensure that electronic documents will actually still be around and functioning for future generations to learn from.

And some of us – some of those selfsame people – continue to write in, and for, print. We have mixed allegiances. We want the print medium and the electronic medium to be as respectively good as each can be. We love the physical codex of the book, and its seeming opposite, the bodyless codex of the display.

(Or rather, Joe does Fleshbot again.)

One had the pleasure, while in Austin, to stand around in the denuded and forlorn Oilcan Harry’s of a Tuesday night with Jonno, Brad L. Graham, and Josh Darden and his business manager. (Oddly, the cab driveuse knew exactly where the leather bar was, but the twink bar is where we ended up meeting.)

As the DJ, or a very lifelike mix tape, played every “gay” song you ever heard in the 1990s (apparently in alphabetical order), we stood around and got to know each other, finally. In an almost cosmic coïncidence, I would bump into Jonno at the superspecial coffee kiosk in the Austin airport the next day!

Now that we were close personal friends, surely it was inevitable that I would be invited to write a guest column for Fleshbot. It all came about after I sent Jonno over a hundred BigMuscle(Bears) links to add to his hopper, which prompted the eventual response – and I’m paraphrasing here – “Why don’t you frigging do it yourself?”

So I am. Read the Consumer Guide to BigMuscle(Bears) every Wednesday in April.

joeclark

CANADIAN SQUEALS AT TABLOID HEDS

Perfect to lead with science-queen SAD SHUTTLE: CAN’T EVEN ROLL ON GROUND

that’s a fucking T-shirt, honey.

to be worn onstage by new tribute band NOSE CONE

heysploid

ha ha! … sell ’em outside nasa

joeclark

sell them for NASA!

beats the fuck out of the bake sales they’ve been having.

“Get your frozen O-rings – er, ONION! ONION rings!”

Pity about the 49 errors (and counting).

…is not merely a thrilling series of Vanity Fair articles and the subject of previous entries. It’s a new book and a Web site (with tables for layout and invalid code, sadly).

Plangent!

I have a bookmark folder entitled FAILED REDESIGNS – rejiggered sites whose rejiggering ignored the last five years of increased expertise in standards compliance and accessibility.

Who’s on deck this week? Queer Day, the sometimes-useful news site that seems to subsist on a diet of Google News Alerts. It used to be a simple couple of columns with lots of little mistakes they could have fixed in no time at all, like missing alt texts and use of unordered lists.

No, in this case the lesbian-turkey-baster baby was thrown out with the bathwater. The new site, introduced by an editor with no mention even of the updated appearance, is a classic failed redesign. (And they were even getting outside help initially.) [continue with: Queerdon’t →]