Geekery

Whatever I’m geeking out about at the time.

An Alt Text Experiment

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I’m the website administrator for Seattle Worldcon 2025, and I decided to run a bit of an experiment with the site, playing with an idea I’d been toying with for next year’s Norwescon website.

As I’ve been learning more about accessibility over the past few years, I’ve been working on transferring what I learn over to both the Norwescon and Worldcon websites as I’ve been working on them. Since alt text on images is one of the baseline requirements for good accessibility, I’ve been making sure that we have decent alt text for any images added to either site.

Of course, when working with other people’s art and images, there’s always a little question of whether the alt text I come up with would be satisfactory for the artist creating the image. So, I figured, why not see if I could more directly involve them?

When we were collecting signups for the fan tables, art show, and dealers’ room, as I was building the registration forms, whenever we asked for a logo or image to be uploaded, I added an optional field to allow the user to include alt text for the image they were uploading. I didn’t expect everyone using the form would take advantage of this — not everyone is familiar with alt text, some might not entirely understand what the field was for, and some might just find the extra field confusing — but I figured it would be worth a shot to see what happened.

Screenshot of a section of a website form. On the left is an option to upload a logo image, on the right is a text box asking for alt text. The prompt reads, 'A brief description of the image to support our Blind and low vision members. If no alt text is provided, '[display name] logo' will be used.' The field is limited to 1000 characters.
The logo upload field and associated alt text entry field for the art show application. The fan table and dealers’ room applications used very similar language.

Without showing how many of each type of application Worldcon received (because I don’t know if our Exhibits department would want that publicized beyond the “more than we have spots for” for each category that they’ve already said), here’s a breakdown of the percentages of each application type that included a logo image, and how many of those included alt text.

Area Submitted Logo Submitted Alt Text for Logo
Fan Tables 77.55% 63.16%
Dealers’ Room 99.60% 72.98%
Art Show 79.89% 87.05%
“Submitted Logo” is the percentage of applications that included a logo image. “Submitted Alt Text” is the percentage of submitted logos that included alt text.

As far as this goes, I’d say it was a pretty successful experiment, with between 63% and 87% of submitted images including alt text that we could then copy and paste into the website backend and code as we built the pages that used them, both saving us time and effort and ensuring that the alt text was what the people filling out the form would want it to be. Not bad at all!

Of course, simply having alt text is only part of the equation. The next question is how good is the submitted alt text?

Not surprisingly, it’s a bit all over the place. Some were very simple and straightforward, with just a business name, or the name with “logo” appended. Some described the logo in varying levels of detail. And some went far beyond just describing the logo, occasionally including information better suited other fields on the form that asked for a promotional description of the business, organization, or artist. That said, there were very few instances where I considered the submitted text to be unusable for its intended purpose.

Later on when I have more time, I might dive a bit more into the submissions to do a more detailed analysis of the quality of the submitted alt text. But for now, I’m quite satisfied with how this worked out. I fully intend on doing this for Norwescon’s website next year and onward, and would recommend that other conventions (and other organizations or businesses) that accept user image uploads to also allow users to provide their own alt text.

In the meantime, feel free to check out the final results of this experiment on Worldcon’s Art Show, Dealers’ Room, and Fan Table pages…and if any of this inspires you to come to Worldcon (if you’re not already planning to), stop by my presentation on digital accessibility for conventions (currently scheduled for )!

My (Draft) Worldcon Schedule

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The Seattle Worldcon 2025 logo and a group of cartoon characters in retrofuturistic clothing against a blue and gold background.

I have my (draft) paneling schedule for Worldcon! While there’s always the possibility that things may shift a bit between now and August, at the moment, I’m giving one solo presentation and will be a panelist on two panels.

Here’s the lineup:

The future of education technology

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Adaptive online learning, AI assisted classrooms, virtual reality schools … Things that used to be just science fiction are now science fact. How is education changing and what does it mean for the students?

Corey Frazier (M), Frank Catalano, Lia Holland, Mason A. Porter, Michael Hanscom

Well, as it turns out, I had a conflict come up, so I’ve had to drop this panel. This was a draft schedule, after all!

Digital Accessibility Basics for Conventions

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Conventions are getting more used to considering the physical accessibility of their hotels and convention centers, but how are we doing with digital accessibility? Ensuring that website and web applications, email marketing, and distributed documents are set up to be compatible with assistive technology keeps our disabled membership included throughout the year. Learn about the basics of document accessibility and get a grounding of what your publications and marketing volunteers should be aware of in order to make sure your convention’s materials are accessible to everyone.

Michael Hanscom (M)

Norwescon: local but not little

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Founded in 1978, Norwescon draws thousands of PNW SF/F creators and fans each Spring. But did you know… NWC grew out of a desire to bring Worldcon back to Seattle? Well we’ve finally done it, so come hear how we got here… and what’s next!

Wm Salt Hale (M), Michael Hanscom, Taylor Tomblin, Tim Bennett

Balance of Power by Dafydd Ab Hugh

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Book 33 of 2025: ⭐️⭐️

This is the third book I’ve read by Ab Hugh, and the third to get two stars. It’s obviously supposed to be comedic, but isn’t funny (the conceit of a Ferengi who speaks entirely like it’s “talk like a pirate day” may be hilarious to some; to me, it was increasingly annoying), there are numerous typos and inconsistencies, and it was just a slog. Not looking forward to when I get to more by this author (though I’ll read them, because I’m a stubborn Trek completist).

Me holding Balance of Power

Heavy Metal 001

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Book 32 of 2025: ⭐️⭐️⭐️

If you know much of anything about Heavy Metal, you know what to expect with this relaunch of the long-running comic anthology series. Sci-fi/fantasy/horror comics and art (often of the “muscle bound men and women wearing a whole lot of not very much no matter how impractical that might be” variety, of course). As the relaunch issue, this also has several short essays about the history of the magazine and some of the artists who have been involved, particularly Greg Hildebrandt, who died between painting the cover (of the edition I have) and when it was published. Though I was never a subscriber, I’d found the occasional issue, and certainly saw the movie (and have had it in my collection for years, even if it’s not a regular watch), and it’s good to know that the magazine is still going, and that it’s still exactly what your inner ’80s adolescent has been looking for.

Me holding Heavy Metal relaunch issue 1

The Vorkosigan Saga

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And that’s it — this morning, I finished off Lois McMaster Bujold’s Vorkosigan Saga. A little under two years (non-consecutively; many other books have been read in between these) of the adventures of Miles Vorkosigan and his family, friends, and enemies.

A complete collection of Vorkosigan saga novels in mass market paperback, arranged in internal chronological order.

This was neither planned nor expected. I started because I’m reading my way through all the Hugo Best Novel winners, and several of the Vorkosigan books are on that list, I continued because even though neither romance nor military sci-fi are genres I usually go for, the books are just so good that they pulled me in. (And, well, I don’t like coming into a series midway through if I can help it, so I had to read the books that were earlier or in between the Hugo winners.)

Bujold’s characters are wonderfully realized. Not always heroes or even particularly heroic (and sometimes rather disturbing), but always very real. The books are funny — I wouldn’t really call any of them comedies, but they are frequently comedic. And the world building (over multiple worlds scattered across a wormhole-connected galaxy) is great, with cultures that are obviously related while also being very separate and distinct.

All in all, while I certainly didn’t expect this when I started, this has become a favorite series, and I’m very much looking forward to seeing what Bujold does in a fantasy world, as I head into her World of the Five Gods series (of which the second, Paladin of Souls, is the next Hugo Best Novel book on my list). (It’s a good sign that both the Vorkosigan Saga and the World of the Five Gods series have won Best Series Hugos….)

Gentleman Jole and the Red Queen by Lois McMaster Bujold

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Book 30 of 2025: ⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️

In a fitting bookend for a series that began with a sci-fi romance between a military officer and a planetary surveyor, it ends with something essentially the same, even to one of the same characters. Much less adventuresome or military than others, this is more of a pleasant, comfortable wrap up for the series, bringing it back to where it started while checking in with many of the remaining characters. While the stories certainly good go on if Bujold chose to write more, this is also a very worthy ending to the series itself.

Me holding Gentleman Jole and the Red Queen

Weekly Notes: May 26–June 1, 2025

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  • ♿️ Officially launched the Accessibility Liaisons project at work on Tuesday, to help train more people and distribute the work of improving digital accessibility across the college. This was just a “soft” launch to introduce the program, with things kicking off more comprehensively in the fall, but it was good to get it started.
  • 🌏 Yesterday we went to Kent’s annual International Festival. Got some good food from food trucks, learned a little bit about some of the many cultures represented in Kent’s population, and saw some good music and dance performances. My favorites were a kids group doing traditional Sri Lankan dance, and kids from the local School of Rock.
  • 🏳️‍🌈🏳️‍⚧️ Happy Pride Month, all. Or if not that, have a well-focused Wrath month. Stonewall was a riot of queer and trans people, after all. And my occasional reminder that I describe myself as “statistically straight“, which allows for some variations in the trend line.

📸 Photos

A rock group of seven teens and pre-teens performing on an outdoor stage as people watch.
The School of Rock kids performing; I think here they were doing Poison’s “Every Rose Has Its Thorn”.

Social media post by Claire Willett saying, "for pride month this year can straight people focus less on 'love is love' and more on 'queer and trans people are in danger'".

A rainbow-colored unicorn with a skull face striding through a black and grey landsdape with flames at its hooves, trailing a banner that says, "we called off pride, now it's gay wrath month".

📚 Reading

📺 Watching

Finished Andor. That was really good. Easily among the best of the modern Star Wars shows and films (that I’ve seen, at least, not having seen them all).

🔗 Linking

  • Eric Wilkinson at King 5: AI stepping up as backup for short-staffed PenCom dispatchers (which was headlined “AI now takes some calls for help on Olympic Peninsula” when I bookmarked this): “AI listens for keywords that may indicate crime or violence. It even picks up inflections in the caller’s voice to sense trouble. If any of those criteria are met, the call goes directly to a real person.” Yeah, I can see no way in which this could go wrong…

  • Helen Smith at King 5: The Cascadia Subduction Zone looks a little different than researchers thought. Here’s what that means for ‘The Big One’ (which was headlined “New research reshapes ‘The Big One’ tsunami risk” when I bookmarked it…what’s with King 5 renaming headlines?): “New findings show that tsunami risk may be different, though not less, in places along the subduction zone. This is due to the absence of a ‘megasplay fault,’ which was previously believed to run from Vancouver Island down to the Oregon-California border.”

  • David Friedman at Ironic Sans: Proof that Patrick Stewart exists in the Star Trek universe: Fun interview with Star Trek fan and researcher Jörg Hillebrand.

  • Technology Connections on YouTube: Closed captions on DVDs are getting left behind. Half an hour, but a fascinating look at how closed captions are encoded into analog video, how it works with the digital video of DVDs, and why modern players and Blu-ray disks are falling over with their closed caption support. Some of the basics here I knew from my subtitle projects, but a lot of the technical details were new to me and neat to learn about.

  • Ben Cohen in The Wall Street Journal: They Were Every Student’s Worst Nightmare. Now Blue Books Are Back. (archive.is link): “Students outsourcing their assignments to AI and cheating their way through college has become so rampant, so quickly, that it has created a market for a product that helps professors ChatGPT-proof school. As it turns out, that product already exists. In fact, you’ve probably used it. You might even dread it. ¶ It’s called a blue book.”

  • Nadira Goffe in Slate: The Controversy Surrounding Disney’s Remake of Lilo & Stitch, Explained: I don’t have any interest in watching the remake (big fan of the original, though), but as a non-Hawaiian white guy, reading about the political undertones in the original that have been stripped out of the remake was really interesting, as it was a lot of stuff that I didn’t know.

  • Anil Dash: The Internet of Consent: “The growing frustration around “enshittification” is, in no small part, grounded in a huge frustration around having a constant feeling of being forced to use features and tools that don’t respect our choices. We’re constantly wrestling with platforms that don’t respect our boundaries. And we have an uncanny sense that the giant tech companies are going behind our backs and into our lives in ways that we don’t know about and certainly wouldn’t agree to if we did.”

  • Kelly Hayes: From Aspiration to Action: Organizing Through Exhaustion, Grief, and Uncertainty: “As an organizer, I’ve been thinking a lot lately about the gulf between what many people believed they would do in moments of extremity, and what they are actually doing now, as fascism rises, the genocide in Palestine continues, and climate chaos threatens the survival of living beings around the world.”

  • Chelsey Coombs at The Intercept: “Andor” Has a Message for the Left: Act Now: “‘Andor,’ the new series set in the universe, doubles down on its anti-authoritarian roots, focusing on the creation of the revolutionary Rebel Alliance. In the process, it gives us a glimpse into the messiness and conflict that often accompanies building a movement on the left, as activists fight over which political philosophies and strategies work best.”

  • Yona T. Sperling-Milner at The Harvard Crimson: Come At Me, Bro: “I propose an alternate strategy: I shall fight Secretary of Education Linda E. McMahon in a televised cage match, the winner of which gets $2.7 billion in federal grants and the power to uphold or destroy America’s continued technological and economic success.”

  • Suyi Davies Okungbowa: I Call Bullshit: Writing lessons from my toddler in the age of generative AI: “Software is as limited as the individuals, systems and institutions that define and prompt it, and as of today, mimicry is its highest form. But as you can see above, mimicry is not a significant endeavour. A human baby can mimic. A chameleon can mimic. Mimicry is basic.”

Toward the Night by James Swallow

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Book 29 of 2025: ⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️

We haven’t gotten an Ortegas-centric episode of the show yet, so it’s fun to get a bit more of a peek into her and her background through this adventure. A mysterious alien artifact, a dangerous planet, ornery Klingons…all in all, quite the fun Trek adventure.

(Very mild spoilers: The only flaw for me wasn’t actually a flaw with the book, but a happenstance of my reading: I’d just read the TOS ebook novella Miasma, so this made for two Trek stories in a row with a landing party trapped on a rainy, muddy planet being chased by swarms of hungry giant bugs while cut off from all communication with the Enterprise. I had to keep reminding myself it wasn’t quite as derivative as it seemed.)

Me holding Toward the Night

(Bi-)Weekly Notes: May 12–25, 2025

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I didn’t get to this last weekend, and this week was too busy to sneak it in and backdate it, so I’m just going for a two-week catch-up this time. Good enough!

  • ♿️ The big thing for me at work last week was Global Accessibility Awareness Day. As one of the co-chairs of SBCTC’s CATO (Committee for Accessible Technology Oversight), I’d written a letter of support and call to action that, after editing and input from the rest of the committee, we sent out to several of the high-level committees within SBCTC, and it’s being passed on from there.
  • 🚀 Last weekend was the final committee meeting for Norwescon 47, where the staff gathers for the post-con wrap-up and “onions and roses” session where we discuss what went well and what we can improve on from a staff point of view. Lots of good comments, followed by a social at a local home. And that wraps up this year’s con…on to the next! (Speaking of, I do need to find time to get our website transition process started soon….)

This past week, in addition to the usual work duties, had several evening events that were fun to do, but definitely threw our weekly routine off.

  • 🎫 On Tuesday night, I went out to my first live concert in years and saw Underworld. They’ve been a favorite artist and “bucket list” concert for decades, so even though this was on a Tuesday night, I decided (a few months ago when tickets went on sale) that it was worth it and a good birthday present to myself. Glad I did, too — the show was really, really good. They started precisely at 8 p.m. (the most prompt concert I think I’ve ever been to), played an hour-long set, took a half-hour break, and then played a 90-minute set, wrapping up right at 11 p.m. I didn’t memorize the track list, but it was a good selection from across their catalog, from the Dubnobasswithmyheadman-era with “Dirty Epic” and “Cowgirl” (a really nice version that I hope gets released), to more recent tracks like “S T A R” off of Drift and “And the Colour Red” off of Strawberry Hotel, wrapping up (of course) with “Born Slippy .NUXX“. Great show, and I’m so glad I finally to a chance to see them live. Sure, as an electronic duo, the show is mostly the lights and video as Karl Hyde performs the vocals and Rick Smith plays with the computers — but there’s something about the experience, being in a venue with lots of other fans dancing and enjoying the music, being able to feel the bass and rhythms wash over and through you, and feeling the energy of the crowd, the artists, and the whole thing, that’s so much more than the sum of its parts.
  • 🎓 Wednesday ended the workday with an end-of-the-year celebration of student leaders. Both my wife and I knew several of the students being honored (she had nominated two of them), and it’s always nice to do this celebration during spring quarter.
  • 🍻 Thursday was a get-together with other coworkers at a local bar, something which I don’t do terribly often (between not being much of a barfly if there isn’t a dance floor, not being much of a drinker, and usually just heading home to relax after work instead of socializing), but is fun to do occasionally.
  • 🪕 And then on Saturday we decided to go to this year’s Folklife festival, which we hadn’t done for years. It ended up being a perfect day for it — sunny and mid-70°s — and we spent a nice few hours wandering around, listening to neat music, watching a performance of a 1950s radio show by American Radio Theater, munching on fair food, and running into a few friends.

📸 Photos

Underworld performing, with Karl Hyde singing and pointing to the sky, lit all in reds.

Underworld performing, list all in purples, blues, and magentas.

Underworld performing, lit yellows, greens, and oranges, in front of a crowded floor.

Three shots from the Underworld show. Plus a bonus shot…

A camera person using a large professional camera during the Underworld concert, with everything lit in green.

This cameraperson was a real MVP of the evening, having to keep the camera trained on the stage…and keep it steady. There is no way I could do that job; the camera would be bouncing all over the place in time with the music. I was really impressed!

People sit on a lawn in front of an outdoor stage with the Space Needle stretching up into a cloudless blue summer sky.

Live music under the Space Needle on a gorgeous early summer day.

📝 Writing

A question on a work mailing list got me rambling about my frustrations with the popular confusion of machine learning with “artificial intelligence”.

📚 Reading

  • Finished Greg Cox’s Star Trek TOS novella Miasma.
  • Read Lois McMaster Bujold’s Vorkosigan saga book Cryoburn.
  • Started James Swallow’s just-released Star Trek SNW book Toward the Night.

📺 Watching

  • Together, we wrapped up a season of Hell’s Kitchen, hopped into an older season of Drag Race All Stars, and supplemented that with our ongoing binge through the three Chicago shows.
  • I’ve made it through ten episodes of season two of Andor (hoping to get through the last two tomorrow, and maybe rewatch Rogue One afterwards), and on a whim started watching Max Headroom. Honestly, I don’t think it would be terribly difficult to update Max Headroom for the modern world, especially with AI-generated everything all around us.

🎧 Listening

I’ve added a few albums over the past two weeks that I’m enjoying:

  • Synthetic. Facts. Seven., Infacted Recording’s latest sampler of EBM/futurepop/however you want to categorize this kind of stuff. Quite a few tracks I’m enjoying, particularly Alex Braun + Rob Dust’s take on “25 Years“, originally by The Catch in 1983.
  • Peter Murphy’s Silver Shade came out, and is really strong. He’s still going really strong, and this album shows it.
  • Orbital’s expanded re-release of Orbital 2 (The Brown Album Expanded) also just came out. Orbital’s also been high on my list of long-time favorite electronic artists, and I’m really enjoying the string of expanded album releases that both Orbital and Underworld have done in the past few years. Alternate takes, remixes, and other stuff that might not be critical for a new or casual listener, but for fans, there’s a lot of gold in these reissues.

🔗 Linking

Particularly interesting reads from across the web.

  • Apparently IBM offers accessibility checking tools, which someone said may be good? I need to take some time to investigate these.
  • This is a motherfucking website: “I’m not actually saying your shitty site should look like this. What I’m saying is that all the problems we have with websites are ones we create ourselves. Websites aren’t broken by default, they are functional, high-performing, and accessible. You break them. You son-of-a-bitch.”
  • Apple unveils powerful accessibility features coming later this year: “New features include Accessibility Nutrition Labels on the App Store, Magnifier for Mac, Braille Access, and Accessibility Reader; plus innovative updates to Live Listen, visionOS, Personal Voice, and more.”
  • Andrew Liszewski at The Verge: This modern cassette boombox will lure you in with glowing VU meters: I certainly don’t need a $500 cassette deck, no matter how pretty. But I’ll admit, it is pretty….
  • Shoreline Area News: Disabled Hiker’s Guide to 5 Washington State Parks is now available: “Each park guide includes an overview of the park, suggested activities, and information on the accessibility of many features in the park. Features are broken out into sections, and include parking, restrooms and facilities, picnic areas and shelters, trails, campgrounds, and more, with detailed information and directions.”
  • Grimoire: A Grim Oak Press Anthology For Seattle Worldcon 2025: Pre-order now, pick up at Worldcon, and get it signed by as many of the authors as you can track down!
  • Neal Stephenson: Remarks on AI from NZ: “Speaking of the effects of technology on individuals and society as a whole, Marshall McLuhan wrote that every augmentation is also an amputation. […] Today, quite suddenly, billions of people have access to AI systems that provide augmentations, and inflict amputations, far more substantial than anything McLuhan could have imagined. This is the main thing I worry about currently as far as AI is concerned.”
  • James Reffell at DesignCult: The secret origin of “log in”: “‘Log in’ is one of those phrases that sounds weirder the more you say it. It’s ubiquitous in online life, though it does seem like it’s being slowly overtaken by ‘sign in’. But where does the phrase come from in the first place?”
  • Constance Grady at Vox: Why does Elon Musk love this socialist sci-fi series?: “The politics of these books are not subtle, and they are also not compatible with the existence of billionaires. So it’s worth thinking about why the broligarchs have so consistently cited a socialist author as an inspiration. What do they find tantalizing about Banks’ work? Are they missing the point altogether?”
  • Georgia Jackson at the University of South Florida’s College of Arts and Sciences profiles faculty member and this year’s Philip K. Dick Award winner Brenda Peynado: In ‘Time’s Agent,’ pocket worlds reveal deep truths — and earn USF faculty a Philip K. Dick award.
  • Christian Balderas at King 5: Kent grapples with repeat internet outages caused by vandalism: We got hit by both of these outages; twice in two days. And there was another only a few weeks ago. It’s really frustrating.
  • Nora Claire Miller at The Paris Review: Recurring Screens: “The world’s first screen saver was not like a dream at all. It was a blank screen. It was called SCRNSAVE, and when it was released in 1983 it was very exciting to a niche audience. It was like John Cage’s 4’33″ but for computers—a score for meted-out doses of silence.” This is either a history of screensavers or a poetry review. Or both?
  • Alexander Hurst at The Guardian: Volodymyr Zelenskyy has courage. Pope Francis had it too. Why are there so many cowards?: “What is just? Who is acting with honour? With courage? When did we stop thinking it normal to consider such questions – and to demand those things from the people who lead us? To demand that they, well, lead?”
  • Ed Pilkington at The Guardian: Meet the new American refugees fleeing across state lines for safety: “America is on the move. Hundreds of thousands of people are packing up boxes, loading U-Hauls, and shipping out of state in an urgent flight towards safety. ¶ They’re being propelled by hostile political forces bearing down on them because of who they are, what they believe, or for their medical needs. ¶ All are displaced within their own country for reasons they did not choose. They are the new generation of America’s internal refugees – and their ranks are growing by the day.”
  • Sarah Kuta at Smithsonian Magazine: A Young Cooper’s Hawk Learned to Use a Crosswalk Signal to Launch Surprise Attacks on Other Birds: “Researcher Vladimir Dinets watched the bird repeatedly sneak behind a row of cars to ambush its unsuspecting prey.”