The Art Of Not Asking Why

Some indieweb folks seem to be concerned with accessibility and readability of their site recently, so I figured what the hell. I ran this blog against WAVE, which is a tool by WebAIM, and yeah… It ain’t pretty. My blog scored 4 out of 10.

But as I started reading more into the issues, I realized fixing those would be going against what I enjoyed doing with the website and at times counterproductive.

I’ll start with the biggest issue I saw with my blog: glaring, angry red “very low contrast” errors.

I recently changed my blog theme to solarized. Solarized is an attempt (and I believe a successful one, as I’m pleased with the results) to standardize my less-contrasting colors¹ with a known theme. Low contrast on purpose? Yes. It’s an issue I personally have, where harsh contrast makes text glow (“ghost text”). It’s called halation. I’ve always preferred less contrast in my own notes (my markdown files, then TiddlyWiki, then Emacs), and my blog follows this suite. So in short, the low contrast on my blog is a feature, not a bug. Also, I believe (perhaps wrongly) that most people who read my blog do so with an RSS reader anyway or could probably use a reader mode with the browser if they have issues. And also? It’s pretty. I enjoy it. My blog is about delivering written content, but I also enjoy how it looks.

Another issue WAVE flagged was “redundant links.” This happens when you have two or more links to the same page next to each other. On my blog’s main page, this happens with post titles and dates: both link to the post itself. This is not easy to fix because it has to do with how I write.

Not every post on my blog has a title. If you look through my blog, you’d notice short micro-posts (usually around 300 characters) that don’t have a title². This is deliberate. In fact, it’s one of those core concepts of what Micro.blog stands for, and one of the reasons I like it: short micro-posts (hence the name, eh?) and quick Twitter-style blurbs (or Mastodon these days, or whatever) go on the blog just like the long posts, which do get titles.

I said this before:

…if you’re one of those once-a-month folks who struggle to express yourself, do me a favor: don’t wait for that something. It ain’t coming because it’s already there. Just spit it out already.

I still stand behind it. If I see something I like and snap a picture, I want it on my blog. If I have a quick thought I want to share, I want it on my blog. A “mind fart,” as I call it? I want it on my blog³. The way I write posts follows a different workflow accordingly: a quick photo with a sentence (like this one for example) is done through the Micro.blog app on my phone. A quick photo (usually with some editing I also do on the phone), which gets uploaded, and a sentence or two. Upload, publish, done. 5 minutes total. Long posts, on the other hand, like my Emacs Config Gems (currently working on part 6), can take several days to write and edit on my computer(s). I write these in Emacs, then export the files for some AI polish, add a summary, and then a title that hopefully also reflects the post’s mood. I take my time with those. Different kinds of posts, different tools.

Back to the point I’m trying to make — titles do not belong on everything. And if I don’t have a title, there’s no permalink to the post besides the Date.

“OK,” you say, “so why not just the date as a link?” Because it’s a tiny little thing (with not enough contrast to see clearly, right?) and not as obvious as the post title. Let me put it this way: posts that have titles are also those that should have a big obvious link, because what you see on the blog is a summary of the post, and you need to click on the title to read the whole thing. So: permalinks for long posts are a must, done through the title and the date; permalinks for short blurbs are nice as a reference, done through the dates only.

Now before you argue against this logic, hang on one second. Tell me, is it really such a bad idea to have both? One is an obvious use case (title) and one “just in case”? Why do we have to make a choice of one or the other?

The two “issues” above with my blog’s accessibility probably knocked it down to a 4 out of 10 instead of, say, a 6 or even a 7. But not all the points from WAVE are bad.

For example, my tagline, that H2 title that says “Don’t ask me why, I’ll tell you anyway.” It’s cute, but yeah, having it there is a bit weird since it competes with the title, and the font I use isn’t that great either. Point taken.

Another issue is the alt descriptions for images that are too long. They are generated by AI automatically (one of Micro.blog’s features, if you turn it on) and usually good enough — but it doesn’t mean they can escape inspection when I post. There’s some friction (I need to wait for the AI to generate a description, then go back in there and edit), but yes, this is something to take into account. In this recent post, for example (which doesn’t have a title, because it’s one of those quick ones, see what I mean?), the first picture with the seagulls is described as “A rocky coastline with seagulls scattered across the rocks and a calm blue ocean extending to the horizon under a partly cloudy sky.” Ehhh, it starts to sound like a bad poem when it needs to be a clear description. Something like “a rocky coastline with a large number of seagulls, calm ocean in the background” is probably good enough. OK, WAVE, you won this round. I will get on this.

All this goes to say: what I like or need is not what you like or need. We are different, which is why the indieweb is the wacky wonderful place it is. And while we should try and make it accessible and inviting, let’s not overdo it to the point of stripping our sites of our personalities, or fix one disability at the price of another, mkay?