Blog - Page 26 of 31 - Rachele DiTullio

Lights Out!

Rachele DiTullio2 February 201625 April 2024In Real Lifegood

Just a quick post today, folks.

The city power company mailed us a fridge magnet with the phone number to call in the event of a power outage. If the lights have been on for awhile, and then go out—presumably because of a power outage—the magnet glows in the dark. Whoever thought of that is awesome.

side by side picture of a fridge magnet that glows in the dark — *Glow-in-the-dark fridge magnet*

The only room for improvement I could see is having just the power outage number glow, and not the customer service number. Since both numbers are the same size and the text explaining what each is for is very small, this could be confusing in the dark. Otherwise, good job.

Sharing Images and Videos Isn’t Inclusive

Rachele DiTullio26 January 201615 December 2023Websiteaccessibility

A huge part of social media platforms is the ability to share images and videos. But I’ve yet to see one that takes people with visual impairments into account by enabling users to add alt tags and descriptions to multimedia assets.

Let’s look at Twitter for a moment. People more and more are using using images and the words within them to supplement their tweets.

My cat is sad because he announced to people he was “seizing the day” but everyone just pointed at him and laughed. pic.twitter.com/bBX9bV8asv

— WHY MY CAT IS SAD (@MYSADCAT) January 26, 2016

The alt tag for all Twitter images is “Embedded image permalink”. Hardly descriptive or useful when every image has the same alt text. In the Tweet above, we see a cat but also words and meanings in the objects around him: a sign with YOLNT (you only live nine times); a book by Jonathan Frazen titled Freedom; and a bottle of Gordon’s gin. People who can’t see this image miss out on much of the intended meaning of the tweet.

In some instances, the entire purpose of the tweet is contained in the image. Look at this example from The Oatmeal where he has attached an image containing an entire comic. (Even providing a link to his website wouldn’t help because he does not provide alt text for his comics.)

My analysis of a sneeze VS a toot pic.twitter.com/YayicCmwzD

— Matthew Inman (@Oatmeal) January 26, 2016

Sharing platforms really need to enable users to provide alt text for images and descriptions for videos, even if they don’t choose to use them.

Changing User Names

Rachele DiTullio19 January 201617 July 2021Dataaccounts

This is a call for developers and system designers to allow user names to change while maintaining the user’s account integrity. There are many instances where someone’s name might change, but issues seems to disproportionately affect women.

At my work, when a woman gets married, her system login gets updated with her new last name. However, not all internal systems are capable of accepting an updated user name. This causes the user to have a new account, and thus no access to her old data.

This seem abundantly silly, easy to plan for, and necessary so as to be inclusive to anyone undergoing a name change whether due to marriage, divorce, or other personal reason.

The Twitter model is representative of how this should work. Users can at any time change their user names or email addresses instead of having to create a new account or go through some process of trying to combine accounts. Developers and designers, take note!