macOS Tahoe Music (app) breaks shuffle

Sigh. Shuffle by Album seems to be broken in Apple Music (the app, not the service; what is it with companies giving their apps and services identical generic names?) under macOS 26 Tahoe.

After starting Music, if I go to my library’s Album view (that is, songs that are downloaded and stored locally), the shuffle icon in the new control bar appears to be glowing (with a bad effectThe left side of the audio control bar in Apple's Music player under Tahoe, with the shuffle icon highlighted in red with a very harsh, hard-edged glow with no fade. It looks really ugly.), but if you check options, through the menu bar, Controls > Shuffle shows “Off” and by “Albums”. If I switch that to “On”, I get about a two-second SPoD (Spinning Pizza of Death) — which seems really odd for an audio player on an M4 Mac Mini — before it responds again.

Pre-Tahoe, I could either hit “play” or double-click the “Albums” item in the Music app sidebar, and Music would randomly choose an album, play it through, then randomly play another album.

Now, If I hit the “play” control, Music starts playing the first album in however the album list is sorted; I usually keep my Album display sorted by year, so it always starts playing the oldest item in my collection (Victrola 88049, Enrico Caruso performing “Ideale (My Ideal!)”). If I double-click the “Albums” item in the sidebar, Music starts playing the first song of the first album sorted alphabetically by artist (for me, that’s “Take on Me” off of A-Ha’s Hunting High and Low). Either way, though the shuffle icon is still glowing, checking the menu bar’s Controls > Shuffle shows that that’s now set back to “Off”.

If I let it play as-is, it just plays through the album. If I set Shuffle back to “on”, then it start shuffling by song, not by album. Well…sometimes. Right now, I can’t get it to shuffle at all, even though Shuffle is turned on, both in the menu bar and with the glowing shuffle icon in the control bar.

Revised original line: Shuffle is either partially broken (only shuffling by song, not by album) or entirely (not shuffling at all), possibly randomly choosing (…shuffling?…) between the two options.

I know Apple’s gone all-in on their streaming Music service, but I really wish they still had a few people assigned to making sure they had a decent basic audio player. Music just gets worse and worse for those of us who have extensive non-streaming collections.

Environment:

  • M4 mini (2024, 16 GB)
  • macOS Tahoe 26.0.1
  • Music 1.6.0.151
  • 41,596 tracks on 4,044 albums (136.4 days, 317.43 GB)

Related question:

Are there any third-party audio players for macOS that write back metadata to the macOS Music library?

The biggest reason that I’ve stuck with Music is that I use its smart playlists to regularly update the playlists that live on my iPhone, so they’re regularly updated and the songs on them rotate around. (My regularly used playlists all have some variation of “exclude if listened to in the last two months” as one of their rules.)

As far as I know from past digging, no third-party audio players write metadata (esp. when last played) back to the Music library, so the smart playlists wouldn’t work anymore.

If there’s a good, functional audio player, especially if aimed at people who actually value listening to owned music rather than streamed, that plays nicely with the Music library metadata, I’d dearly love to know about it.

Weekly Notes: September 22–28, 2025

  • ♿️ We made it through the first week of fall quarter! It was a busy week, with a fair amount of tech troubleshooting for faculty, staff, and students, but on the whole, it went pretty well.

  • 🚀 The week was extra busy with a couple nights of evening Zoom calls, but the end result of one is that after fourteen years, I have finally turned over the social media manager position for Norwescon to someone else! I’m still on the team as an assistant/consultant/graphics person, but I’m not in charge anymore, which is a welcome step. (I didn’t mind doing it, but almost a decade and a half is a long time to be the primary online “voice” of the con, and I’m happy to let someone else with other ideas take over.)

  • 🎻 Today we went into Seattle to see Danny Elfman’s Music From the Films of Tim Burton with the Seattle Symphony. Music from 13 of the 17 films that Burton and Elfman have collaborated on, with a full symphony plus choir, and with a screen showing clips from the films interspersed with images of Burton’s character design sketches. Really well done, and the music was great. I was particularly pleasantly surprised with the section from Big Fish — I’ve seen it, but not anytime recently, and didn’t have any memory of the score, and it’s very different than Elfman’s other scores. I didn’t realize Elfman knew that there were that many major chords! ;)

📸 Photos

The Seattle Symphony on stage, with blue and purple lights on the walls, and a screen displaying a Tim Burton sketch of two bare trees on a checkerboard landscape and the text, 'Danny Elfman's music from the films of Tim Burton'.
The show about to start.
Looking south down the Seattle waterfront from the roof of the new aquarium with the skyline on the left and the Seattle ferris wheel on the right, with people strolling along the sidewalk by the old aquarium building.
Before going to the symphony, we went down to look at the newly remodeled Seattle waterfront. It’s really nice!
Panoramic shot of the Olympic mountains across Puget Sound, half-shrouded in clouds, under a mostly cloudly sky, with a ferry on the water on the far left of the image.
The Olympic mountains were really pretty this morning.
A section of brick wall and utility pipe barely visible behind hundreds of pieces of used, chewed gum, some stuck to the wall in blobs, some stretched to hang off of the pipes. It's actually more gross than it sounds.
It had been a while since we’d gone by the gum wall. It’s as appealing as ever! (My wife glanced up as I was working on this photo, and commented, “That’s disgusting. I looked up just in time to see my husband looking at dirty pictures on his computer…”.)

📚 Reading

🔗 Linking

  • Colin Nissan at McSweeney’s, with the perennial classic: It’s Decorative Gourd Season, Motherfuckers: “When my guests come over, it’s gonna be like BLAMMO! Check out my shellacked decorative vegetables, assholes. Guess what season it is—fucking fall. There’s a nip in the air, and my house is full of mutant fucking squash.”

  • Varsha Bansal at The Guardian: How thousands of ‘overworked, underpaid’ humans train Google’s AI to seem smart: “A great deal of attention has been paid to the workers who label the data that is used to train artificial intelligence. There is, however, another corps of workers, including Sawyer, working day and night to moderate the output of AI, ensuring that chatbots’ billions of users see only safe and appropriate responses. ¶ ‘AI isn’t magic; it’s a pyramid scheme of human labor,’ said Adio Dinika, a researcher at the Distributed AI Research Institute based in Bremen, Germany. ‘These raters are the middle rung: invisible, essential and expendable.'”

Weekly Notes: September 15–21, 2025

  • ♿️ Made it through opening week at work! (This is the week before classes start, filled with staff and faculty info and training.) Day two got a little crazy for me running around making sure that captions were up and running properly, but everything worked out in the end. Tomorrow, students are back and classes start!

  • 💻 A particularly exciting part of the week was getting issued my new work laptop. My old one was a Dell something-or-other, my new one is an Apple MacBook Pro with M4 Pro, 48 GB RAM, and 1 TB drive. A very nice upgrade, prompted because I need to be able to work cross-platform for accessibility testing and document remediation, and this allows me to run Windows in a virtual environment inside the macOS. Haven’t gotten very far setting it up yet, but it’ll be very nice when it’s all set up.

📸 Photos

Spooky season decorations outside our house, incouding a skeleton, jack-o-lanterns, and several Halloween themed gnomes.
It’s spooky season! Our seasonal gnome garden gets some extra friends for the next month or so…plus, we got some fun new additions this year.
An outdoor decorative figure of three very creepy mushrooms with wide eyes, droopy noses, and wide evil sharp-toothed smiles, with tombstones and bones at their bases.
This great bunch of evil mushrooms has been creeping out my wife for the past few weeks since we found it and tossed it on a shelf inside until it was time to set it out front.
An outdoor figurine of a snail with a green head, blue foot, and purple shell, all stitched up and with metal plugs like Frankenstein's monster.
We definitely couldn’t resist this frankensnail (Frankensnail’s monster?) when we saw it.
Me holding a paper model of a Seattle Link light rail train car, while wearing a black cap, rainbow shirt, and black face mask.
We’re less than three months away from the new Link light rail station across the street opening up, so we got paper craft train cars to assemble during our first day of all-staff events.

🎧 Listening

  • Nine Inch Nails’ Tron: Ares soundtrack just landed. I’ve only given it a quick run-through so far, but my first impressions are that it works really well as a follow up to Daft Punk’s Tron: Legacy soundtrack, and has some really strong new NIN tracks, but I’m not yet entirely sure what I think of it as a NIN album.

🔗 Linking

There’s a bit of a theme to this week’s links that will be quite obvious….

Weekly Notes: September 8–14, 2025

  • 💉 Last weekend we tried to get our Covid boosters at our local Walgreens and were turned down, even though Washington’s governor had put out a directive a few days before stating that everyone in Washington over six months old was eligible. So on Monday, we tried again at our local Safeway, which had no problems at all with giving us a Flu/Covid vaccine cocktail, so we’ve now switched pharmacies from Walgreens to Safeway.

  • Work was pretty uneventful, though this was the last week of the summer break; this coming week is our “opening week” with lots of staff and faculty welcomes and training workshops, and the week after that, students are back on campus. Back into the school year!

📸 Photos

Me with the left sleeve of my t-shirt rolled up to reveal two band-aids that have been written on with black permanent marker; the top says "F U" and the bottom says "R F K".
I decorated my bandaids after getting my vaccines, just because I could.
Three decorative 'skeleton' creatures on my office desk. One is an elephant (complete with solid bone ears and trunk bones), one an octopus (with large skull and tentacle bones), and one a snail (with skull shell, solid antennae, and a bony ribcage-like structure for the foot that makes it look almost centipedal).
It’s spooky season, so it’s time for my small collection of ridiculously anatomically improbable skeletons to come back out onto my desk at work. The elephant is the newest addition.
A flock of about 40 ducks standing across a bike path.
The ducks on our weekend walking trail were out in force on Saturday morning.

📝 Writing

📚 Reading

I finished two books this week; one was even non-fiction! Though as it was a behind-the-scenes look at Star Trek III, it was still solidly within my usual wheelhouse.

And I’ve just started Lois McMaster Bujold’s The Curse of Chalion, as a precursor to moving forward on my Hugo best novel reading project; this one isn’t a Hugo winner, but its immediate sequel is. With how much I enjoyed Bujold’s Vorkosigan saga, which though sci-fi, combined two genres that aren’t my usual thing (military SF and romance), I’m curious what I’ll think of her in the fantasy realm, which is also secondary to SF in my interests.

📺 Watching

Two movies this week:

  • The Phoenician Scheme (⭐️⭐️⭐️): I am absolutely a sucker for Anderson’s quirky hyper-stylized films.

  • The Thursday Murder Club (⭐️⭐️⭐️): Take some of today’s most known British actors and let ‘em run around having fun in a murder mystery. Quite enjoyable.

🔗 Linking

  • Erin Reed: We Must Not Posthumously Sanitize Charlie Kirk’s Hateful Life: “Charlie Kirk was not “practicing politics the right way.” His work should never “be continued.” He embodied everything corrosive about American politics today. […] His model of politics was not dialogue, but trolling: hopping from campus to campus to bait students, churn out sound bites, and spread hate. And his rhetoric was not debate—it was violent, dehumanizing, and designed to put targets on people’s backs.”

  • Elizabeth Spiers at The Nation: Charlie Kirk’s Legacy Deserves No Mourning: “There is no requirement to take part in this whitewashing campaign, and refusing to join in doesn’t make anyone a bad person. It’s a choice to write an obituary that begins ‘Joseph Goebbels was a gifted marketer and loving father to six children.'”

  • Identity 4: Racintosh Plus: Really impressive work putting a Mac Plus into a one-unit rack mount casing.

Google Docs Adds PDF Accessibility Tagging

I don’t know exactly when this happened (my best guess is maybe sometime in April, based on this YouTube video; if you watch it, be aware that the output seems to have improved since it was made), but at some point in the not-too-distant past, Google Docs has started including accessibility tags in downloaded PDFs. And while not perfect, they don’t suck!

update: Looks like this started rolling out in December 2024, earlier than I realized. Thanks to Curtis Wilcox for pointing out the announcement link.

Quick Background

For PDFs to be compatible with assistive technology and readable by people with various disabilities, including but not at all limited to visually disabled people who use screen readers like VoiceOver, JAWS, NVDA, and ORCA, PDFs must include accessibility tags. These are not visible to most users, but are embedded in the “behind the scenes” document information, and define the various parts of the document. Assistive technology, rather than having to try to interpret the visual presentation of a PDF, is able to read the accessibility tags and use those to voice the document, assist with navigation, and other features.

However, until recently, Google Docs has not included this information when exporting a PDF using the File > Download > PDF Document (.pdf) option. PDFs downloaded from Google Docs, even if designed with accessibility features such as headings, alt text on images, and so on, were exported in an inaccessible format (as if they had been created with a “print to PDF” function). The only way around this was to either use other software to tag the PDF or to export the document as a Microsoft Word .docx file and export to PDF from Word.

But that’s no longer the case! I first realized this a couple months ago when I was sent a PDF generated from Google Docs and was surprised to see tags already there. I’ve recently had the chance to dig into this a little bit more, and I’m rather pleasantly surprised by what I’m seeing. It’s not perfect, but it doesn’t suck.

Important note

I’m not a PDF expert! I’ve been working in the digital accessibility space for a bit over three years now, but I’m learning more stuff all the time, and I’m sure there’s still a lot I don’t know. There are likely other people in this space who could dig into this a lot more comprehensively than I can, and I invite them to do so (heck, that’s part of why I’m making this post). But I’m also not a total neophyte, and given how little information on this change I could find out there, I figured I’d put what knowledge I do have to some use.

Testing process

Very simple, quick-and-dirty: I created a test Google Doc from scratch, making sure to include the basics (headings, descriptive links, images with alt text) and some more advanced bits (horizontal rules, a table, a multi-column section, an equation, a drawing, and a chart). I then downloaded that document as a PDF and dug into the accessibility tags to see what I found. As I reviewed the tags, I updated the document with my findings, and downloaded a new version of the PDF with my findings included (338 KB .pdf).

Acrobat Pro displaying a document titled 'this is an accessibility test document' with the tags pane open to the right and the first line of the document selected and highlighted with a purple box.

Findings

More details are in the PDF, but in brief:

  • Paragraphs are tagged correctly as <P>.
  • Heading are tagged correctly as <H1> (or whatever level is appropriate).
  • Links are tagged correctly as a <Link> with a <Link - OBJR> tag. Link text is wrapped in a <Span>, and the link underline ends up as a non-artifacted <Path>.
  • Images are tagged correctly as a <Figure> with alt text included. However, images on their own lines end up wrapped inside a <P> tag and are followed by a <Span> containing an empty object (likely the carriage return).
  • Lists are pretty good. If a <LI> list item includes a subsidiary list, that list is outside of the <LBody> tag, and I’m not sure if that’s correct, incorrect, or indifferent. Additionally, list markers such as bullets or ordinals are not wrapped in <LBL> tags but are included as part of the <LBody> text object. However, this isn’t unusual (I believe Microsoft Word also does this), and doesn’t seem to cause difficulties.
  • Tables are mostly correct, including tagging the header row cells with <TH> if the header row is pinned (which is the only way I could find to define a header row within Google Docs). However, the column scope is not defined (row scope is moot, as there doesn’t seem to be a way to define row header cells within Google Docs; the table options are fairly limited).
  • Horizontal lines are properly artifacted, but do produce a <P> containing an empty object (presumably the carriage return, just as with images).
  • Using columns didn’t affect the proper paragraph tagging; columned content will be read in the proper order.
  • Inserted drawings and charts are output as images, including any defined alt text.
  • Equations are just output as plain text, without using MathML, and may drop characters or have some symbols rendered as “Path” within the text string. STEM documents will continue to have issues.

Conclusion

So, not perfect…but an impressive change from just a few months ago, and really, the output doesn’t suck! For your basic, everyday document, if you need to distribute it as a PDF instead of some other more accessible native format, PDFs downloaded from Google Does now seem to be a not-horrible option. (My base recommendation is still to distribute native documents whenever possible, as they give the user agency over the presentation, such as being able to adjust font face, size, and color based on their needs. However, since PDFs are so ubiquitous, it’s heartening to see Google improving things.)

Alt Text Tips From A Visually Impaired Person

If you’ve ever struggled with writing alt text for images, especially for photos that seem difficult to describe, here are six excellent tips from a visually impaired person, posted to Mastodon by @hello@makary.online:

  1. Tell me about the colours, because of all the people who need an alt text, some of us see a little bit, or we used to, so we know what colours are. Even those of us who were born blind, we know intellectually what green is and that it’s the colour of grass, and leaves, and people usually bring it up in the context of life, and hope, and so on. Just because you haven’t seen an atom doesn’t mean that the concept is unthinkable for you, right?

  2. I know what shapes and textures are, if you tell me that something is smooth, I know what smooth is, if you tell me that something is made of cloth, I know how that feels, if you tell me it has sharp edges, I know how sharp edges feel and how they are different from soft, rounded corners.

  3. Give me the context. If it is a character from a book or a series, tell me their name and the title, maybe I know them! I listen to audiobooks and series all the time! If it’s a comic and the people interacting are a couple, it is important, and means something else than if they are siblings, or a parent with a child, or an owner and their dog. If someone on the photo makes an awkward or unhappy face, or grins like crazy, that’s information that helps me get it.

  4. Give me vibes. Describe it to me the way you see it. If you think the drawing of a doll is creepy, say ‘it seems creepy to me’. If the picture of a sunrise makes you feel at peace, tell me ‘It looks really peaceful to me’. Tell me how it makes you feel, be evocative, because that’s what experiencing stuff is, you know, experiencing. If you don’t feel sure about it, also tell me. ‘It feels off and eerie for some reason, but I can’t put my finger on it’ is a very interesting description.

  5. Be a person. AI image descriptions not only sometimes get stuff wrong, but also miss all the context. A robot will not know which part of the picture is important. I am not a robot, neither are you. Just think about ‘how would I describe it to a friend who cannot see it for whatever reason’ and do that. You are not my external eyes, because that’s not possible, you are a person describing stuff to me.

  6. Do as much or as little as you can. You don’t have to write an essay about every meme. Write as much or as little as you can, have time and feel comfortable with. If you give a short or a bad description, I can see that, and that’s what happens in life lol. But if you don’t put ANY description. the whole thing that you thought was important enough for you to share, doesn’t exist at all for me and people like me, and that’s just low-key sad.

Fortnightly Notes: June 30–July 13, 2025

As there have been Things Going On lately, I missed last Sunday’s “Weekly Notes” post, so this becomes a “Fortnightly Notes” post instead, partly because “biweekly” is vague, and “fortnight” is a term should be used more often (outside of a gaming context).

  • 🏥 The major part of the Things Going On has been that two weeks ago, my wife had a (planned and necessary) hysterectomy, and I’ve been on caretaker duty. She had two nights in the hospital following the surgery, and then came home and has been recuperating here. She’s healing well, and had a good post-op checkup a few days ago, so things are going well! This does mean that our summer is going to be mostly uneventful, but that’s obviously quite okay under the circumstances.

  • ♿️ Due to the aforementioned Things Going On, I’ve spent the past two weeks working remotely. I’m incredibly fortunate to have a job that lets me do that when it’s necessary, and I wish more people had the ability to do this.

  • 🚀 On the convention front, the Seattle Worldcon schedule was released this past week. Since I’m our website admin, I’m quite happy with the technical side of things, as I was able to present the full 5-day schedule on a single page, filterable by day, track, or both, and with clean (for WordPress), semantic, and accessible (to the best of my ability to verify) code.

    A bit of geekery:

    The Javascript code that does the filtering could quite probably be improved and optimized, as it’s just a result of me digging through the web and hacking things together until it did what I wanted, and my JavaScript knowledge is just barely at the level that allowed me to figure this out. But hey, it works, and that was the most important part.

    Each panel is wrapped in an article tag, each panel title is a heading, and start and end times are wrapped in proper time tags. Panel titles are linked self-anchors so that it’s easy to link directly to individual panels, which is discoverable either by tabbing to the title or by mousing over them. Here’s a sample of the code for one (totally randomly chosen) panel:

    <article class="track dan eve">
        <h4 id="EVE03"><a href="#EVE03">Wednesday Night Dance with DJ Wüdi</a></h4>
        <div class="sched">Events; Dance/Movement<br>Sheraton: Metropolitan Ballroom, <time datetime="2025-08-13T20:00-07:00">Wed. 8 p.m.</time>–<time datetime="2025-08-14T02:00-07:00">2 a.m.</time></div>
        <p class="desc">From dance clubs in Alaska in the '90s to being a recent regular DJ at Norwescon, DJ Wüdi spins an eclectic mix of dance tracks from across the decades. Pop, electronica/dance, wave, disco, goth/EBM/industrial, convention classics, mashups… (almost) anything goes! Already know there's something that'll get you out on the floor? <a href="https://app.limedj.com/shows/djwudi/9NWMHW">Send in your requests ahead of time!</a></p>
        <p class="pros">DJ Wüdi</p>
    </article>
    

    Keyboard navigation for the page works fine, checking it with WAVE comes up with zero errors (and 400-some “alerts”, but that’s because WAVE incorrectly thinks the panelist listings should be headers), checking with ANDI also looks good, and I was able to navigate and interact (at least as well as a non-regular screen reader user can) with VoiceOver and NVDA. This certainly doesn’t mean that there aren’t things that could be improved, but I’m pretty happy with where I got things to be.

📸 Photos

Me stretched out in a grey recliner in our living room.
Our old recliner broke, so we got a new one. Of course, once assembled, I had to give it a good test. It works! Which is good, since this is my wife’s primary recuperation spot.
Me sitting at a small table in a hospital room, wearing a face mask while working on my computer.
Working from a hospital room isn’t quite as comfortable as from home or at the office, but at least I could do it!

📝 Writing

📚 Reading

Read Terry Pratchett’s Pyramids and issue 65 of Uncanny Magazine.

📺 Watching

I found time for four movies, mostly in the first few post-surgery days when my wife was doing a lot of sleeping:

  • The Adventure of Sherlock Holmes’ Smarter Brother: ⭐️⭐️ — Not as amusing as I hoped, given the cast.
  • Bugsy Malone: ⭐️⭐️⭐️ – I’d had vague memories of kids shooting marshmallows out of tommy guns in a ’20s gangster film, and finally tracked down that memory. Odd, but entertaining!
  • Johnny Dangerously: ⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️ — Another ’20s gangster parody I vaguely remembered watching as a kid; this one is still really funny, and I realized while watching it that some old jokes I’ve had in my head for years came from this film. “You shouldn’t grab me, Johnny. My mother grabbed me once. Once.
  • KPop Demon Hunters: ⭐️⭐️⭐️ — Somehow this one popped into conversations around me, I gave it a shot, and was entertained…and suspect that it would be a good idea to make sure the soundtrack ends up in my convention DJing playlist.

🔗 Linking

  • Patrick Clark in Businessweek: American Mid: Hampton Inn’s Good-Enough Formula for World Domination: I’ve occasionally wondered about how the mid-range hotel breakfast buffet got started; this was a surprisingly interesting look at how strategically aiming for the middle of the road made Hampton Inn the US’s largest hotel chain (which I wouldn’t have guessed).

  • Lynda V. Mapes in The Seattle Times: These orcas have been trying to feed people, new research shows: “So just what are the orcas doing, offering food to people? ¶ Researchers ruled out play, because the incidents were short, lasting only about 30 seconds. And it’s mostly young orcas that play, and orcas of every age offered food. So it seems what is going on is exploration, the scientists surmised: The orcas are curious to see what happens if they offer us food.”

  • Gaurav Sood at Yanko Design: World’s Narrowest Fiat Panda is One Anorexic 19-Inch-Wide EV Destined for the Record Books: “Italian mechanic Andrea Marazzi has transformed a 1993 Fiat Panda into what is now being described as the world’s narrowest functioning car. At just 19.6 inches wide, the one-seater electric vehicle looks more like a cartoon sketch brought to life than a road-ready hatchback. Yet it can move, steer, stop, and drive like any other car.”

  • Sarah Perez at TechCrunch: Facebook is asking to use Meta AI on photos in your camera roll you haven’t yet shared: “Facebook is asking users for access to their phone’s camera roll to automatically suggest AI-edited versions of their photos — including ones that haven’t been uploaded to Facebook yet. […] To work, Facebook says it will upload media from your camera roll to its cloud (meaning its servers) on an “ongoing basis”….

  • Sitara at Sitara’s Garden: How Fantasy Fuelled 60s Counterculture: “That pirated Tolkien paperbacks hit like a bomb in 60s campuses. The bootleg copy was printed due to a loophole in copyright law and quickly became a cult phenomenon, selling over 100,000 copies in 1965 alone. The biggest fans of the book seemed to be hippies, protesters and rockstars. It makes sense when you look at the context.”

  • Laura Michet: Touching the back wall of the Apple store: “When I was in high school, my friends and I had a game we used to play at the mall: we would go into the Apple store and try to make it to the back wall of the store, touch it, and exit out the front without an Apple staff person talking to us.”

  • Elizabeth Lopatto and Sarah Jeong at The Verge: The American system of democracy has crashed: “The declaration pronounces these rights to be so important that it’s worth overthrowing a government over them. But one should not undertake revolution against a tyrannical government lightly, the declaration says, going on to provide a massive litany of complaints as justification. In modern times, the full list was considered to be the boring part of this document, lacking the vim and vigor of ‘we hold these truths to be self-evident’ and other such bars from the preamble. But this year, it’s become a… bracing read.”

  • Jason Kottke: There’s No Undo Button For Our Fallen Democracy: “America’s democratic collapse has been coming for years, always just over the horizon. But when everything that happened during Trump’s first three months in office happened and (here’s the important part) shockingly little was done by the few groups (Congress, the Supreme Court, the Democratic Party, American corporations & other large institutions, media companies) who had the power to counter it, I knew it was over. And over in a way that is irreversible, for a good long while at least.”

  • Sarah Taber on Mastodon (as a nice chaser to Kottke’s link above): “Hello Americans on Mastodon, I know we don’t feel like there’s much to celebrate this July 4th. It’s been a rough several years. ¶ So I want to talk about how we’re making history right now.”

  • Marcus Medford-Kerr at CBC Radio: These sea spiders use the bacteria on their bodies to turn methane into food: “Most sea spiders are hunters. They tend to eat anemones, worms, sponges and soft corals, getting their nutrients by piercing their prey and sucking up their internal fluids. ¶ The Sericosura spiders, on the other hand, are more like intergenerational farmers.”

  • Catherynne M. Valente in Uncanny Magazine Issue 65: When He Calls Your Name: So good, and a wonderful homage to…well, that would just be giving it away, wouldn’t it?

  • Dr David Musgrove at History Extra: “I counted the penises in the Bayeux Tapestry and I have no regrets”: what one Oxford professor found when he studied the rudest bits of the embroidery: “It’s not too often that medieval historians grab national headlines, but when you get an Oxford academic counting penises in a world-famous embroidery, you’re sure to arouse media attention.”

  • Randee Dawn: 7.07.25 Why most SFF cons need fixing, and how CONvergence can show the way: I’m actually pleased to see that Norwescon is already doing or working on several of the suggestions in this post. That said, there’s more we can do to ensure that we’re around for our 50th year (not too far away!) and beyond.

  • Daniel Villarreal at LGBTQNation: GOP erases all mentions of bisexuals from Stonewall Monument webpages: “Transgender journalist Erin Reed noted that the Stonewall National Monument page once said, ‘Before the 1960s, almost everything about living openly as a lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, or queer (LGBTQ+) person was illegal.’ The newly revised version says, ‘Before the 1960s, almost everything about living authentically as a gay or lesbian person was illegal.'”

  • Marcin Wichary: Frame of preference: A history of Mac settings, 1984–2004: “Join me on a journey through the first twenty years of Mac’s control panels.”

An Alt Text Experiment

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 )!

Weekly Notes: May 26–June 1, 2025

  • ♿️ 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.”

(Bi-)Weekly Notes: May 12–25, 2025

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.”