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.

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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

[ghoti]

The instances I'm thinking about in particular are in my role as website wrangler for a religious community I am a part of. Many of our participants are neither tech-savvy nor necessarily using touch-screen devices.

My links are frequently "Click this link to see a map of the college campus we will be renting space from"; parking is available in Lots 3 and T. If you need a space closer than that, please contact mailto:person_who_deals_with_campus_parking@organization.org.

Or "Lunch will be pot-luck with [Dietary Restriction], please clearly mark allergens (link to common allergens) present."

Or "Click here for the schedule of services for the next month."

In the third example, I would linkify "schedule of services".
In the second example, I would probably linkify "allergens" but also acknowledge that no one is going to follow it.
The first example is where I struggle most. Do I link "college campus"? "Map"? The whole sentence?

I try to balance any accessibility needs vs. the intended (assumed) user of the site I am linking -from-. A "click here" is probably most convenient for most of the people needing the link, but.

[silveradept]

I feel like many of those examples could be full links all across the sentences, and it would make them more descriptive as links.

For that first example, I would linkify "Click this link to see a map of the college campus we will be renting space from" all the way through.