Social

16 August 2018 11:40 IST

This Saturday 18th August 2018, it’s one year since I announced I’d written Accessibility For Everyone. And that announcement got more attention that I could’ve imagined.

As a result of that early publicity, A Book Apart opened pre-orders. And those pre-order sales were nothing to sniff at. However, I still feel a little resentful when people suggest that the particular tweet “did me a favour.” (I’m not going to show the original tweet here, as it just attracts more harassment.) My end goal is that more people make websites more inclusive, and so more sales help me reach that goal. But I want to explain the feeling I had when I wrote this tweet:

“Sorry, I’m so new, I’m still learning the correct language. Nothing I wrote, let alone the book, would be worthwhile without other people.”

It was late at night. I felt small, and that I didn’t deserve to have a book published. And anxious that people would think a) I didn’t have the right to have a book published, and b) that I was ungrateful to all the people who made the book exist.

The resulting outcry, and massive wave of support, felt incredible. So many people, so many I didn’t know, saying kind things to me. It lessened that anxiety, and when people told me I should feel proud of my achievement, I really felt proud.

But then came a lot of responses along the lines of “you should be grateful, he did you a favour.” Because his big name brought publicity that my little name would not. People have said this to me in person too. Kind people, meaning well. Someone even suggested that I should get him to print artwork to include in the book. The suggestion horrified me. I’m not grateful. I was so excited to share that I’d been working on a book for three years, but that announcement was hijacked by a well-known person publicly chastising me.

I don’t want a book about inclusivity to be tied to a tweet that made me feel excluded. And yet people will introduce me at conferences talking about that tweet. If I bring the book up in conversation, people will bring up that tweet. I’m not cross with the folks who want to deride the nature of the tweet, or the systemic inequality that leads to such a tweet. But it means I can’t escape that feeling of being small, or knowing that many people think I owe a person for making me feel that way because it may have resulted in a few more sales. You might notice I find it very difficult to call it my book. I call it Accessibility For Everyone or the book I wrote.

Sometimes I’ll make a knowing reference to the whole event when talking about the book. Like, I WROTE A BOOK. Or (jokily) implying that famous people endorsed my book out of the blue. But I don’t want to make a big deal of the event, or celebrate it, because I can’t escape the implication that I’m indebted to a person who wanted to publicly berate me. Or a social system that makes men think it’s ok to patronise women and marginalised people based on the assumption that a man knows best and everyone else must want to hear him. I do not consider “victim of mansplaining” to be one of my life’s achievements.

I am grateful to the people who took thirty seconds out of their day to bolster me when I was feeling exposed. I’ll never forget sitting in a burger bar on the Malmö coast, reading supportive tweets aloud to my boyfriend. That strangers considered how I might be feeling in that moment, and tried to make me feel better, was so incredibly kind.

Sales are still going steadily, so I’m really happy. That’s a steady number of folks who care about accessibility. And with the audiobook out this month, I’m hoping that we’ve made the book itself more accessible too.

I’m posting this as a note so it doesn’t draw unnecessary attention/further harassment. Still, I thought it worth publicly documenting my feelings about it. I started writing a little post to note the announcement’s anniversary and it spilled out into feelings. So I want to be able to point people at this explanation.

15 August 2018 21:24 IST

Did a little update to the site this evening. I have have categories and tags exposed again. I also simplified the link styling and fixed some bits of layout that I’d previously broken. Hooray for iteration!

06 August 2018 16:45 IST

If you’re a person who is on Mastodon, you may be interested to know that we now have our own instances for Ind.ie, and I have my own instance for me.

So you can follow us on Mastodon at:

• Ind.ie: @indie@mastodon.ind.ie
• Better: @better@mastodon.ind.ie
• Aral: @aral@mastodon.ar.al
• Laura: @laura@mastodon.laurakalbag.com
• Oskar: @gigapup@mastodon.laurakalbag.com 🐕

If you’re not on Mastodon, and are wondering what I’m on about, you might find the following link useful!

‘How Does Mastodon Work?’ by Kev Quirk

02 August 2018 17:28 IST

Today I pushed a fairly big update to my site… I’ve now got a photos section, and that section is grouped under the latest section alongside notes.

This comes from me wanting to add more types of content. Photos and notes are both informal, with photos being the most informal, and I don’t want them to each be in the navigation. They’re just not that important.

The RSS feed for Photos isn’t quite up and running yet. I need to work out how to make the template produce the images in the right manner. This requires more digging into Hugo.

But I have got a fancy grid for the Photos list, and pleased with how that’s working out.

25 July 2018 21:06 IST

Somehow I had fudged my site’s RSS feeds. They are now un-fudged (and showing full content as intended!)

• All posts: https://laurakalbag.com/index.xml
• Just blog: https://laurakalbag.com/posts/index.xml
• Just notes: http://laurakalbag.com/notes/index.xml

Thanks to Julian who has sharp eyes and gave me a kind nudge.

25 July 2018 14:04 IST

Angry thoughts while updating the Better Blocker blocklist… (I get them every time!)

If you are providing third party services on a domain that is entirely unrelated to your (or any previously acquired) business name, you look veeeery sketchy…

I’m looking at you, Adobe. 👀

If you do this and you hide your domain ownership in whois, you are extra sketchy.

Nothing makes me angry quite like researching trackers for Better Blocker.

Use Better Blocker? There’s new block rules waiting for you. Open the app to fetch them. A couple of little fixes and a couple of new trackers blocked. I’ll get more sorted over the next week (these were a little tricksy!)

https://better.fyi/news/

Now I am having a large G&T.