Ramblings on Librarianship, Technology, and Academia

I've been reading the coverage of Maggie Tokuda-Hall's fight with Scholastic over removing references to racism in Love in the Library. It should go without saying that I'm immensely impressed with Tokuda-Hall for making the fight into national news. And it's important to cover the story in light of the ramped up culture war against books and libraries.

It's also true, though, that most of the coverage, such as The New York Times's "Asked to Delete References to Racism From Her Book, an Author Refused", present this story as

an example of how the culture wars behind a surge in book banning in schools has reached publishers

And that's all true but... Scholastic has always been this way, and it's always been extremely damaging. In 2009, they told Lauren Myracle to remove the lesbian parents from Love Ya Bunches. Myracle refused, there was an internet outcry, and Scholastic agreed to sell the book but not in elementary schools. This is Scholastic: they have immense market power in the US, and they use it to force vanilla conservative values down people's throats.

And the current fight is obviously more important. The culture war in the US is existential and life threatening. I get it! Nevertheless, it's annoying to see Scholastic's long-standing love of censorship framed as somehow the fault of Ron De Santis and Greg Abbott. When this nonsense is over, if there's still a children's book public industry left standing in the US, if there's still a US, we need to fight the censorial urges of companies like Scholastic anyway. The GOP is ginning up a culture war out of pure unadulterated awfulness, whereas Scholastic has only ever done it for profit, but that doesn't make it okay.

People are overthinking alt text. The guidance is pretty simple for normal images:

1. Have alt text on your images.
2. If the image is purely decorative, like a curly line, space-filler clip art, or redundant with text, then the alt should be alt="". But it should still be present.
3. Otherwise, briefly describe the part of the image that's relevant to sighted readers in the context in which you are choosing to post it. This is up to you; you are the one who finds this image interesting. This usually, but not always, includes any visible text on the image.
4. You don't need to say "image of".
5. If you need something very long (eg. for a chart or an infographic), put it in plain text somewhere, either immediately below the image or linked immediately below it. That helps sighted people, too.
6. Don't include information that's not available to sighted people looking at the picture. The alt is not a caption. Information like "generated with midjourney", "taken with a Canon 400", "me and elvis taking his Jet down to Las Vegas" are all captions, not alt. Put them in visible text near the image. (The exception is images of clearly identifiable objects which sighted people will be expected to recognize without more information: "The Mona Lisa", "The Eiffel Tower" are reasonable alt.)
7. Don't use it for punchlines! The alt has a purpose! (You can be witty, as long as you don't disrupt that purpose.)

There you go. That's it!

(It gets more complex for SVG and images/sprites placed with CSS, but the principal is the same.)

I've been fascinated to watch, first as people discovered alt text at twitter and later at mastodon, how the one point I've seen people be absolutely resistant to learning is that alt text is for describing the image. It's not for:

• punchlines
• sourcing and credits
• metadata
• extra jokes
• full newsy image captions
• information repeated in a visible caption
• excessive interpretation

Not to say alt text can't have flavor (which implies some interpretation). But folks are massively resistant to learning the two vital points about alt text: that its job is to describe the visual image, and that not everyone can access it so you never use it for information everyone should be able to read.

I don't mean resistant to writing alt text that follows that simple guideline. I mean, folks insist on arguing with blind folks and accessibility experts about the purpose.

I have at least some anecdata tying this stubbornness to these two sites with UIs exposing the alt text to sighted users. So this tool that I would have sworn a few years ago would improve alt creation, I think has made sighted image creators think alt is a toy for them.

I suppose I shouldn't be surprised. I remember the debates over userpic title and alt attributes here at dreamwidth. It took a lot of debate to get to the point where understood they were for different audiences and should be constructed differently. (Although, hmph, that seems to have been reverted at some point, I wonder why?)

From heydon, What Happened To Text Inputs.

I cannot yell loudly enough that (thoughtless, ill-considered) innovation and standing out are nearly always incompatible with usability, user experience, and accessibility. Web designers and front end devs who don't have a functionality-first attitude need a new career, or they need to do work on art projects instead of usable websites. Heydon yells this with the assistance of wolves and cursing, so maybe more people will watch and pay attention.

This exchange on twitter (via the Internet Archive for obvious reasons) made me laugh:

transcribed

Quoted Tweet from Zoë Schiffer (ZoeSchiffer):

Elon Musk is also asking for up 10 screenshots of the "most salient lines of code" from Twitter engineers

Quote tweet from Ed Zitron (edzitron):

anyone who understands coding (I do not): this is dumb right. This is a silly request? Why is it silly? please help me

Reply from Lemurdusa (lemurdank):

This is like asking a librarian for their favourite numbers in the dewy decimal system

Because I'm a librarian and a programmer, and yeah, my response to both questions is to look at you funny.

(As a programmer, because some of my best solo work isn't my lines of code, it's architecture of the system. And the lines of code I'm most proud of are either clever (clever code is often dangerous), or a convoluted and hideous hack to deal with a shitty system. Also who thinks of specific lines of code in complex systems? Probably any specific "salient lines of code" I could pick out are in silly personal side projects; half of what I write in a professional capacity is practically boilerplate. In the repository of all the lines of code ever written, the expertise of the programmer -- picking the right ones and putting them in order -- is what differentiates the programmer from GitHub Copilot.)

(As a librarian because, seriously, the Dewey Decimal System? Really? Library of Congress, obviously.)

(Also it's 398.2, obviously.)

If had a platform read by people in tech too young to have gone through a downturn before, here's what I'd say.

1. It sucks, and I'm sorry. Even if it's a good layoff for you, that works in your favor, and that you knew was coming, it still sucks. It's okay to feel some kind of way about it.

2. Keep up old the ex-old-job people social networks that aren't actively dangerous or toxic for you. I got my first post-layoff job when I went out to lunch with former colleagues from the position where I was laid off and they asked me to work at their new place. Every ex-old-job community is going to be full of people who successfully leapt to a new place which, by definition, is hiring.

3. Don't sign anything without a lawyer's eyes. When I got laid off the second time, a local labor lawyer gave me a free consult on the severance package. And really think about the math; especially if you have medical insurance from another source, the severance the offer you is often not worth the NDA, non-disparagement, and arbitration clauses.

4. You will get a good job again. You have skills and connections. It might be rough in the meantime, but you will.

5. There's still plenty of remote jobs. And contrary to what VCs will claim, most companies don't actually think you're smarter just because you live near them. If your needs, family, or support networks don't tie you to living in a place where the cost of living is unsustainable for you, you don't need to live there. The rent is too damn high everywhere, but you'd be amazed at how far a tech salary will take you in most parts of the country.

6. Every large company hires tech people, and bigger companies are often much better employers than startups. Companies that are great employers, especially for people from underrepresented groups, are often stodgy and boring, with no interesting vibe. Show me a company with an established HR department staffed by professionals and a risk-averse legal department, and I'll show you a place that nobody on social media thinks is interesting at all. Look for lists put together by polling actual employees, not by random PR departments.

   • America's Best Employers For Women 2022
   • Best Places to Work - 2021 - Disability:IN
   • The World's Top Female-Friendly Companies 2022
   • America's Best Employers For Diversity 2022
   • America's Best Large Employers 2022
   • 100 Best Companies to Work For | Fortune

7. If you're young and in tech, there's a reasonable chance you've been paid in Ludicrous Mode for your entire career, and may never really have struggled for cash. It's fine if that's you! Just know that there are skills you can learn. If you have friends on the other side of our economy's awful divide, they might have good advice. But there are plenty of little things you can do to save money. They can't move someone up a tier in our fucked up economy, but they can help you learn to budget. For example, the tech industry has taught you to buy subscriptions things that already existed free or cheaper, in some cases (eg. audible vs. the library).

8. Don't do a bootcamp to get more skills; many of them are ridiculously expensive scams that don't teach much. Look into your local community colleges, which often teach more for a fraction of the cost.

9. You don't owe the old place any loyalty. Leak to the press if it gives you satisfaction. Just, leak to someone with a track record of not throwing sources to the wolves. You don't want a rep and you don't want to paste a target on your back, especially if you're dealing with the world's richest man in the middle of a spite-fueled tempter tantrum.

An interesting side effect of being at the intersection of Epub standards, publishing, programming, librarianship, children's/YA literature, and open access is that I am absolutely positive that I have many colleagues who have always gotten along wonderfully with one another professionally and philosophically who nonetheless have vehement, diametrically opposed opinions about Hachette v. Internet Archive.

(Disclaimer: I wrote a package for the IA which (at least at one time) was part of their pipeline for making their scanned books accessible: abbyy-to-epub3. I don't know if they're still using any variants of that code.)

In any case while I have my own opinions about the case,^[1], I find it absolutely wild how many authors are defending the current library ebook-rental model, which is unsustainable, unaffordable for many libraries, and is not a massive royalty generator for most authors (in the US, anyway, which doesn't have a Public Lending Right). Regardless of the ethics and legality of the IA's model -- which is not at all an easy answer! copyright in the digital realm is hard^[4], as we all know! -- the current library ebook licensing model is awful for libraries.

---

[1]: Mostly that it's not cut and dried, but also most individuals who are angry at the IA should actually try the experience of checking out a book from the IA and they'll realize that it's hardly going to be anyone's first choice if an actual print book or ebook is available and accessible^[2] from the library or for sale. And in fact it does not seem to be anyone's first choice, in that sales appear to be unaffected.^[3] In general the terms of the program are even more restrictive than they were two years ago, when TechDirt wrote about how everyone misunderstands what it is.

[2]: It's worth noting that many of the IA's CDL books are out of print and have no ebook edition, and unless the reader has access to the NLS (in the US), the IA is one of the only ways to get a vaguely accessible Epub or DAISY copy, or a copy in your location at all.

(You're welcome. Or, I guess, I'm sorry, if you've seen the quality of the theoretically-accessible epub, which is the best you can do in an automated pipeline with limited budget, because accessibility costs money.)

There's no other way you can see my dad featured in this very out-of-print book from the Boston Children's Museum, unless you have access to one of the 145 libraries with a copy, that's for sure.

[3]:

Indeed, the publishers have not offered any evidence that Internet Archive’s digital lending, or anyone else’s, has cost them one penny in revenues . In fact, their overall profits have grown substantially, and sales of the works at issue in this case appear to have increased . Plaintiffs’ own witnesses admitted that their theory of harm is “speculative” and simply an “inference one could make.” And tellingly, Plaintiffs specifically instructed their expert not to try to measure any economic harm.

Hachette v. Internet Archive - Internet Archive's Memorandum for Summary Judgment

[4]: It's not clear what the repercussions to the rest of our online lives would be if the US government decided to rethink the First Sale doctrine, but it would certainly be extremely far-reaching to all of us.

( Content note: mention of multiple genocides of the last century. )

The weirdest thing for me about the continuing existence of the Free Software Foundation is that by one metric (the propagation of libre free software licenses as part of the global computer ecosystem) they've been wildly and completely successful, and yet by their own metric they've been so overwhelmingly defeated that the GNU fields have basically been sown with salt. And it's all their own doing, as well; if the FSF had spent the last decade or so being more than an 501(c)(3) vanity project to entertain RMS, then maybe they could have helped the actually useful organizations fight against the world of proprietary, closed, non-federatable systems, in which the actual threats have nothing to do with eeeeevil open source, non-libre licenses, but have to do with a massive world in which all that FLOSS software underlies surveillance capitalism and horrific concentration of capital. They could have fought more effectively against a world where instead of hooking up your libre RSS reader and your libre chat client, you have to install proprietary tools to do the simplest job, if they didn't think there were few greater sins than collaborating with someone using a *gasp* Apache license -- or worse, a proprietary software package a user is required to use to do their job.

Anyway, as I've pointed out before, RMS once said, when someone asked about accessibility in free software,

"the abolitionists did not seek to give people the power to make choices about freedom or slavery. They sought to abolish slavery."

tl;dr the FSF can eat my shorts, emacs sucks, and vim is great.

The Color Specialist

The color specialist has no opinions about where to put the bikeshed, what materials to use, where buy the paint, or how to fund raise for its construction. The color specialist will never volunteer to help with construction, to leaflet the neighborhood about the bikeshed raising party, or to take minutes at the Bikeshed Design Group meetings. The color specialist will not buy the paint, drive someone else to the paint store, or look up the paint store's hours on the internet. The color specialist will, however, wait until the paint has been applied and then raise furious points of order about the use of eggshell over semigloss finishes.

The Serious Reader

The serious reader is up on all the terms. She reads the important bloggers and name drops them constantly. Sometimes she even reads print books and magazines, if she's old enough. She uses the vocabulary of her heroes' blog posts, whether or not it applies correctly or completely to the situation. The serious reader loves to rules lawyer any general philosophy or principle, turning a general guideline into an unbreakable rule. She disapproves of any technology that her heroes dislike, and loves what they love--unless they advocate against her favorite design pattern. Then she digs up some contradictory articles pointing out that they are wrong, wrong, wrong.

Émile

Émile has had a natural tech education, created by reading nothing at all. He learned on the job and is uninterested in any technology he's never seen before. If it has always worked before, it's correct, regardless of whether it's sustainable, accessible, or secure. Any thought of best practice is offensive to Émile; what we do here is best.

The Marginalized Apologist

The marginalized apologist jumps into conversations to tell other marginalized people they haven't experienced harassment or trauma. The marginalized apologist points to successful marginalized people as evidence that the harassment has never happened, while telling everyone else that they should get over it, be quiet, and take their complaints to private conversations. The marginalized apologist is an amazing gaslighter, saying things like "what do you mean a well-documented history of harassment?" about people who are on video being horrible at tech conferences for decades. The marginalized apologist just wants us all to get along and talk about the technology.

The Natural Born Expert

The natural born expert turns up out of nowhere in a small tech community, known to nobody in the community, suddenly running a consultancy or trying to replace an incredibly well-established spec. The natural born expert isn't trying to make change by learning the tech or networking or getting involved with the professional community. Instead, they are representing themselves to customers and the press as someone who knows what they are talking about. Actual experts, who can clearly see that they are lying, only sometimes make a dent in the natural born experts convictions and public positioning.

The Evangelist

Try telling the evangelist that she is as passionate about her religion in exactly the same fashion as adherents of the opposite religion. Try telling her that she sounds exactly like worshippers of That Other Founder, or The Enemy Product. She won't believe you. Then she will tell you she refuses to support your browser / operating system / assistive technology / car, because it's evil and bad, and also all the security problems with the product and people she perfers are irrelevant, because Reasons.

The Cat Herder Who Used To Be A Cat

The cat herder was a cat a long time ago, even though they spend all day herding cats these days. They are positive that they can tell actually cats how to eat kibble and meow and lick their own asses, but it turns out that former cats have forgotten how to do all those things. They keep lying down in the bowl of kibble and making a mess, then scolding the cats for eating their kibble wrong.

The Anti-Patternist

The anti-patternist has all kinds of words to tell you what you're doing wrong or what they're doing right. If they can link to a wikipedia page for that Absolutely Proves Their Unassailable Point, so much the better. The anti-patternist can happily explain how whatever your code is doing, it's bloat or creeping featurism or input kludge or not DRY or ignoring YAGNI or insufficiently KISS. If there's an acronym and it's obscure, it's great. If the anti-pattern has a very rude name (object orgy, code smell, cargo cult) that's best of all. The code doesn't have to be an example of the anti-pattern at all.

The Javascript Programmer

'Nuff said.

It's been a long week.