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Add aria-describedby sections to home.html; Publish WA for 2024wk02.
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ryan-p-randall committed Jan 15, 2024
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14 changes: 7 additions & 7 deletions _layouts/home.html
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Expand Up @@ -13,13 +13,13 @@ <h1>Hi, I'm Ryan.</h1>
<h2>Featured Sections</h2>

<div style="display: grid; grid-gap: 1em; grid-template-columns: repeat(2, 0.5fr);">
<div><a class="btn btn--primary btn--large" href="{{ site.url }}/posts/">Blog</a><br>Somewhat regular posts.</div>
<div><a class="btn btn--primary btn--large" href="{{ site.url }}/bookmarks/">Bookmarks</a><br>Annotated links.</div>
<div><a class="btn btn--primary btn--large" href="{{ site.url }}/notes/">Notes</a><br>My digital garden.</div>
<div><a class="btn btn--primary btn--large" href="{{ site.url }}/Reading/">Reading</a><br>What I'm reading.</div>
<div><a class="btn btn--primary btn--large" href="{{ site.url }}/colophon/">Colophon</a><br>How I make this site.</div>
<div><a class="btn btn--primary btn--large" href="{{ site.url }}/links-rhizome/">Links Rhizome</a><br>I am also here.</div>
</div>
<div><a class="btn btn--primary btn--large" aria-describedby="blog-desc" href="{{ site.url }}/posts/">Blog</a><br><span id="blog-desc">Somewhat regular posts.</span></div>
<div><a class="btn btn--primary btn--large" aria-describedby="bookmarks-desc" href="{{ site.url }}/bookmarks/">Bookmarks</a><br><span id="bookmarks-desc"></span>Annotated links.</span></div>
<div><a class="btn btn--primary btn--large" aria-describedby="notes-desc" href="{{ site.url }}/notes/">Notes</a><br><span id="notes-desc">My digital garden.</span></div>
<div><a class="btn btn--primary btn--large" aria-describedby="reading-desc" href="{{ site.url }}/Reading/">Reading</a><br><span id="reading-desc">What I'm reading.</span></div>
<div><a class="btn btn--primary btn--large" aria-describedby="colophon-desc" href="{{ site.url }}/colophon/">Colophon</a><br><span id="colophon-desc">How I make this site.</span></div>
<div><a class="btn btn--primary btn--large" aria-describedby="links-rhizome-desc" href="{{ site.url }}/links-rhizome/">Links Rhizome</a><br><span id="links-rhizome-desc">I am also here.</span></div>
</div>

<h2>Featured Posts</h2>
{% for post in site.tags.featured %}
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58 changes: 48 additions & 10 deletions _posts/2024-01-13-2024-week-02.md
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Expand Up @@ -2,28 +2,66 @@
title: Weekly Assemblage for 2024 Week WW
modified:
categories: [weekly-assemblage]
excerpt: ' .'
tags: []
excerpt: 'RSS reading; _Author, Author_ and A.I.; and Site Refinements of the Week.'
tags:
- A.I.
- a11y
- rss
- Star Trek
- science fiction
- site refinements
# header:
# image: /assets/images/weekly-assemblage.png
# caption: 'Photo credit: [**Unsplash**](https://unsplash.com)'
published: false
published: true
toc: true
comments:
date: 2024-01-13T08:20:03-6:00
date: 2024-01-14T18:10:44-6:00
---

[Weekly Whaaa…?]({% post_url 2016-01-09-weekly-whaaa %})
{: .notice}

<!--
## Don't Call It a Comeback, RSS Feeds Have Been Here For Years

Maybe:
Although I've been using RSS readers since well before [Google Reader](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Google_Reader) joined the many other projects (often mercilessly and pointlessly) [killed by Google](https://killedbygoogle.com/), [NetNewsWire](https://netnewswire.com/) has become a much more prominent part of my day for the last couple of weeks.

## Shaving the Wrong Yak
Sometime early last week I went through all my old RSS subscriptions and asked which still bring me joy. Then I unsubscribed or marked many as "read" in bulk.

Or, occasionally, ["procrastivity"](https://www.psychologytoday.com/us/blog/rethinking-adult-adhd/202007/procrastivity-aka-sneaky-avoidance-and-adult-adhd-coping).
Now, when I would usually peep in on Mastodon or a Discord group, I instead find myself gravitating toward NetNewsWire's "Today" section.

Samuel Robert Mathias' [Scholarly references in Jekyll](https://crackedbassoon.com/writing/references) details some clever, although tedious to set up, ways to generate citations using Liquid in a static site. This means that for a Jekyll-based site, like mine, you wouldn't need to use one of the various plugins, like [Jekyll-Scholar](), which also do this… but at the cost of not being entirely compatible with GitHub Pages.
Unlike social media's endless scroll and endless context shifts, the "Today" section brings me more substantial "chunks" of reading and a recognizable endpoint. While I anticipated the benefits of having an obvious stopping point, I didn't foresee how much I'd prefer having slightly larger chunks of reading and fewer jarring shifts in context.

-->
It probably helps that I'm following a large number of feeds, and a few people who post small updates throughout the day. (These folks often post to their own microblogging sites with [IndieWeb microformats](https://book.micro.blog/microformats/) or to IndieWeb-oriented services like [omg.lol](https://home.omg.lol/) and [micro.blog](https://micro.blog/).)

This means that I'll usually see **something** new in my RSS reader, even if it's only 2 to 20 new things rather than the hundreds of new posts I'd encounter on Mastodon.

Maybe I'll start doing more frequent, smaller posts as well? If you've got a site, consider this more encouragement to add an RSS feed and to make it prominent and easily discoverable!

## "Author, Author" & AI

We watched the "Author, Author" episode of _Star Trek: Voyager_ as part our of first viewing of **all** of _Star Trek_. (In homage to the [Memory Alpha wiki](https://memory-alpha.fandom.com/wiki/Portal:Main), we're calling this our "#ViewingAlpha".)

In this episode, the Doctor—an "Emergency Medical Holograph" who has grown far beyond his expected role as the ship Voyager's supplemental medical support—has become the author of a holonovel. (Yep, **holo**novel: an interactive work of fiction playable by any immersive holodeck.)

As part of the Doctor's ongoing story arc—one that parallels many similar "not quite human" characters in the series—this episode revolves both around his relationship to his crew mates and his legal rights. Can he legally be granted copyright for the work he's clearly created?

The episode immediately made me think of [Olaudah Equiano](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Olaudah_Equiano)'s excellent slave narrative/captivity narrative [_The Interesting Narrative of the Life of Olaudah Equiano_](https://standardebooks.org/ebooks/olaudah-equiano/the-interesting-narrative-of-the-life-of-olaudah-equiano), as well as the ongoing copyright questions generative AI technology currently presents.

Whether you're deeply familiar with _Star Trek_ or relatively ignorant of the series, I think it'd be an excellent stand-alone episode to dip into. (Full disclosure: I haven't rewatched it before writing thing. But I don't believe there's any necessary context that isn't explained within the episode, particularly as what Samuel Delany might call "a significant distortion of the present.")

I'm still toying with the idea of having one or two seasons of _Star Trek: Voyager_ or _Star Trek: Deep Space Nine_ be part of my dissertation, and this is one of those episodes that's strong enough to be persuasive.

## Site Refinements of the Week

Looking over my site's [commit history](https://github.com/ryan-p-randall/ryan-p-randall.github.io/commits/develop/), I spruced up a few things this week!

Most are accessibility-related things you might not immediately perceive. Which will probably be a running theme, whenever I post this sort of "site refinements of the week."

First, I realized that the [Minimal Mistakes theme](https://mmistakes.github.io/minimal-mistakes/), which I use for my site, uses an `<h4>` heading for the on-page table of contents. Maybe there's a reason for this—but in practice on my site, there's always a skip from the page title's `<h1>` level to much lower `<h4>` level. As [WebAIM explains](https://webaim.org/techniques/semanticstructure/#headings), it's best not to introduce this sort of jarring skip. So I fixed that pattern, at least for my own site! I might end up submitting a pull request as well.

Less related to the theme overall is the introduction of `aria-describedby` attributes to the button-styled links on my home page. These mean that anyone using assistive technology will hear the descriptions associated with the buttons, just as someone would quickly perceive visually based on the layout.

Although they haven't hit the live site yet, I'm also tinkering with switching my footnotes plugin from [Bigfoot](https://web.archive.org/web/20221127194150/http://www.bigfootjs.com/) to [Littlefoot](https://littlefoot.js.org/).

I believe Littlefoot will have better support for screen readers, plus it seems easier for me to understand its CSS, which means it'll be that much easier to connect its CSS to the [theme switcher](https://fossheim.io/writing/posts/accessible-theme-picker-html-css-js/) I eventually plan to add.

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