Zoom Accessibility Distractions

It would be nice if Zoom considered neurodiversity as much as it has deafness. I've complained to Zoom through the Help menu feedback feature for the past year about its unfriendliness to me, with no sign of improvement. Zoom has worked hard on deaf accessibility. An automatic transcript can be provided, and I believe they've …

The Treachery of Captchas

Apologies to René Magritte. And apologies to Randall Munroe if xkcd got here first with this joke. Of course, if Magritte were in charge of this, the correct action would be to click Skip. There are no images of pipes; there are only images of drawings of pipes. Nothing would happen, of course; this is an drawing of …

Single-Field Password Set/Reset: Threat or Menace?

This post is dedicated to everyone who ever had trouble logging into a website (myself included, way too many times) or whoever had their account hacked because their password was too simple (way too many friends and acquaintances, way too many times). This is for us. Dear website designers and programmers: Every modern website adds new …

When good people use good software to do bad things to websites

Flash is a wonderful piece of software when used to add functionality to a website.  It is not a substitute for HTML. In particular, it may shut out some people from using your website. I've already written on the fact that iPhones and iPads don't run Flash. Now I'm going to tell you about how …

Why can’t an OS be more like a browser?

Computer operating systems and the programs that run in them are surprisingly inflexible in appearance, given the power of personal computers today. Browsers are incredibly flexible. OS's and programs could afford to learn a lesson from browsers.