1. David Carr, a media columnist who was the north star for many journalists (myself included) died yesterday in the tower of news.

"David’s public contribution to the profession — his columns and feature stories, his interviews and investigations — is part of the record, and part of the glory of this newspaper. He covered every corner of the media business (including, sometimes, his own employer) with analytical acumen, ethical rigor and gumshoe tenacity. He managed to see the complexities of digital-age journalism from every angle, and to write about it with unparalleled clarity and wit."

+ He was a subscriber, and once highlighted this newsletter in the paper of record. I've never been prouder.

2. Alternate futures for the web.

"The web in its current state was by no means inevitable. Not only were there competing visions for how a global knowledge network might work, divided along cultural and philosophical lines, but some of those discarded hypotheses are coming back into focus as researchers start to envision the possibilities of a more structured, less volatile web."

3. The military search engine, Memex.

"Unlike a Google search, Memex can search not only for text but also for images and latitude/longitude coordinates encoded in photos. It can decipher numbers that are part of an image, including handwritten numbers in a photo, a technique traffickers often use to mask their contact information. It also recognizes photo backgrounds independently of their subjects, so it can identify pictures of different women that share the same backdrop, such as a hotel room—a telltale sign of sex trafficking, experts say."

+ Named after Vannevar Bush's pre-Internet hypothetical information filing system.

4. How to start up a low power FM station.

"One of the absolutely beautiful things about low power radio is how cheap it is. Many stations get on the air for under $15,000 and can stay on the air for less than $1,000 per month. The main start-up expenses for a radio station are engineering fees, studio equipment for producing radio shows, and transmitting equipment for sending your signals out to the world. The main recurring costs are rent, utilities, and personnel."

5. Earlier this week, I shared a link from Flipboard's engineering team about how they built their website for mobile web speed with Canvas. While some web designers were impressed by what they did, reader George White had a good counterpoint.(Yes, I think the 5 slot will become a regular way of sharing collective intelligence among us.) In building their system the way they did, it hurt the current generation of assistive technologies:

They’ve taken a text-driven product and made it look flashy entirely at the expense of accessibility. It’s certainly their right to choose to build a product that cuts off alternative access methods and shuns factors that make it more usable for all. But it’s a shame that they’ve chosen to do that.

 

As a long time contributor to both native mobile and web software, I see the Flipboard release as an attempt to optimize a product along the wrong axis. While I get that the team sees their look and feel as a key differentiator, I feel that they’ve more or less ignored the possibility of understanding and embracing the medium they’ve chosen to deliver their product...

 

The use of Canvas as the basis for the design means that it’s basically just painting pictures on the screen. The text is visible, but can’t be picked up by assistive technologies. For example, as far as Apple’s VoiceOver is concerned, the new Flipboard site contains no content at all. Search engines and other screen readers are also going to have issues with this. And many in-browser tools will fall down, too, since they won’t be able to apply user-specific styles sheets for things like low-contrast vision.

 

It is possible to build an accessible, all Canvas web app. But it’s really not easy. And it’s clear that the Flipboard team didn’t manage to fit that in with this release. I would give the team the benefit of the doubt and assume that they knew this was possible, but decided to go this route for timing or budgetary reasons.

 

In some ways, this is a retread back to the bad old days of Flash, before it added some accessibility support. Creating a content container in-page, that is very robust in certain ways, but falls down completely in others.

On Fusion:

• "I bought a used car from the Uber-for-used cars startup"
• My remembrance of David Carr

Today's 1957 American English Language Tip

dexter in heraldry means right, sinister left, i.e. of the person bearing the shield, not of the observer.

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