Fandom Snowflake 2021 #2: The Salon

[silveradept]

Day Three of Janus's month provides the second challenge: to make a connection with someone new.

In your own space (or their own space) interact with someone new.

That's halt slightly harder than usual this year, as many of the people that are running this iteration are people who have done it before or done other ones before or been participants in previous or other challenges like this one. There are also some newer faces and names, so I don't think it will be an issue to find new people to interact with.

For something like this, I thought I might borrow an idea from jenett and hold a salon for people to talk in and meet new people and have interesting conversations with them. I'll be borrowing her house rules and useful notes sections as well, if with a modification or two.

Here's a starter question that's on my mind. If you want to talk about something else, feel free.

As a Great Old One when it comes to the World Wide Web, it's been ingrained in me that part of making the Web accessible is providing descriptive text for your links to other parts of the Web. There's no technical wrongness involved in a link that only says "click here" or just "here", but usually, there's a perfectly serviceable description of what is on the other end of the link right there in the same sentence that says "Click here." Expanding the tag to include time description seems like something that could be easily done. Nowadays, I would expect something like that to fall under "good SEO" rather than accessibility, but I'm also a little shirty about the idea that we've optimized the Web for robots and in doing so have made it much more frustrating for humans and their assistive technologies.

Am I just "old man shouts at cloud" about this, or is there progress I haven't seen, or some other thing that I should be posting attention to about this? It seems small and petty, but it also seems fixable with a small and petty amount of work.

Consider tracking this post to get notifications of new comments. Select the bell icon (or the words 'track this'). More help about tracking a post is in the Dreamwidth FAQs, as is an entire category of FAQs about notifications in general.

Comments are welcome whenever you get a chance - even if that's hours or days later. Feel free to jump into whatever sub-threads intrigue you. More discussion is the point of the salon posts!

Got a question you're trying to sort out, or a thing you'd like to discuss? Lots of thoughtful interesting people with a wide range of interests show up here! Feel free to ask about things you're thinking about or trying to solve, as well as other kinds of chat.

House rules:

1. This is a public post, feel free to encourage other people to drop by, just note the 'if posting anonymously, include a name people can call you in responses' rule.


2. Consider this a conversation in my living room, only with a lot more seating. I reserve the right to redirect, screen, and otherwise moderate stuff, but would vastly prefer not to have to. Keeping conversations SFW is a good idea if you don't want the reputation of being horny on main, and see above about reserved rights to redirect and moderate. Follow Wheaton's Law.


3. If you don't have a DW account or want to post anonymously, please include a name we can call you in this particular post. (You can say AnonymousOne or your favourite colour or whatever. Just something to help keep conversations clear.)


4. If you've got a question or concern, feel free to PM me.

Comments

[silveradept]

I'm not fully aware of what you mean by the link previews, because what comes to mind is the "hover over the link, see some fragment of a graphic of the web page, have to click through anyway to get anything useful."

[azurelunatic]

They're a small card-like HTML block, showing the title of the destination page, an image from the page, and a text snippet. They would be possible to construct by hand, but places like Twitter and Facebook which don't allow HTML-ing build them for you.

[silveradept]

That would be helpful, yes, assuming that the destination were clear, rather than obscured through marketing materials.