Entertaining, if mad, philosopher Slavoj Žižek:

As I like to emphasize here in the States, there are freedoms of choice which I am glad to renounce. I like to do a parallel between healthcare and water and electricity. Yes, you can say I don’t have a choice in choosing my water provider. It’s imposed by where I live. But, my God, I gladly renounce this choice. I prefer to have some basic choices made by society – water, electricity, and some elementary healthcare. This precisely opens up the choice, opens up the freedom for other choices.

We gladly renounce the choice to rootkit our Android “tablet” because doing so opens up the freedom to enjoy the use of our iPads.

Gruber: “[J]ust three years ago it took five weeks after the close of WWDC for the session videos to appear. Now Apple has it down to four days.”

Yes, but the 2010 Worldwide Developers Conference videos were provided with a kind of half-assed captioning masquerading as subtitles. I hate saying this sort of thing is better than nothing, but it was.

What remains unresolved is the fact that Apple’s own videos, including keynotes and WWDC sessions, are almost invariably uncaptioned. Apple can afford captioning. The issue then becomes turnaround time.

• Do we want videos never to be published without captioning? It’s perfectly possible, even for WWDC videos (39 roughly-50-minute, two roughly-one-hour, and one roughly-half-hour items). I am quite sure that Vitac could produce pop-on-caption files for about 40 hours of captioning in two business days. (Every shift of every office, even the tiny one in D.C., would be working on it, but they could do it.) Almost any established high-volume shop, even the dried husk of Captions, Inc., could do it in a week. (Obviously I wouldn’t use NCI or any mom-’n’-pop shop. And mixed case only!)

  For Apple keynotes, it’s an hour or two of video that goes online at iTunes a couple of days later. Also perfectly doable.

• The other option is to ship first, caption later, which, again, any established high-volume shop can handle. (Then you’d have to replace all the videos on iTunes.)

Rush jobs are expensive, but Apple has the money. Apple can afford it either way. My contention is it is straightforward and affordable to caption every Apple video available on iTunes, irrespective of age, and to do so for future videos immediately after they are picture-locked and frozen. In principle, transcripts could also be included, but let’s talk about that another day.

And at no time whatsoever must Apple be tempted to attempt captioning in-house, which I believe is the only thing it has ever done for any video that isn’t a TV commercial. On that topic: TV commercials have to be captioned in every place where captioned commercials are possible. I can attest this is not the case in Canada. It needs to be fixed. All this needs to be fixed.

Because I thought Apple was committed to accessibility.

(UPDATED) Mr. CHRISTIAN SCHWARTZ (q.v.) addressed magazine designers in Toronto yesterday (at MagNet 2012). (Notes forthcoming below.)

The happily married type designer enjoyed a macchiato and a custom TTC Type & Tile Tour. I noted his disbelieving smile at Museum station, which he claimed to like despite dismissing as kitsch the hieroglyphics embedded in the letters of MUSEUM.

Update and liveblog of sessions

(2012.06.11) I have finished spellchecking, paper-editing, and fact-checking my liveblog notes from Mr. SCHWARTZ’s two sessions. (For the first time, I tried banging shit out in iA Writer [yes] rather than handwriting in a notebook and transcribing later. It really isn’t better this way!) Live-twitting is not exactly the stupidest possible approach; live-twitting then collating everything in Storify is. My way is better, and, with all due respect to Adactio, nobody does this better.

Before we go on, I will tell you something about Mr. SCHWARTZ’s mien in the two sessions. He was up bright and early at 0900 for the first one and seemed distant and nervous, especially after I had the gall to ask him how much he billed the Grauniad for Commercial Type’s endless custom fonts. (He took a swig of water under my withering questioning, in fact.)

But in the afternoon session, I guess Mr. SCHWARTZ had had luncheon, hence was considerably less glucose-deprived, because he demonstrated what I could describe only as manly mastery of the subject, the room, and his presentation style. I am not gladhanding here. Mr. SCHWARTZ blossomed from an introverted nerd to a man who knows his shit, knows he knows it, and effortlessly imposes decisions on junior type designers (then makes sure those decisions stay made).

Manliest type designer: Steve Matteson or Christian Schwartz? Despite Mr. SCHWARTZ’s lack of hi-’n’-tite haircut, the comparison is nonridiculous. [continue with: Schwartzed →]

After orientation and mobility training, a job, and maybe a white cane and/or a guide dog (all in that order), the most useful thing a blind person (a blink) can do for themself is buy an iPhone or an iPad. (Not a “cellphone” and not a “tablet.”)

And, apparently, they are doing that. WebAIM’s screen-reader survey – just a survey, not a census – shows VoiceOver use at about 9% on desktop but nearly half on mobile. Those numbers seem plausible in order of magnitude. Most computers run Windows, including those blind people use on the job. But there’s more choice in the matter when it comes to phones; blind people pick the intrinsically accessible platform.

What are the alternatives? There really aren’t any.

• At this point you shouldn’t be surprised that Google ships first and asks blinks questions later. It’s possible to run Android nonvisually, but that scenario seems to apply only to malcontents and tinkerers. Add in cheapskates and you’ve just described the Android userbase.

• CrackBerry? RIM just issued another of its announcements about a screen reader, which, like Android’s, works with only some applications. I’d love to learn more, but RIM’s Web site won’t let me.

  

  It won’t let Google in, either. (Google is a blind user.)

What about the Grey Lady?

I think we should just look the other way in response to the Times’s 1999-style, WCAG 1–compliant special blink version of its homepage. Without bothering to ask anybody there (not that they’d answer my mail), I infer this was the best they could get away with under the constraints of their CMS and their internal politics. One guy there knows how to solve the problem properly, but surely this isn’t the Costa Concordia and no single person can change the course of a ship that big.

Matt Mills, Xtra, 2012.05.31:

I stumbled… across the case of a gay man who was fighting aggravated sexual assault charges…. He was treated horribly by police and even more appallingly by members of his own community of gay men.

Well, so was Ron Kelly, but the people who mistreated him are the ruling elite of Toronto’s diverse gay communities and get away with everything, not including murder. [continue with: AIDS Action Now turned its back on Ron Kelly. Its leaders now run gay Toronto →]

Last week Mike Monteiro unleashed his 30,399 Twitter supplicants on a hapless civilian who dared to break orthodoxy and criticize Monteiro. Last night the beloved blowhard porkchop, who dearly wants you to know he frequents a gay barbershop, did much the same thing to me.

Bullying behaviour must be resisted and condemned even if you never suffer from it, believe the victims had it coming (what they always say about gay men), and rankle at the revelation the perpetrator is anything other than a lovable scamp.

There’s always a next victim. It could be you, and if that happens it’ll be 30,398 to 1.

The leftist bully is unreformable

Lacking God in their lives, leftists enact the substitute religion of progressivism, which requires apostates, a Satan, and a hell. Mike Monteiro, being as he is firmly held in the grip of progressivism, is constitutionally unable to recant his religion. He too requires apostates and a Satan. He does not understand he lives in Hell.

He, and everyone like him, is unreformable, and is moreover an active danger to everyone else.