Website Accessibility

I used the Website Accessibility eValuation Tool on the website of an institution that I used to work with. As part of my role at this institution, I updated the social media accounts, but I did not have the opportunity to work on the website. The website was quite outdated and has always had a uniform format, a paint-by-numbers style. It is part of a larger educational institution, so it should follow accessibility regulations, specifically The Accessibility for Ontarians with Disabilities Act.

The most recurrent issue on the website was a lack of alternative text for screen readers and images that may not load. There were also several redundant and empty links and the language of documents were often not defined. The font of the website was also italicised and difficult to read.

 

Gendered Experiences

It is a bit outdated and exclusionary that I must still choose a salutation when completing online forms, why does the pizza shop need to know my gender? “Mx” is a great gender neutral option for a salutation and is supposed to be accepted by the UK government, but it is not uniformly applied as an option with government forms and other important aspects of daily life, like banking.

Gendered selections were even a problem with Bitmoji. I downloaded the app as part of Thing 5 and was thrilled with the amount of options for customisation. However, before I even started, I had to choose from a binary definition of gender and as I chose woman, I could only choose clothing for women (with the exception of some sports wear) even though I normally have a more androgynous style. The app could have easily skipped this option and the app would be even more customisable with a greater audience if you could choose from all customisable options.

I think I will use this quote from Sabrina Fonseca in daily life, “If you don’t know why you’re asking, then you probably don’t need to know the answer.” – from Designing forms for gender diversity and inclusion, uxdesign.cc, April 2017

Bitmoji avatar from Snap.inc

I agree that it is a good thing to have more diverse emojis, it is important to be represented in what has become common language. If you consider languages that use gendered words, like French and Italian, there is no space for people who do not fit into binary language. Emojis are a form of language, so they should be diverse and representative. However, I do not think technology companies are ground-breaking or deserve endless praise for doing the bare minimum. Representative or inclusive visual language does not equate equality, rather it aligns more with “tolerance”, especially the emojis that just changed the skin tone of default and sometimes white figures.

Paige Tutt made an interesting point in their article “How Apple’s new multicultural emojis are more racist than before,” that they now had to consciously insert race into their digital communication. However, I would agree with Kate Miltner, that technology neutrality is a myth. The new emojis just made us more aware of it.

I really enjoyed the Bitmoji app and the amount of customisation that was possible.

Digital security is something that we should all prioritise, myself included. I am usually careful to customise the permissions on new apps that I download and I always turn off my phone location – unless I am lost and relying on Google Maps to find North. So I was surprised to find that there were still some apps that had permissions I did not remember granting. Using the My Permissions app, I was surprised to find that there were several apps and accounts that I had deleted, but were still connected to my social media accounts. 

It is easy to miss, a simple click can provide instant access to a mountain of personal data. The security of our personal devices and online accounts is something that a lot of us do not take seriously until something happens. This week’s assignment was a good reminder that I should regularly be checking my app permissions and my overall phone security.

https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Laetoli_footprints.png; By Raichlen DA, Gordon AD, Harcourt-Smith WEH, Foster AD, Haas WR Jr (Wikimedia); CC BY 2.5

 

I have a millennial digital footprint, how do I manage an online presence that reaches back to childhood?

Managing my digital footprint is something that I have become increasingly concerned about. Growing up in the nineties and the noughties, I was quickly amassing a messy digital footprint without a full understanding of the repercussions. My digital footprint is definitely a little messy, but thankfully, it remains professional. Reading through the e-Professionalism document, I liked the emphasis on thinking ahead about your career and maintaining a digital footprint that aligns with that. Something I will be working on this week!

Thankfully, I was taught basic online etiquette and made aware that what you write online is public and to think carefully about what you are posting and how it impacts yourself and others. It seems that everyday there is a new story about a prominent social or cultural figure whose digital footprint has caught up with them as people unearth controversial social media posts from their past. I never quite understood how anyone could post some of these things that are truly awful or hurtful. I see posting online as a deliberate act, far more deliberate and thought out than something that you may verbalise in a conversation with a friend or inappropriate and outdated vocabulary you might accidentally use. While neither of these situations should excuse hurtful behaviour, posting online requires several steps while a conversation may be off the cuff and not well-thought out. I wonder if the people posting inappropriate content to a large audience, would do or say the same things if their audience was standing in front of them?

 

How can a school assignment negatively impact future job prospects?

Because of convoluted family history, my name is fairly unique. Rumour has it that when my great-grandfather immigrated to Canada alone as a child he did not know how to spell his surname, I cannot confirm this with certainty, but it makes a great story! Googling myself turned up a few newspaper articles about my artwork when I was in high school (including a painting I made for my sister with a deity from a religion and culture I do not know nearly enough about, something I would not do today!), some stories I wrote for my old university newspaper, some pictures from awards I received at uni, a bio I did not remember writing for my Master’s student association, and a stab at becoming a freelance copy-editor.

I have always been very careful about my personal digital footprint in regards to social media, but one thing that I did not consider for years was my professional footprint. This only became a concern for me during my Master’s degree. I always knew that I wanted to continue my studies in a post-grad program (even today I hope to complete a PhD in the future) and the unofficial motto of every undergrad humanities student was “publish or peril”. Master’s programs were looking for students who could read and write at least three languages, had published work, an impressive list of extra-curricular activities, a history of awards and funding, and of course incredible grades! So I did all of these things, while also working part-time, and while I am happy with the results, looking back, I realise that it was detrimental to my mental and physical health and created a confusing and unfocused professional digital footprint. As undergraduate students, we were pushed to publish work to get into master’s programs. As master’s students, we were told we should not be publishing because our ideas were too undeveloped (which is true). I am not unhappy with or embarrassed by the work that I published as an undergraduate, but I think the caveat that that work represents me as an undergraduate who had a lot to learn, is not obvious.

I will end this long post with a cautionary tale for students and educators. During my undergraduate degree, I was assigned a group project to create and promote a mock gallery. One of the suggestions from the instructor was to create a website. So we did. We tried to make it as realistic as possible, and it worked…too well. One of my group members has since been asked at several job interviews about the gallery that he ran in London. While it is easy to explain away at the interview, I worry that it could negatively impact him if prospective employers were to view it as misleading. We were young students who were comfortable with the internet and wanted to jazz up our project, but I wish we, and our instructor, had thought ahead and not used our real names and photos for the website (which I cannot remove as I no longer have access to the account used to create it).