@stringyland
Julie G, accessibility dork, at your service. Head of Accessibility Assessment at @intopia.bsky.social. Living in Whadjuk lands. Spending too much time online instead of outdoors or making silly little arts and crafts stuff.
📣 Reportedly only 140,000 out of the 480,000 Robodebt class action members have registered to receive additional compensation in the proposed settlement.
If you're eligible, you have until 4pm tomorrow to register with Gordon Legal:
robodebtsettlement.com.au
I have seen a lot of cursed stuff in my time in academia but this is among the *most* cursed.
Grammarly is generating miniature LLMs based on academic work so that users can have their writing ‘reviewed’ by experts like David Abulafia, who died less than two months ago.
Australians impacted by Robodebt have until 4pm on Friday, March 6, to register for a new class action settlement with payouts between $1,000 and $50,000 au.finance.yahoo.com/news/centrel...
Its one thing to read the histories and realize that fascism is an ideology by and for weird losers who suck at everything, and another to live through it
Bluesky is “screen reader accessible” the way a staircase with curb cuts on each step is a “wheelchair ramp.”
No keyboard nav. No useful landmarks. No focus memory. I lose my place every time I interact with a post.
Compliance ≠ usability.
Day 14 asking @support.bsky.team to fix this #A11yFail
I know right? I thought we were done with him
a chart showing the electricity price rises at the same time as gas price rises
a chat showing that the price of gas peaks in the evening, and that's what causes the wholesale price to peak
a chart showing that call outages correspond strongly with rice bikes
a graphic showing that increased costs on power bills. Of clinging into coal and gas.
Excellent new Climate Council report directly naming the villains behind high power bills in Australia: expensive fossil gas and comically unreliable coal power.
Power bill relief will mean getting rid of these ASAP. Read this report, it's good!
www.climatecouncil.org.au/resources/po...
I did a similar thing with my last haircut. It's funny but also low-key shattering.
Australia Institute research shows that nurses pay more tax than gas and oil companies.
New polling has revealed that One Nation and Greens voters strongly support a 25 per cent tax on gas exports.
✍️ Sign our petition to stop the gas export scam: https://theaus.in/46op1x4
“There is no offset for what cannot be replaced,” writes Louise Morris, Advocate at The Australia Institute.
Read the full piece on The Point: https://theaus.in/3ZTEeT9
If you have an Amazon wishlist, Amazon's just decided it's going to reveal your address to gift buyers from 25 March. There appears to be no actual reason to do this.
www.404media.co/amazon-wishl...
From me: The architect of the Robodebt scheme, who was told it was unlawful even as he delivered it for the government, is still employed in the public service, now at the Commonwealth Director of Public Prosecutions. And in a senior governance and risk role. www.crikey.com.au/2026/02/20/r...
It feels like one of the cornerstones of the web is gone.
Google and others would crawl and index, but they'd bring traffic in return. These AI scrapers extract the value and give you a middle finger on the way out.
Oof! That tax versus text one is huge! I don't know if it's useful to you or not, but the Web Accessibility Initiative has a sample email you can use when sending complaints. You can copy and paste it, then substitute your specific details into the spots they've marked. www.w3.org/WAI/teach-ad...
Finally we have Eleanor Beilby, a learning tech co-ordinator at Curtin University who was late-diagnosed with ADHD. She’s talking about how digital tech can be a support for people with ADHD, and what adjustments are already possible. #PDAC2026
Forget the memes and slang. Alina proposes the AURA framework instead: authentic, utility-driven, relatable, and action-oriented. #PDAC2026 She’s taking her own advice too, giving lots of practical examples and ideas to us.
Our second-to-last speaker is Alina Eshal, on how to make accessibility matter to Gen Z! What a great topic. #PDAC2026
Yes exactly! 95% accuracy sounds pretty great, until the 5% includes one crucial detail that’s foundational to understanding the rest of it! Automation is amazing, but it can’t replace the context, intent and embodied information that are the majority of human communication.
When you understand the limitations of automated tests, then you can have more confidence in what yours does cover, and you can make plans to manually test the rest of the things you need. #PDAC2026
One example is of automated tests for alt text. Tests can tell if an <img> element has a populated alt attribute, but can’t tell if an image is so decorative that it shouldn’t have an alt, if the alt is accurate, or if it refers to a longer description somewhere else. #PDAC2026
For our last few sessions, Beau Vass from TTC is describing the automated accessibility testing gap. #PDAC2026 As good as automated tests are, there are several things you need to be aware of before you rely on their results.
The problem Vithya is finding is that people put too much trust in the results of ChatGPT and friends. The speed at which it generates content is much faster than humans can review it, so we don’t always do our due diligence. But LLMs can’t distinguish between true and false #PDAC2026
You’re welcome! I should put you in touch with the committee for this event - I think your maths talk would be very much appreciated
AI can supplement assistive technologies by filling gaps in current feature sets. The best options here are to use the AI features provided by the assistive software itself, because those are built by and for people with disabilities. Mainstream AI tools are not as good for this purpose. #PDAC2026
For improving accessibility in documents, AI is currently very good at identifying accessibility problems, but no good at fixing them. Run it over your docs to find failures, but fix those problems yourself. #PDAC2026
For alt text, AI can help with large volumes. But it doesn’t understand context, and can misrepresent identities by mislabelling people and objects. This can have potential legal or ethical impacts, depending on the purpose of the image. Use it for drafts but don’t allow it to publish #PDAC2026
Starting with captions and transcripts: AI can help with speeding up a workflow and creating rapid drafts. It struggles with accents, jargon and overlapping voices and sounds. Vithya recommends a hybrid approach with an automated draft corrected by a human with subject expertise #PDAC2026
Vithya Vijayakumare is one of the few people I’d trust to tell me about the next topic: the role of AI in digital accessibility. #PDAC2026
Art and images are for everyone, and are how culture is shared. Participating in that is a human right, and providing alt text makes sure that people who are blind or have low vision are included and can contribute to our shared understanding as a society. #PDAC2026
Laetitia L Thompson is about to talk on a topic I always enjoy - the art of alt text! 😍 #PDAC2026 This talk has cat pictures, dry humour and WCAG in it, this is like bait for me.
