Inside the Little Plastic Castle

The MacMost site offers bite-sized tech help for Apple users. Even though I’ve been using Apples since 1984, I always learn something there. Recently, Gary offered 36 ways to type more easily on the iPhone keyboard. Transcript and video at https://macmost.com/36-iphone-keyboard-tips.html

I learned three things that made me happy. Writing them down helps me remember, so here are the summaries:

( Specific advice for iOS, general approach may also apply to Android )

Do you have any tricks to make mobile Dreamwidth posting easier?

Metafilter mentioned Lil Nas X in full lilac jumpsuit on the cover of the NYTimes Sunday Magazine.

https://www.nytimes.com/2021/07/07/magazine/lil-nas-x.html

Followed the link and I hit the pay wall: "sign in to your account or subscribe.*"

I do pay for local publications. I won’t pay for the NYTimes because then I’d read the NYTimes and my mental health would plummet.

My workarounds in order of use:

1. Try another browser
2. Wayback Machine
3. Find another archive
4. Use my local library’s subscription

( my four workarounds )

I'm here to kvell about a nifty browser extension, StopTheMadness

(Everything except the name, which I could do without. More accurately, it's GiveMeBackControl).

StopTheMadness wrests control back from websites, so I can always right-click, copy text/images, prevent opening in new pages, prevent media autoplay, and much more. Visit site for full marketing info:

https://underpassapp.com/StopTheMadness/

It's currently available for Chrome (and Chromium browsers) on Windows, Mac, Linux.

For Mac/Safari it's a full-fledged app (as now is required for Safari extensions) with even more benefits.

I can assign browsers to domains and apps to URL schemes.

The social media giants seem to optimize function for Chromium-based browsers. So in my case, I always use Brave (with its robust privacy features) for FB, IG, Twitter, Tumblr, Reddit, Gmail and YouTube. Any cookies left by those sites are isolated to those sites, with my principal work remaining in Safari.

URL schemes means I control which apps open feed://, mailto: etc.

It also offers domain-specific implementation of styles if I use the Safari style sheet option -- it's not a full replacement for Tampermonkey yet, but who knows? The dev, Jeff Johnson, has been steadily adding features.

Sadly, it's not available for iOS (yet?)

Many academic libraries/databases have been made world-readable in the past few months while students lack campus library access. Curiosity led me to the Association for Computing Machinery’s digital library (open access until 30 June 2020), where I was delighted to learn of the journal called ACM Transactions on Accessible Computing

Use the advanced search interface if you’re ready to go diving.

I found research explaining why automatic captioning is so unsatisfactory. "Word Error Rate" is the metric YouTube and other automatic speech recognition systems use as they trumpet their production of "automatic captions." Deaf & HoH users often call them "craptions." Total number of incorrect words divided by total number of words displayed doesn't map on to the info we need to understand spoken language visually. Some words we can easily infer; when names, locations, and crucial verbs go missing, comprehension plummets. This article explains in great detail, and proposes alternative metrics which could measure whether automatic speech recognition is good enough.

Predicting the Understandability of Imperfect English Captions for People Who Are Deaf or Hard of Hearing

SUSHANT KAFLE and MATT HUENERFAUTH, Rochester Institute of Technology

ACM Trans. Access. Comput., Vol. 12, No. 2, Article 7, Publication date: June 2019. https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/3325862

abstract: Automatic Speech Recognition (ASR) technology has seen major advancements in its accuracy and speed in recent years, making it a possible mechanism for supporting communication between people who are Deaf or Hard-of-Hearing (DHH) and their hearing peers. However, state-of-the-art ASR technology is still imperfect in many realistic settings. Researchers who evaluate ASR performance often focus on improving the Word Error Rate (WER) metric, but it has been found to have little correlation with human-subject performance for many applications. This article describes and evaluates several new captioning-focused evaluation metrics for predicting the impact of ASR errors on the understandability of automatically generated captions for people who are DHH. Through experimental studies with DHH users, we have found that our new metric (based on word-importance and semantic-difference scoring) is more closely correlated with DHH user's judgements of caption quality—as compared to pre-existing metrics for ASR evaluation.

And isn’t it weird that academia is still using obscure abbreviations like ‌ACM Trans. Access. Comput. when nothing’s printed so there’s no space to save?

Bookmarklets are programs that live on your browser’s Favorites (aka bookmarks) bar. Where standard bookmarks have a name and a web address, bookmarklets have a name and a tiny Javascript to make life simpler. I just stumbled on a tool that let me combine a number of bookmarklets into a menu!

https://w-shadow.com/bookmarklet-combiner

Here's my "lucky star" ★ menu, which offers three functions I use all the time

• !css strips out all styles on a web page, permitting me to see my preferred, large font and pink background. Unlike reader mode, the no-styles version still lets me make comments.
• wbm save sends the current page to Archive.org’s Wayback Machine, saves the URL, and loads the future-proofed version, ready to copy into a post.
• boost puts your current selection in a new DW post with an attribution and link to your source. This is ljwrites’ fork of the signal boost tool from astolat and melannen.

Once installed, clicking the star brings up a little menu to perform one of these tasks.

To install the ★ menu in your browser:

1. Adjust preferences to display your Favorites Bar
2. Visit my Star menu page
3. Scroll to the Star icon at the bottom of the page (search on the string "result" and tab once)
4. Drag the star to your Bookmark Bar (I put it on the left edge). If you’re using Safari & a keyboard, command-1 will bring up the menu.

ljwrites does a much better job explaining this!

https://lj-writes.dreamwidth.org/2019/03/02/alt-text.html

lightgetsin relies on image descriptions, and her thoughts are crucial

https://lightgetsin.dreamwidth.org/308442.html

For sighted people, images can communicate a lot in a short time. On the web, tho, images come with a cost: bandwidth. Folks who don’t or can’t view your image can still get your message when you use image descriptions. "alt text" is the HTML tool to hold your image descriptions.

Web Accessibility In Mind — WebAIM — is an outstanding resource for ensuring that all users can appreciate your web content.

Spend twenty minutes at WebAIM to gain a confidence in applying the principles of alt texts. Their tl;dr about the content of alt texts: ( open me )

I love being on Twitter. Constant stimulation. Jokes zinging right and left. Art and photos from around the world. Checking in with people who I only see once a year at WisCon if I’m lucky.

I hate being on Twitter. Constant stimulation. Terrible things happening world wide, curated for my attention by people I like. As of November 2016, I've been on a total newsfast to maintain my sanity, and there's a LOTS of content that's toxic.

Therefore: three tools that help me interact with Twitter manageably.

Thread Reader App

( read and save threads off site )

TCHAT.io

( real-time at your own pace )

Tweetlogix

( superlative iOS client )