Geekery

Whatever I’m geeking out about at the time.

iA Presenter and Headings

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I’m quite curious about iA Presenter (a new Markdown-focused presentation creation app), so I downloaded the 14-day trial.

And it is immediately driving me up the wall that in the sample/instructional presentation that loads by default, the creators are repeatedly misusing headings to create the style for their demonstration slides.

The iA Presenter window as first opened to the demo presentation. The Markdown code for the content begins with an H1 followed by an H4. The next slide begins with an H3 that is followed by an H2.

The cover slide starts with an H1 and then immediately jumps to an H4, presumably because they wanted the visual distinction between the larger text of the title and the notably smaller text of what’s being used as a subtitle. But that skips two levels of headings.

The second slide (and many other slides) starts with an H3 that is immediately followed by an H2. Consistently, slide after slide, it’s an H3 followed by an H2. Again, this appears to be done for the visual presentation, as it results in the smaller-text headline over the larger-text headline. But that means that the headings are all out of order and don’t create a consistent outline to indicate the structure of the document.

And this sort of thing continues throughout the entire demo presentation.

Not only is this generally sloppy, but it’s an accessibility issue: When headings are skipped, users of assistive technology like screen readers have to try to figure out from context whether the headings have actually been skipped, or if they’re they exist but haven’t been tagged properly, or if they’re being presented out of order. When the document outline is out of order, it makes it much more difficult to navigate through and build a coherent mental picture of the final document.

I haven’t gotten as far as looking to see how iA Presenter does with its output (Is the HTML it generates standards compliant? Are the PDFs it generates properly tagged for accessibility)? But even if it exported perfect HTML or ideally tagged PDFs, the content will have accessibility issues because the designers are prioritizing style over substance. And with this as their demo, many people using the app will likely follow their lead.

And that’s a shame. Because on first blush, it’s a gorgeous app with some extremely good advice on how to conceptualize and plan better presentations and some great templates. All criticisms aside, I’m still looking forward to experimenting with it. But the abuse of headings and lack of concern for reasonable document structure is not giving a very good first impression.

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Year 50 Day 31

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Me wearing a short-sleeve button-up shirt with a print that looks like rainbow paint was poured over and is dripping down the shirt. I'm leaning on my office wall. On the wall next to me is a rainbow-colored laser-cut wood plaque of the Vulcan calligraphy for Kol-ut-shan, or IDIC - Infinite Diversity in Infinite Combinations.

Day 31: Happy Pride Month, take two—this time with color!

A friendly reminder: While I‘ve generally defaulted to “straight” as my most common shorthand, in conversations about such things, I’ve also been noting for decades that it’s “somewhere in the 80-90% range, depending on the situation and people involved”. But I’ve really never felt like “bi” applied to me, even if it might be arguably technically correct for anyone who isn’t a solid Kinsey 0.

So I think “statistically straight” is a good way to put it. All of my relationships have been with people who (at the time, and as far as I know, carrying into the present) were and are cisgender women, so a graphed trend line would certainly go that direction, but the totality of my experiences plus my awareness of my own self would definitely introduce some wobbles into that theoretical trend line — certainly enough for a qualifier of some sort on the “straight” designation. Hence, “statistically straight”.

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📚 The Weight of Worlds by Greg Cox

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28/2023 – ⭐️⭐️⭐️

Kirk and Spock travel to another universe as the Enterprise crew try to counter an invasion by aliens on a religious crusade. The alien’s religion didn’t really make sense to me, their gravity-controlling weapons seemed to work mostly as required by the plot, and Cox’s referential style is as present as ever. (I feel like I harp on this, mentioning it in every review of one of his books, but it really stands out every time. He’s not a bad writer at all, he just has this stylistic quirk that likely doesn’t stick out nearly as much to some people as much as it does to me.) Not a bad adventure, but not top-tier, either.

Me holding The Weight of Worlds

📚 Apocalypse Girl Dreaming by Jennifer Brozek

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27/2023 – ⭐️⭐️⭐️

A collection of short fiction, with a mix of urban fantasy, “weird west” (supernatural western), and science fiction. I’ve enjoyed Brozek’s work as an editor in the past, and picked this up from her at Norwescon to sample her work as an author. I enjoyed these, especially as several were interconnected—generally not directly, but through being set in one or another of the worlds she’s created in her longer works. Short stories are often a fun way to dip into a world, and having a few to sample from a few different worlds was a nice way to get a feel for them beyond what a single story can do. That said, my favorite was a stand-alone story set in Seattle, playing with the “Pigs on Parade” statues that went up around the city in the early 2000s.

Me holding Apocalypse Girl Dreaming

📚 Unspoken Truth by Margaret Wander Bonnano

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26/2023 – ⭐️⭐️⭐️

A Saavik-centric story, mostly set after the events of Star Trek IV, but with flashbacks to her youth. The first half of the book is mostly planetary exploration with a dash of mystery surrounding Saavik’s past; the latter half takes that mystery and becomes a somewhat odd spy story, with various disguised motivations. I found the latter half far less engaging than the first, but overall, I liked diving more into Saavik’s character and fleshing out some of the wider consequences of the Star Trek II/III/IV trilogy. Also, though not a comedic adventure, one brief mention of a character “stepping over a Thermian’s tentacles” in a bar did make me laugh out loud.

Me holding Unspoken Truth

🎥 Dungeons & Dragons: Honor Among Thieves

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Dungeons & Dragons: Honor Among Thieves (2023): ⭐️⭐️⭐️

This was good, lighthearted, fun. I’ve never been a D&D player (though I did enjoy reading through the monster manuals when I was a kid, and I’ve been around it enough through friends to have a reasonably good generalist familiarity), so I’m sure there were any number of references and creatures that long-time players would have noticed that I didn’t. I just got to sit back and enjoy the adventure. I really want the portal staff (just as I’ve long wanted an Aperture Science Portal gun), and the pudgy dragon was particularly great.

🎥 Scream VI

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Scream VI (2023): ⭐️⭐️⭐️

This series continues to entertain. The move to NYC helps refresh things a bit, and the constant parade of background horror movie characters (and multiple Ghostfaces) thanks to the Halloween weekend setting was consistently amusing. I think the shrine was a bit of a stretch—even buying the handwave-y explanation given, it’s not like all that stuff came from a lot of different places and so wouldn’t be easily missed when it disappeared—but admittedly, it did make for a fun set piece for the final showdown. All in all, another enjoyable entry to a series (sorry, franchise) that started strong and even in its weaker moments is still pretty consistently entertaining.

Year 50 Day 18

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Me standing in a grocery store, wearing a grey cap, black t-shirt, black KN95 mask, and dark sunglasses.

Day 18: Forgot to swap sunglasses for normal glasses before heading into the store, and thus inadvertently fulfilled my personal “creepy old white guy in the grocery store” quota for the indefinite future.

📚 Interference by Sue Burke

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25/2023 – ⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️

As fascinating as the first. Centuries after the events of the first book, another expedition from Earth arrives at Pax. Their ethnocentric assumptions cause enough difficulties, but when another sentience makes itself known, it all gets worse. More really neat explorations of how cultures change and adapt, how those changes influence communication and understanding, the biology of plant life, and alien intelligences. I’m excited to see that a third book should arrive next year.

Me holding Interference