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I still use Bandcamp almost exclusively to buy music, and keep a big library of MP3s. The downside is that this marks me as a weirdo, but otherwise it’s great and has been working well for me. Since I last wrote about it, Bandcamp was acquired by Epic games (?) and then acquired from them by Songtradr, and its employees are trying to get recognized as a union. Times are changing and Bandcamp is no longer a lovely indie company, but it’s still a heck of a lot better than Spotify. People (who?) are sharing their ‘Spotify wrapped’ auto-generated compilations and I wanted the same, for my Bandcamp purchases, so I built it on Val Town. You can create your own! Or edit the code of the tool that generates them. Because of API limitations – really, the absence of an API – it requires you to copy & paste content from your purchases page, but isn’t copy-and-paste really a kind of API? Anyway: Vampire Empire / Born For Loving You by Big Thief Patterns by Pool Boys Acadia by Yasmin...
2 months ago

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Recently

I am not going to repeat the news. But man, things are really, really bad and getting worse in America. It’s all so unendingly stupid and evil. The tech industry is being horrible, too. Wishing strength to the people who are much more exposed to the chaos than I am. Reading A Confederacy of Dunces was such a perfect novel. It was pure escapism, over-the-top comedy, and such an unusual artifact, that was sadly only appreciated posthumously. Very earnestly I believe that despite greater access to power and resources, the box labeled “socially acceptable ways to be a man” is much smaller than the box labeled “socially acceptable ways to be a woman.” This article on the distinction between patriarchy and men was an interesting read. With the whole… politics out there, it’s easy to go off the rails with any discussion about men and women and whether either have it easy or hard. The same author wrote this good article about declining male enrollment in college. I think both are worth a read. Whenever I read this kind of article, I’m reminded of how limited and mostly fortunate my own experience is. There’s a big difference, I think, in how vigorously you have to perform your gender in some red state where everyone owns a pickup truck, versus a major city where the roles are a little more fluid. Plus, I’ve been extremely fortunate to have a lot of friends and genuine open conversations about feelings with other men. I wish that was the norm! On Having a Maximum Wealth was right up my alley. I’m reading another one of the new-French-economist books right now, and am still fascinated by the prospect of wealth taxes. My friend David has started a local newsletter for Richmond, Virginia, and written a good piece about public surveillance. Construction Physics is consistently great, and their investigation of why skyscrapers are all glass boxes is no exception. Watching David Lynch was so great. We watched his film Lost Highway a few days after he passed, and it was even better than I had remembered it. Norm Macdonald’s extremely long jokes on late-night talk shows have been getting me through the days. Listening This song by the The Hard Quartet – a supergroup of Emmett Kelly, Stephen Malkmus (Pavement), Matt Sweeney and Jim White. It’s such a loving, tender bit of nonsense, very golden-age Pavement. They also have this nice chill song: I came across this SML album via Hearing Things, which has been highlighting a lot of good music. Small Medium Large by SML It’s a pretty good time for these independent high-quality art websites. Colossal has done the same for the art world and highlights good new art: I really want to make it out to see the Nick Cave (not the musician) art show while it’s in New York.

a week ago 9 votes
2025 Predictions

I was just enjoying Simon Willison’s predictions and, heck, why not. 1: The web becomes adversarial to AI The history of search engines is sort of an arms race between websites and search engines. Back in the early 2000s, juicing your ranking on search engines was pretty easy - you could put a bunch of junk in your meta description tags or put some text with lots of keywords on each page and make that text really tiny and transparent so users didn’t notice it but Google did. I doubt that Perplexity’s userbase is that big but Perplexity users are probably a lot wealthier on average than Google’s, and there’s some edge to be achieved by getting Perplexity to rank your content highly or recommend your website. I’ve already noticed some search results including links to content farms. There are handful of startups that do this already, but the prediction is: the average marketing exec at a consumer brand will put some of their budget to work on fooling AI. That means serving different content to AI scrapers, maybe using some twist on Glaze and other forms of adversarial image processing to make their marketing images more tantalizing to the bots. Websites will be increasingly aware that they’re being consumed by AI, and they will have a vested interest in messing with the way AI ‘perceives’ them. As Simon notes in his predictions, AIs are gullible: and that’s before there are widespread efforts to fool them. There’s probably some way to detect an AI scraper, give it a special payload, and trick it into recommending your brand of razors whenever anyone asks, and once someone figures it out this will be the marketing trend of the decade. 2: Copyright nihilism breeds a return to physical-only media The latest lawsuit about Meta’s use of pirated books, allegedly with Mark Zuckerberg’s explicit permission, if true, will be another reason to lose faith in the American legal system’s intellectual property system entirely. We’ve only seen it used to punish individuals and protect corporations, regardless of the facts and damages, and there’s no reason to believe it will do anything different (POSIWID). The result, besides an uptick in nihilism, could be a rejuvenation of physical-only releases. New albums only released on vinyl. Books only available in paperback format. More private screenings of hip movies. When all digital records are part of the ‘training dataset,’ a niche, hipster subset will be drawn to things that aren’t as easily captured and reproduced. This is parallel, to the state of closed-source models from Anthropic or OpenAI. They’re never distributed or run locally. They exist as bytes on some hard drive and in some massive GPU’s memory in some datacenter, and there aren’t Bittorrents pirating them because they’re kept away from people, not because of the power of copyright law. What can be accessed can be copied, so secrecy and inaccessibility is valuable. 3: American tech companies will pull out of Europe because they want to do acquisitions The incoming political administration will probably bring an end to Lina Khan’s era of the FTC, and era in which the FTC did stuff. We will go back to a ‘hands off’ policy in which big companies will acquire each other pretty often without much government interference. But, even in Khan’s era, the real nail in the coffin for one of the biggest acquisitions - Adobe’s attempt to buy Figma – was regulators from the EU and UK. Those regulators will probably keep doing stuff, so I think it’s likely that the next time some company wants to acquire a close competitor, they just close up shop in the EU, maybe with a long-term plan to return. 4: The tech industry’s ‘DEI backlash’ will run up against reality The reality is that the gap between women and men in terms of college degrees is really big: “Today, 47% of U.S. women ages 25 to 34 have a bachelor’s degree, compared with 37% of men.” And that a great deal of the tech industry’s workforce is made of up highly-skilled people who are on H-1B visas. The synthesis will be that tech workers will be more diverse, in some respects, but by stripping away the bare-bones protections around their presence, companies will keep them in a more vulnerable and exploitable position. But hard right-wingers will have plenty to complain about because these companies will continue to look less white and male, because the labor pool is not that. 5: Local-first will have a breakthrough moment I think that Zero Sync has a good chance at cracking this really hard problem. So does electric and maybe jazz, too. The gap between the dream of local-first apps and the reality has been wide, but I think projects are starting to come to grips with a few hard truths: Full decentralization is not worth it. You need to design for syncing a subset of the data, not the entire dataset. You need an approach to schema evolution and permission checking These systems are getting there. We could see a big, Figma-level application built on Zero this year that will set the standard for future web application architecture. 6: Local, small AI models will be a big deal Embedding models are cool as heck. New text-to-speech and speech-to-text models are dramatically better than what came before. Image segmentation is getting a lot better. There’s a lot of stuff that is coming out of this boom that will be able to scale down to a small model that runs on a phone, browser, or at least on our own web servers without having to call out to OpenAI or Anthropic APIs. It’ll make sense for costs, performance, and security. Candle is a really interesting effort in this area. Mini predictions Substack will re-bundle news. People are tired of subscribing to individual newsletters. Substack will introduce some ~$20/month plan that gives you access to all of the newsletters that participate in this new pricing model. TypeScript gets a zeitwork equivalent and lots of people use it. Same as how prettier brought full code formatting from TypeScript, autoloading is the kind of thing that once you have it, it’s magic. What if you could just write <SomeComponent /> in your React app and didn’t have to import it? I think this would be extremely addictive and catch on fast. Node.js will fend off its competitors. Even though Val Town is built around Deno’s magic, I’ve been very impressed that Node.js is keeping up. They’ve introduced permissions, just like Deno, and native TypeScript support, just like the upstarts. Bun and Deno will keep gaining adherents, but Node.js has a long future ahead of it. Another US city starts seriously considering congestion pricing. For all the chatter and terrible discourse around the plan, it is obviously a good idea and it will work, as it has in every other case, and inspire other cities to do the same. Stripe will IPO. They’re still killing it, but they’re killing it in an established, repeatable way that public markets will like, and will let up the pressure on the many, many people who own their stock.

a month ago 35 votes
Recently 2024

Happy end-of-2024! It’s been a pretty good year overall. I’m thankful. There’s no way that I’ll be able to remember and carve out the time around New Years to write this, so here’s some end-of-year roundup, ahead of schedule! Running This was my biggest year for running on record: 687 miles as of today. I think the biggest difference with this year was just that nothing stood in the way of my being pretty consistent and putting in the miles: the weather has been mild, I haven’t had any major injuries, and long runs have felt pretty good. I was happy to hit a half-marathon PR (1:36:21), but my performance in 5Ks was far short of the goal of sub-20 – partly because Brooklyn’s wonderful 5K series was run at the peak of summer, with multiple races at over 85°F. I learned the value of good lightweight running gear: Bakline’s singlets and Goodr sunglasses were super helpful in getting me through the summer. Work Val Town raised a seed round and hired a bunch of excellent people. We moved into a new office of our own, which has a great vibe. It’s been good: we’re doing a lot of ground-up work wrangling cgroups and low-level worker scheduling, and a lot of UX-in work, just trying to make it a pleasant tool. Frankly, with every product I’ve worked on, I’ve never had a feeling that it was good enough, and accordingly, for me, Val Town feels like it has a long way to go. It’s probably a good tendency to be sort of unsatisfied and motivated to constantly improve. New York It’s still such a wonderful place to live. Late this year, I’ve been rediscovering my obsession with cycling, and realizing how much I whiffed the opportunity to ride more when I lived in San Francisco. I guess that’s the first time I felt genuinely nostalgic for the West coast. I miss DC a bit too: it’s one of the few cities where my friends have been able to stay in the city proper while raising children, and I miss the accessible, underdog punk scene. But Brooklyn is just a remarkable place to live. My walk score is 100. The degree to which people here are in the city because they want to be, not because they have to, shapes so much of what makes it great. Other ‘metrics’ Relative to my old level obsession about self-quantification, my ‘metrics’ are pretty moderate now. Everything’s just backward-looking: I’m not paying much attention to the numbers as I go, it’s just fun to look at them year-over-year trends. That said, this was a lackluster year for reading: just 18 books so far. I think I just read an above-average number of books that I didn’t enjoy very much. Next year I’m going to return to authors who I already love, and stay away from genres that – the data shows – I don’t like. Whereas this was a banner year for watching movies: not great! Next year, I want to flip these results. Of everything I saw, Kinds of Kindness will probably stick with me the most. Placemark It seems like a decade ago that I released Placemark as open source software, as developing it as a closed-source SaaS application for a few years. But I did that in January. There have been a few great open source contributions since then, but it’s pretty quiet. Which is okay, somewhat expected: there is no hidden crowd of people with extra time on their hands and unending enthusiasm for ‘geospatial software’ waiting to contribute to that kind of project. Placemark is also, even with my obsessive focus on simplicity, a pretty complicated codebase. The learning curve is probably pretty significant. Maps are a challenging problem area: that’s what attracts a lot of people to them, but people who use maps persistently have the feeling that it couldn’t be that complicated, which means that few users convert into contributors. There are a few prominent efforts chasing similar goals as Placemark: Atlas.co is aiming to be an all-in-one editing/analysis platform, Felt a cloud-native GIS platform, and then there are plenty of indiehackers-style projects. I hope these projects take off! Figma plugins I also kept maintaining the Figma plugins I developed under the Placemark name. Potentially a lot of people are using them, but I don’t really know. The problem with filling in water shapes in the plugins is still unsolved: it’s pretty hard and I haven’t had the time or motivation to fix it. The most energy into those plugins this year, unfortunately, was when someone noticed that the dataset I was using - Natural Earth – marked Crimea as part of Russia. Which obviously: I don’t draw the countries in datasets, but it’s a reasonable thing to point out (but to assume that the author is malicious was a real downer, again, like, I don’t draw the countries). This decision from Natural Earth’s maintainer is heavily discussed and they aren’t planning on changing it, so I switched to world-atlas, which doesn’t have that problem. Which was fine, but a reminder of the days when I worked on maps full-time and this kind of unexpected “you’re the baddie” realization came up much more often. Sometimes it was silly: people who complain about label priority in the sense of “why, at zoom level 3, does one country’s name show up and not anothers?” was just silly. The answer, ahem, was that there isn’t enough space for the two labels and one country had a higher population or a geometry that gave their label more distance from the other country’s centroid. But a lot of the territorial disputes are part of people’s long cultural, political, military history and the source of intergenerational strife. Of course that’s serious stuff. Making a tool that shows a globe with labels on it will probably always trigger some sort of moment like that, and it’s a reason to not work on it that much because you’re bound to unintentionally step on something contentious. Other projects I released Obsidian Freeform, and have been using it a bit myself. Obsidian has really stuck for me. My vault is well over 2,000 notes, and I’ve created a daily note for almost every day for the last year. Freeform was a fun project and I have other ideas that are Obsidian plugin-shaped, though I’ve become a little bit let down by the plugin API - the fact that Obsidian-flavored-Markdown is nonstandard and the parser/AST is not accessible to plugins is a pretty big drawback for the kinds of things I want to build. Elsewhere recently I’ve been writing a bit: Recently I’ve written about dependency bloat and a developer analytics tool we built at Val Town, and started writing some supplementary documentation for Observable Plot about parts of its API that I think are unintuitive. On the micro blog, I wrote about not using GitHub Copilot and how brands should make a comeback. This blog got a gentle redesign in May, to show multiple categories of posts on the home page, and then in August I did a mass update to switch all YouTube embeds to lite-youtube-embed to make pages load faster. I’m still running Jekyll, like I have been for the last decade, and it works great. Oh, and I’ve basically stopped using Twitter and am only on Mastodon and Bluesky. Bluesky more than Mastodon recently because it seems like it’s doing a better job at attracting a more diverse community. I’m looking forward to 2025, to cycling a lot more and a new phase of startup-building. See you in the new year.

2 months ago 64 votes
Recently: Cycling and Autumn

I haven’t been posting much to the ‘main blog’ recently, but I have been keeping the micro blog updates humming. If you want more content in your RSS reader, you can subscribe to those posts, which are shorter, more scattered, and even less copyedited. It feels bad to have multiple “Recently” headings in the blog listing, so I’ll give them short subtitles from now on. Anyway, what’s up? October was all right. At Val Town, we spent a lot of time interviewing job candidates and improving the AI assistant, Townie. I also got some time to tackle long-awaited technical debt cleanups: I conquered the ‘big scary function’ that did the actual ‘running’ of val code. Cycling Outside of work, a lot of my October-related excitement was related to being outdoors. It’s been a great year for running – I just passed 600 miles so far and will probably hit 650 barring any injuries or life complications. But cycling is on the mind. We just rode the Old Croton Aqueduct trail from Ossining back to Brooklyn. It’s a fairly rough trail: plenty of rocks and terrain. Rideable on my ~32mm tires, but it’d be a lot easier with a mountain bike. We rode past some osage orange trees with their funky-looking and inedible fruit the size of large grapefruits. The trail passed right next to the Lyndhurst Estate, which was owned by a series of rich and powerful people, including Jay Gould, who is especially hated. Upstate, a lot of the attractions are like this, other big historic houses. The trail was mostly really beautiful, though the parts closer to Yonkers have a lot of trash. It’s much more popular with hikers than with cyclists. Even though bikes are explicitly permitted, locals seemed a little surprised by our presence, even though we were ringing bells, going slow, and making lots of space. It’s kind of funny to compare the general spatial awareness of people upstate to those in the city: we encountered a lot of people upstate who were standing in the center of the trail, completely zoned out and surprised by the presence of another human, and then on the way back were on city streets with four people within a few feet of us on foot, bikes, cars, scooters, all mostly aware and ready to silently negotiate how to move together through a shared space. I remarked that I think that when some people move out of the city because of the ‘inconvenience’, the inconvenience is people, and once you leave, you lose a certain ability to live around other people - from then on, you expect to have a suburban yard-sized perimeter around your personal space. Micro I wrote a lot on the microblog this month: about the Arc browser’s recent news that it’ll be abandoned, Reddit adopting Web Components, domain squatting, Python datascience tech, and Knip, a tool for finding dead code in TypeScript systems. Content I watched a bunch of films, which are on my Letterboxd, and the only new album on my rotation is Yasmin Williams’s Acadia: Acadia by Yasmin Williams This YouTube channel is showing all of the steps involved in doing a multi-day bikepacking trip through India. It’s a lot of fun: And that’s it for this month! I’ll write a full-fledged blog post one of these days.

3 months ago 50 votes

More in programming

How to select your first marketing channel

When you're brand new, how do you select your first marketing channel?

20 hours ago 4 votes
Europeans don't have or understand free speech

The new American vice president JD Vance just gave a remarkable talk at the Munich Security Conference on free speech and mass immigration. It did not go over well with many European politicians, some of which immediately proved Vance's point, and labeled the speech "not acceptable". All because Vance dared poke at two of the holiest taboos in European politics. Let's start with his points on free speech, because they're the foundation for understanding how Europe got into such a mess on mass immigration. See, Europeans by and large simply do not understand "free speech" as a concept the way Americans do. There is no first amendment-style guarantee in Europe, yet the European mind desperately wants to believe it has the same kind of free speech as the US, despite endless evidence to the contrary. It's quite like how every dictator around the world pretends to believe in democracy. Sure, they may repress the opposition and rig their elections, but they still crave the imprimatur of the concept. So too "free speech" and the Europeans. Vance illustrated his point with several examples from the UK. A country that pursues thousands of yearly wrong-speech cases, threatens foreigners with repercussions should they dare say too much online, and has no qualms about handing down draconian sentences for online utterances. It's completely totalitarian and completely nuts. Germany is not much better. It's illegal to insult elected officials, and if you say the wrong thing, or post the wrong meme, you may well find yourself the subject of a raid at dawn. Just crazy stuff. I'd love to say that Denmark is different, but sadly it is not. You can be put in prison for up to two years for mocking or degrading someone on the basis on their race. It recently become illegal to burn the Quran (which sadly only serves to legitimize crazy Muslims killing or stabbing those who do). And you may face up to three years in prison for posting online in a way that can be construed as morally supporting terrorism. But despite all of these examples and laws, I'm constantly arguing with Europeans who cling to the idea that they do have free speech like Americans. Many of them mistakenly think that "hate speech" is illegal in the US, for example. It is not. America really takes the first amendment quite seriously. Even when it comes to hate speech. Famously, the Jewish lawyers of the (now unrecognizable) ACLU defended the right of literal, actual Nazis to march for their hateful ideology in the streets of Skokie, Illinois in 1979 and won. Another common misconception is that "misinformation" is illegal over there too. It also is not. That's why the Twitter Files proved to be so scandalous. Because it showed the US government under Biden laundering an illegal censorship regime -- in grave violation of the first amendment -- through private parties, like the social media networks. In America, your speech is free to be wrong, free to be hateful, free to insult religions and celebrities alike. All because the founding fathers correctly saw that asserting the power to determine otherwise leads to a totalitarian darkness. We've seen vivid illustrations of both in recent years. At the height of the trans mania, questioning whether men who said they were women should be allowed in women's sports or bathrooms or prisons was frequently labeled "hate speech". During the pandemic, questioning whether the virus might have escaped from a lab instead of a wet market got labeled "misinformation". So too did any questions about the vaccine's inability to stop spread or infection. Or whether surgical masks or lock downs were effective interventions. Now we know that having a public debate about all of these topics was of course completely legitimate. Covid escaping from a lab is currently the most likely explanation, according to American intelligence services, and many European countries, including the UK, have stopped allowing puberty blockers for children. Which brings us to that last bugaboo: Mass immigration. Vance identified it as one of the key threats to Europe at the moment, and I have to agree. So should anyone who've been paying attention to the statistics showing the abject failure of this thirty-year policy utopia of a multi-cultural Europe. The fast changing winds in European politics suggest that's exactly what's happening. These are not separate issues. It's the lack of free speech, and a catastrophically narrow Overton window, which has led Europe into such a mess with mass immigration in the first place. In Denmark, the first popular political party that dared to question the wisdom of importing massive numbers of culturally-incompatible foreigners were frequently charged with claims of racism back in the 90s. The same "that's racist!" playbook is now being run on political parties across Europe who dare challenge the mass immigration taboo. But making plain observations that some groups of immigrants really do commit vastly more crime and contribute vastly less economically to society is not racist. It wasn't racist when the Danish Folkparty did it in Denmark in the 1990s, and it isn't racist now when the mainstream center-left parties have followed suit. I've drawn the contrast to Sweden many times, and I'll do it again here. Unlike Denmark, Sweden kept its Overton window shut on the consequences of mass immigration all the way up through the 90s, 00s, and 10s. As a prize, it now has bombs going off daily, the European record in gun homicides, and a government that admits that the immigrant violence is out of control. The state of Sweden today is a direct consequence of suppressing any talk of the downsides to mass immigration for decades. And while that taboo has recently been broken, it may well be decades more before the problems are tackled at their root. It's tragic beyond belief. The rest of Europe should look to Sweden as a cautionary tale, and the Danish alternative as a precautionary one. It's never too late to fix tomorrow. You can't fix today, but you can always fix tomorrow. So Vance was right to wag his finger at all this nonsense. The lack of free speech and the problems with mass immigration. He was right to assert that America and Europe has a shared civilization to advance and protect. Whether the current politicians of Europe wants to hear it or not, I'm convinced that average Europeans actually are listening.

yesterday 5 votes
Using Xcode's AI Is Like Pair Programming With A Monkey

I've never used any other AI "assistant," although I've talked with those who have, most of whom are not very positive. My experience using Xcode's AI is that it occasionally offers a line of code that works, but you mostly get junk

2 days ago 6 votes
tracepoints: gnarly but worth it

Hey all, quick post today to mention that I added tracing support to the . If the support library for is available when Whippet is compiled, Whippet embedders can visualize the GC process. Like this!Whippet GC libraryLTTng Click above for a full-scale screenshot of the trace explorer processing the with the on a 2.5x heap. Of course no image will have all the information; the nice thing about trace visualizers like is that you can zoom in to sub-microsecond spans to see exactly what is happening, have nice mouseovers and clicky-clickies. Fun times!Perfetto microbenchmarknboyerparallel copying collector Adding tracepoints to a library is not too hard in the end. You need to , which has a file. You need to . Then you have a that includes the header, to generate the code needed to emit tracepoints.pull in the librarylttng-ustdeclare your tracepoints in one of your header filesminimal C filepkg-config Annoyingly, this header file you write needs to be in one of the directories; it can’t be just in the the source directory, because includes it seven times (!!) using (!!!) and because the LTTng file header that does all the computed including isn’t in your directory, GCC won’t find it. It’s pretty ugly. Ugliest part, I would say. But, grit your teeth, because it’s worth it.-Ilttngcomputed includes Finally you pepper your source with tracepoints, which probably you so that you don’t have to require LTTng, and so you can switch to other tracepoint libraries, and so on.wrap in some macro I wrote up a little . It’s not as easy as , which I think is an error. Another ugly point. Buck up, though, you are so close to graphs!guide for Whippet users about how to actually get tracesperf record By which I mean, so close to having to write a Python script to make graphs! Because LTTng writes its logs in so-called Common Trace Format, which as you might guess is not very common. I have a colleague who swears by it, that for him it is the lowest-overhead system, and indeed in my case it has no measurable overhead when trace data is not being collected, but his group uses custom scripts to convert the CTF data that he collects to... (?!?!?!!).GTKWave In my case I wanted to use Perfetto’s UI, so I found a to convert from CTF to the . But, it uses an old version of Babeltrace that wasn’t available on my system, so I had to write a (!!?!?!?!!), probably the most Python I have written in the last 20 years.scriptJSON-based tracing format that Chrome profiling used to usenew script Yes. God I love blinkenlights. As long as it’s low-maintenance going forward, I am satisfied with the tradeoffs. Even the fact that I had to write a script to process the logs isn’t so bad, because it let me get nice nested events, which most stock tracing tools don’t allow you to do. I fixed a small performance bug because of it – a . A win, and one that never would have shown up on a sampling profiler too. I suspect that as I add more tracepoints, more bugs will be found and fixed.worker thread was spinning waiting for a pool to terminate instead of helping out I think the only thing that would be better is if tracepoints were a part of Linux system ABIs – that there would be header files to emit tracepoint metadata in all binaries, that you wouldn’t have to link to any library, and the actual tracing tools would be intermediated by that ABI in such a way that you wouldn’t depend on those tools at build-time or distribution-time. But until then, I will take what I can get. Happy tracing! on adding tracepoints using the thing is it worth it? fin

2 days ago 3 votes
Evaluating overlay-adjacent accessibility products

I get asked about my opinion on overlay-adjacent accessibility products with enough frequency that I thought it could be helpful to write about it. There’s a category of third party products out there that are almost, but not quite an accessibility overlay. By this I mean that they seem a little less predatory, and a little more grounded in terms of the promises they make. Some of these products are widgets. Some are browser extensions. Some are apps. Some are an odd fourth thing. Sometimes it’s a case of a solutioneering disability dongle grift, sometimes its a case of good intentions executed in a less-than-optimal way, and sometimes it’s something legitimately helpful. Oftentimes it’s something that lies in the middle area of all of this. Many of them also have some sort of “AI” integration, which is the unfortunate upsell du jour we have to collectively endure for the time being. The rubric I use to evaluate these products remains very similar to how I scrutinize overlays. Hopefully it’s something that can be helpful for your own efforts. Should the product’s functionality be patented? I’m not very happy with the idea that the mechanism to operate something in an accessible way is inhibited by way of legal restriction. This artificially limits who can use it, which is in opposition to the overall mission of digital accessibility. Ideally the technology is the free bit, and the service that facilitates it is what generates the profit. Do I need to subscribe to use it? A subscription-based model is a great way to run a business, but you don’t need to pay a recurring fee to use an accessible website. The nature of the web’s technology means it can be operated via keyboard, voice control, and other assistive technology if constructed properly. Workarounds and community support also exist for some things where it’s not built well. Here I’d also like you to consider the disability tax, and how that factors into a rental model. It’s not great. Does the browser or operating system already have this functionality? A lot of the time this boils down to an issue of discovery, digital literacy, or identity. As touched on in the previous section, browsers and operating systems offer a lot to help you self-serve. Notable examples are reading mode, on-screen narration, color filters, interface and text zoom, and forced color inversion. Can it be used across multiple experiences, or just one website? Stability and predictability of operation and output are vital for technology like this. It’s why I am so bullish on utilizing existing browser and operating system features. Products built to “enhance” the accessibility of a single website or app can’t contribute towards this. Ironically, their presence may actually contribute friction towards someone’s existing method of using things. A tricky little twist here is products that target a single website are often advertised towards the website owner, and not the people who will be using said website. Can I use the keyboard to operate it? I’ve gotten in the habit of pressing Tab a few times when I first check out the product’s website and see if anything happens. It’s a quick and easy test to see if the company walks the walk in addition to talking the talk. Here, I regrettably encounter missing focus indicators and non-semantic interactive controls more often than not. I might also sometimes run the homepage through axe DevTools, to see if there are other egregious errors. I then try to use the product itself with a keyboard if a demo is offered. I am usually found wanting here. How reliable is the AI? There are two broad considerations here: How reliable is the output? How can bias affect someone’s interpretation of things? While I am a skeptic, I can also acknowledge that there are some good use cases for LLMs and related technology when it comes to disability. I think about reliability in terms of the output in terms of the “assistive” part of assistive technology. By this, I mean it actually helps you do what you need to get done. Here, I’d point to Salma Alam-Naylor’s experience with newer startups in this space versus established, community supported solutions. Then consider LLM-based image description products. Here we want to make sure the content is accurate and relevant. Remember that image descriptions are the mechanism that some people rely on to help them understand the world. If that description is not accurate, it impacts how they form an understanding of their environment. A step past that thought is the biases inherent in, and perpetuated by LLM-based technology. I recall Ben Myers’ thoughts on implicit, hegemonic normalization, as well as the sobering truth that this technology can exert influence over its users worldview at scale. Can the company be trusted with your data? A lot of assistive technology is purposely designed to not announce the fact that it is being used. This is to stave off things like discrimination or ineffective, separate-yet-equal “accessibility only” sites. There’s also the murky world of data brokerage, and if the company is selling off this information or not. AccessiBe comes to mind here, and not in a good way. Also consider if the product has access to everything you visit and interact with, and who has access to that information. As a companion concern, it is also worth considering the product’s data security practices—or lack thereof. Here, I would like to point out that startups tend to deprioritize this boring kind of infrastructure work in favor of feature creation. Not having any personal information present in a system is the best way to guard against its theft. Also know that there is no way to undo a data breach once it occurs. Leaked information stays leaked. Will the company last? Speaking of startups, know that more fail than succeed. Are you prepared for an outcome where the product you rely on is is no longer updated or supported because the company that made it went out of business? It could also be a case where the company still exists, but ceases to support the product you use. Here, know that sometimes these companies will actively squash attempts for community-based resurrection and support of the service because it represents potential liability. This concern is another reason why I’m bullish on operating system and browser functionality. They have a lot more resiliency and focus on the long view in this particular area. But also I’m not the arbiter of who can use what. In the spirit of “the best camera is the one you have on you:” if something works for your specific access needs, by all means use it.

2 days ago 6 votes