Sven Slootweg (soft-deprecated) @joepie91@pixie.town

@alda Many, many years ago, when I worked at a medical information system, I got to learn some Important Principles from my manager.

The first of them was, a computer must not get in the way of a doctor. The specific example, of which there were numerous examples (because of a recurring data quality issue) was, if a doctor makes a medical record of a man having become pregnant, or more urgently, having gotten his water broken and an emergency Caesarean being necessary, the computer must never try to override the doctor.

A data quality issue can be sorted out later. Somebody dying because a doctor was arguing with a computer instead of doing a life-saving surgery, can't.

And that's even before I learnt the Biological Period, that strange punctuation mark that appears in medical texts all the time. It looks just like a period, but it's pronounced But Biology Is Messy, And Sometimes There's Exceptions. Some people's hearts are on the right. Some people have six toes. Some people might well have two appendixes, so just because one was taken out three years ago is no good reason for a computer to argue a doctor wanting to schedule a new appendectomy. There will be time to count the appendixes later. Saving a life can't wait.

Back then, we often thought of medicine being a uniquely life-critical field of tech, but as decades pass, I keep running into good times to apply this principle increasingly often.

OK, I cannot stress this enough.

KEEP INVITING your chronically ill friends & (chosen) family to things.

Yes, a lot of the time we won't be able to come, but

1. that's our decision, don't make it for us, and
2. it's incredibly hurtful to find out there was an event etc and that we weren't invited. We want to at least know you were thinking of us.

A simple message saying: you are doing X and that you realise we probably cannot make it*, but would love us to be there if we can, is all you need to do.

@chronicillness #ChronicIllness

*which acknowledges you understand our health situation.

Friendly, nay, aggressive reminder that

TAB INDENTATIONS ARE AN ACCESSIBILITY FEATURE

- People that use Braille tablets will represent each space individually, so 4 spaces is 4 cells, 1 tab representing 4 spaces is 1 cell. (visual accessibility)
- People that are hard of seeing, but don't need Braille will often use a large font size, but reduce the size of tabs so lines are not super indented. This is not possible with spaces. (visual accessibility)
- Tabs have special considerations in TTS engines. (audio accessibility)
- Tabs are easier to navigate with a keyboard. (motor accessibility)

If you PROHIBIT tab characters YOU ARE HURTING ACCESSIBILITY IN YOUR PROJECT and YOU SHOULD FEEL BAD

If you do not feel bad, turn in your humanity, fox, pup, or doll card because you are a monster.

You work at a place long enough, and sometimes the answer to "Who created this cool thing that just saved me a ton of time?" is "oh, I created that"

one thing I love about dogs is that they'll go "I don't know what you want, so here's all of my possible responses in the hope that one of them is correct"

or they'll do something random one time right before you feed them and from that day forward they will always do that thing when you're about to feed them because they don't understand confirmation bias

this year, I'm unsubscribing from email newsletters and adding them to my RSS feed reader instead, so that I can ignore them in a different place.