Tag: blogging

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The Text Behind the Text

At the time of the Sydney 2000 Olympics, access to the Internet was becoming more common outside of academic settings, and many people used the official event website to keep track of the news.

One such user, Bruce Lindsay Maguire, won a court case against the organising committee because that website wasn’t accessible to him. One point of complaint was that no alt-text had been provided for images, so his Braille display wasn’t able to tell him what the images represented. The Australian Human Rights Commission website features a summary of the case.

With 22 years now passed, it’s easy to imagine this problem was confined to the early and more experimental years of the Web, but that’s not always the case.

Let’s use Instagram as an example, which employs software to try to identify what’s in a picture. A typical caption is ‘May be a picture of two people’ or ‘May be cars on a road’. However, it’s not easy to find the option to type your own alt-text. On the Android app, you need to click a small ‘Advanced settings’ link just before posting the picture, then head to ‘Write alt text’. There seems to be no good reason not to provide this box in plain sight.

A good piece of alt-text is one that fills in any important details that aren’t conveyed by the image caption or any other context. It doesn’t need to contain every detail, just enough to help someone understand the scene if they can’t see it.

One exception is purely decorative images. On this page, I often use headers created from fractals; these are generated by software as a copyright-free source of images. It’s not important to know that the image has dots and swirls of blue or pink, so these are typically labelled as simply ‘Fractal’.

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Skip to Next Week

I’m in the unusual position of having an entry almost entirely planned out in my head, but no time to write it out.

It’s all about alternative text, which describes images and other media either for people who can’t see them, or for context that’s not obvious from the media.

So I’ll catch you next week, at which point I expect to be ready to present it.

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Inside the Box

Only in the last 12 months or so have I discovered how much I dislike writing outdoors. I’ve recently been thinking about this, but because of an art lesson rather than prose or poetry.

The task was to find leaves from trees and bushes, then draw them under natural daylight. It did not go well. I set up a table and chair on my balcony, which doesn’t see much sunlight until later in the day. It was freezing, it was windy, and at one point, my pen fell off the balcony. A sunny day can be just as bad, making it difficult to read a computer screen with the glare, and there’s still often a risk of rain.

But more than that, even under the most favourable of weather conditions, I only enjoy writing indoors. When I’m outside, I like to be standing up and moving about. It’s not an environment that puts me in a frame of mind for writing.

This knowledge helps me incredibly. I know if I want to finish – for example – a blog entry at lunchtime, it’s not worth the 20-minute round-trip to the park, and that I’d be more productive sitting on my couch.

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When You Find the Words

I’m pernickety about keeping backups of my stories and poems, even if I ultimately don’t end up doing anything further with them. Each is given its own folder, and the different versions appear in date order. The oldest files go back more than a decade.

As such, I was most surprised that I couldn’t find a certain light verse I’d written in 2018. I tried searching by title: Too Chicken. I then tried searching by first line: I’m in love with the woman from Nando’s. I tried searching again with other words I recalled from the text, but no results appeared.

I thought I would have to reconstruct the piece from memory. I knew a reasonable chunk of the text, and it was written in a triolet form, so some lines would be repeated at predictable points.

The other day, however, I was looking at Snapchat. The app has a Timehop-style section where you can look back at pictures you sent in years gone by. I don’t often use that feature, but I’m glad I did, because I’d taken a picture of the original handwritten draft.

A lot of my pieces are first jotted down in pencil, and are then typed up and edited to create a second draft. That critter had somehow escaped the net, but it’s now safely on my computer and can be easily found.

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Thinking Time

My main way to consume novels and other publications is to listen to the audiobook version. This allows me to walk or run or be otherwise active at the same time, so I tend to read paper books only if there’s no other option.

However, I also go through periods of not listening to anything, and I’m currently in one of these periods.

I mentioned in my last entry that I’d been unwell, but that I was able to finish a short story I’d half-written. I’m feeling much better, and I’m back to leaving the house for much longer periods. I’ve been using this time to think about the sequel to that story, and now that’s coming along nicely.

I’ll eventually be ready to go back to the audiobooks, but I can’t see that happening for a little while yet, at least until that sequel is completed. But when that day comes, I’ll be able to pick up from where I left off.

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Nobody’s Ever Over the Weather

For the last six days, I’ve been rather unwell. It’s not the Big Thing, that’s for sure, but it’s meant I’ve been less physically able to move. This has meant I’ve spent more time in front of the computer.

On the plus side, though, I was able to devote some time to a short story I’d half-written, and it didn’t take that long to finish.

Unfortunately, the effort it took to finish that story has drained the energy required to write a blog entry. So tune in next week when this illness has hopefully eased off a bit more.

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Changing Times and a Change of Time

I’ve left it until the last minute to write this entry. It’s not entirely because I’ve been busy – although that’s a factor – but because I wanted to hear the announcement today from the Scottish First Minister, Nicola Sturgeon.

Tomorrow is the next instalment of my open-mike evening Hotchpotch, and it was expected that new restrictions would be brought in today on account of the Omicron variant of COVID-19. Happily, nothing in the announcement affects our ability to hold the event tomorrow, even if more members might choose instead to attend our virtual event on Sunday.

Last week, we were also able to run a new version of our gameshow The Literal Flow Test, involving Christmas-themed topics, as part of a wider programme of events. I might come back to this topic in a future week as there’s a story to be told there as well.

The one event that isn’t back in person is National Novel Writing Month (NaNo). As that organisation has a largely top-down approach, all the regions in the world have been advised not to meet except online, even if our local authorities allow it. Which brings me to a point about the timing of my weekly blog posts.

When I started writing this blog, I was able to update regularly at 5pm on a Monday. This evolved into 6pm on a Tuesday, and that lands squarely during the NaNo meetings. That used to make sense because I would talk to people around a table while using my PC to type the entry.

Because I’m now using my PC to talk to members and write at the same time, it’s not so simple. As such, from next week, I’ll be updating this blog at 8pm on a Tuesday. The time is still subject to a trial run, but expect my entries to appear a couple of hours later.

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When The Muse Strikes

As I sit down to write, it feels like a continuation of the last entry, where I talked about inspiration appearing at 5am. This time, however, the inspiration happened near the end of the day.

I’ve been asked to provide a poem for a 12 Days of Gratitude project. As late as Saturday of last week, I’d absolutely run dry of ideas. There were plenty of people to thank, but nothing that fitted into a structure.

While I do find walking helps with the process, I wasn’t having much luck – and over an hour later, I thought of my first line and the structure. I even took a couple of pictures to document this. It’s rare that I would show such an incomplete draft so early, but it happened by surprise.

Half-completed villanelle about gratitude
Half-completed villanelle about gratitude

My walk had taken in river views and grassy areas, but when I wrote those lines, I was probably the least inspiring place I’d been that evening: behind the Mecca Bingo.

Picture of Mecca Bingo where villanelle was written
Picture of Mecca Bingo where villanelle was written

What I need to do now is finish the piece and make a recording of it, but arguably the hardest part is over, so the rest should be plain sailing.

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Sprinting Like a Champion

Yesterday, I volunteered to take over one of the Twitter accounts for National Novel Writing Month for an hour. NaNoWordSprints provides nearly 50,000 subscribers with writing prompts and encouragement to reach their chosen goals.

When I first started writing, I went to classes with an author who would give us five or ten minutes to write a passage inspired by a snippet of text or a photograph, or occasionally an object.

My approach to this hour-long stint was similar, except that shorter prompts and longer writing periods seem to work better on Twitter. I’d thought about the prompt topics in advance, but the structure was constructed largely on-the-fly. In minutes, the four sessions were: 10, 15, 15 and five. The third of those had a photograph as a prompt instead of text.

On top of this, you need to keep an eye on any replies coming in, and answer accordingly if it was warranted. However, I found the pace manageable, and once I was in the swing of presenting the exercises, I enjoyed the experience so much that I signed up to take over on the three coming Mondays.