You guys, it is so damn awesome to have my writing mojo back.

The Epic Romance is now 12,000+, but I took a break from it today to start writing some porn for the kink meme (1,000+ words so far). And there are a couple of other prompts there I'm itching to write for. Need more hours in the day!

Also this weekend I started futzing around with developing a custom skin for the AO3 (more info on personalised AO3 skins here), which I am growing increasingly fond of, though I discover re-used classes where I don't want them to be every ten minutes and am thus spending half my time happily coding and half tearing my hair out.

I also got it into my head that I might make that "a model, idiot" Eoin Macken icon, but upon doing a google image search, became quickly overwhelmed by THE GIANT NIPPLES. Google image searching also turned up this photo of EM & Mr James, which, WHAT? (I'm sure I'm already late to the party that is that photo, but still, allow me to have my moment of WHAT?)

Anyway, that's all I got. Do I have to go to work tomorrow? I want to stay at home and write trashy smut instead. CanIcanI?

Discovering this in a template for one of work's webapps:

  <table>
   <tr>
     <td width="99%"><div class="header1">Page Heading</div></td>
     <td width="1%"><img src="static/images/1x1_transparent.gif"/></td>
     <td width="150"> </td>
   </tr>
 </table>

Yes. That is the markup they have given a PAGE HEADING. It serves no other purpose. JUST A PAGE HEADING.

ETA: for those playing at home, here's what a standards-compliant, semantically marked-up, beautiful page heading looks like under its skirts:

<h1>Page Heading</h1>


So, people like my story! Yay!

Though, my half-baked theory that the more plot = the less comments seems... pretty correct, actually. Hahaha...haaah... <-- somewhat exhausted laughter because I heart feedback but omg writing porn is GRUELLING.

ETA: okay, writing the above makes me SO PARANOID because it's this THING again where if you talk about what it's like to receive feedback then you are being precious. And yet that site of engagement is such a complex one that I wish wish WISH fandom as a whole was more open to meta'ing and being frank about it (I know, I have said this before, but then I get - hah - paranoid, and lose my nerve and delete after all). But I am trying to be brave, and not think about being silently judged. CAN WE PLEASE, AS A COMMUNITY, JUST TALK ABOUT IT?

Ahem.


Anyway. Speaking of writing stuff, I am going to re-do the Nerdy PSA into a v.2, seeing as lots of people are still using it and I think I could tidy it up a bit and integrate a bunch of stuff left in the comments. If you have anything to add/weigh in on wrt accessibility and casual coding that isn't covered there, drop me a comment/PM/pigeon?

omg productivity!

Most people know enough quick-and-dirty html to give their LJ posts a wee bit more formatting without having to work in the dreaded Rich Text Format.

But DID YOU KNOW that there's a right way and a wrong way to use these wee bits of formatting and functionality?

The main one I see most often is using <i> </i> for italics and <b> </b> for bold.

Yes, this will visually represent italics and bold in pretty much all browsers, but if you want to be accessibility friendly, you should:

use <em> </em> for italics, and
use <strong> </strong> for bold.

Visually, the result doesn't look any different - italics and bold! - however, the accessibility point here is that not everyone 'reads' information on web pages the same way (with their eyes on a screen displaying a browser). The 'em' and 'strong' tags are accessible to other technology such as screen readers, which provide an audio verbalisation of what is being displayed on the user's screen.

The screenreader technology interprets 'em' and 'strong' as requiring emphasis, and delivers them thus. It will not recognise 'i' and 'b', therefore not translating that bit of formatting to the user who is not accessing your post visually.

It may seem like a drag at first (I have to type 'strong' instead of just 'b'?? oh, man!), but really, you get used to it very fast with the added bonus of being a good netizen. After all, you *do* want more people reading your post/blog/story, right? Frankly, this way is just as quick-and-dirty, once you get in the habit of it.

( A few other tips for making your usual quick-and-dirty markup a bit more accessible )


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A note on intended use of this PSA

This post does not set out to explore and explain the ins and outs of accessibility for people building websites from scratch. There are a range of resources on the web out there that'll do that for you.

My intention with this post is to provide a few easily-understood tips for people posting to services like LJ and Dreamwidth, who would like to know more about how to make their posts accessible, but don't necessarily have the technical confidence or knowledge to dive into the world of coding tutorials on the web.

Please be aware that the guidelines described above do not encompass the extent of accessible use for the tags - for example, use of the 'alt' tag in images can differ a lot depending on what the image is being used for. I've not gone into it here because I'm writing with the idea that the people reading will be solely using the img tag to post pictures to their blogs, rather than building websites that use graphics.

If you're serious about accessibility and are writing your own code off LJ/Dth, I strongly recommend reading up on more accessibility guides. The W3C is the hub for this; if you find it too dry or hard to get into, just google "accessible code" and browse through the results.



Feel free to correct me if any of the above needs correcting, or suggest any more tips I should have included. (With the understanding that I've tried to go with layman's terms here, for people without geeky motivators or expertise.)